Intelligent Enterprise: A new Ventana Research report finds that most companies are falling short on the basics of performance management. Here are five sets of diagnostic questions as well as best practices for broader, more responsive and more effective planning and budgeting.

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"What now? That's the hard question. When an IT project is in trouble, it's easy to ask what went wrong and who's to blame. Easy and popular. And fun, if you're not on the hot seat. But what to do to save the project? That's harder -- a lot harder. Especially when, as with the U.S. Census Bureau's "paperless census" project, it can't be killed and can't be delayed."

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"Individual developers can use sites like SourceForge.net to host multiple projects, but such sites are not well suited to college environments that have many student programming projects to host. DrProject is a multiple project hosting application designed for schools. It gives each project a wiki, bug tracker, and source code repository.

DrProject is a fork of the Trac project, which can only host project at a time. DrProject has a different look and feel but the navigation menu is very similar to Trac's."

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The biggest reward I get from working on IT projects is the opportunity to take new ideas and new strategies and piece them together into something that has never been done before.  Even when I'm not the one originating the new idea, I like helping other innovative people bring their ideas to the table.  I have ideas, dreams, and aspirations to help take my workplace to the next level of where it should be via innovative use of what I know best, information technology.  How could innovation and all these wonderful ideas I have in my head not be anything but a good thing for my organization?  A recent article in the Wall Street Journal answers just that question by saying that there are negatives for an organization that innovates too much.

In "How Innovation Can Be Too Much of a Good Thing", George Anders writes about how companies and business consultants are rediscovering that less innovation can produce better business results.  Companies that used to push the limit in efficiency are finding that they're "jamming too many new ideas into a product pipeline, without enough slack time to ensure that critical tasks stayed on schedule".

Similar insights have been standard wisdom on the manufacturing floor for decades. Factory managers learn about bottlenecks through the formal discipline of queuing theory. That teaches them to keep a little slack in the system to handle the unpredictable -- but inevitable -- crunch times.

"Two of the challenges faced in every project are the task of identifying milestones and distribution of work. Many systems and methodologies have been created to help address these issues but there is little information about using these practices in Drupal development. This post is an attempt to identify a methodology and tool set for managing the development of a Drupal based project."

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"Technologies are changing so quickly around us that it's hard to find and integrate good software before its replacement has gone mainstream. For this reason, I'm always on the prowl for what's new and hot.

A couple days ago, I was checking up on the status of Wordpress 2.1, which is supposed to have exciting new features like pseudo cron and spell checking. I came across Wordpress's defect/feature management system, Trac. Just to be clear, Wordpress isn't the author of Trac."

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CMS Watch has a very good article on their site titled, "Question CMS Consolidation".   The article serves as a reminder for IT and managers that, although technically feasible, an organization may not want to put everyone on the same content management system (CMS).  Why would an organization want to to consolidate their systems in the first place?  For those at top of the organization there may be some obvious reasons to unify the organization onto a single CMS.

Many organizations are looking at a portfolio of dozens of content management systems running somewhere on their network. From sheer tidiness alone, it’d be nice to have a shorter list. And such tidiness can have real benefits: better negotiating leverage with vendors, reduced overhead to manage contracts, reductions in the number of servers and hence in datacenter space (with attendant power and operational costs), and so on. Finally, increased demands for compliance and control are placing a premium on simplifying information management.

In my own organization, we have had both Internet and intranet servers since the mid 1990's supporting operations and administrators.  While we moved our Internet web servers onto a CMS a few years ago, it is only the past few months that many of our offices and departments have shifted their intranet from static pages to much more dynamic system.  As many of our field offices migrate their servers to utilizing newer Web 2.0 and collaboration applications, IT and management have a strong desire to consolidate those applications and servers.

"Good project management -- is it art, science, or just dumb luck? It's actually a little of all three. There's plenty of room for creativity and flexibility (the art), but there are some good rules to follow (the science). And to be successful requires at least a little good luck most of the time. I can't really help with the art, but let's go back to the science. Here are 15 guidelines or key principles that, if followed, will give project managers a higher probability of success."

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"CMS project managers face a dilemma. For a project to succeed, contributors need to embrace the system. However, when confronted with a new CMS your business colleagues are, understandably, not interested in understanding the system but in getting their job done...Successful project managers must work to stave off a negative reputation, especially in the delicate early phase of a CMS project. What follows are some thoughts on how to do that."

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What really keeps an open source project going?  I think it all starts when someone in the open source community asks the tough questions.  Take for instance this one, "Has XOOPS lost its appeal?".   The project will evolve depending on how the project responds to such challenging questions.  In this particular case, those closer to the open source project asked in a proactive response, "How do we give XOOPS appeal and user satisfaction?".

Following some innovative ideas from the Has xoops lost it's appeal thread, I have decided to open a new thread, with some extractions of ideas to work on. The suggestion is that xoops has lost its appeal in some ares concerning community support. I have tried to pull out the POSITIVE and proactive suggestions so that we can build on this, working up to some real action for improvements. If a user asks a question like this, I believe it is the responsibility of leadership to sit up and take notice. Here is my response, as a small contribution to answer criticisms with some proactive response.

I urge you to read the forum threads and decide for yourself whether XOOPS has lost its appeal or not.  For me, this is the first time in a long time that XOOPS has shown something that appeals to me most.  I call it open source synergy.  I predict good things for XOOPS in 2007.