Posts

Building the data pipeline - A Guide for Project Managers

How do you leverage engineering metrics to track business performance KPIs (do they have to be linked or can they be totally different things)? Anyone go through such an experience? What's your story there? This was the question on the discussion board within the Ryerson University - Innovation Boost Zone (IBZ). This is how I took the opportunity to answer this question: My current process around this is to use JIRA for both the development tasks (Code Assignments) as well as the user stories. I also use JIRA for testing against benchmarks for GO / NO GO decisions. For a recent task, I took a Google Form and generated User Test Cases to evaluate the experience of onboarding a new customer and walk through the key product features. This was used in facilitation of 3 x 6 person testing sessions where we presented the software, issued activation keys, and responded to real-time interactions with the trail participants. The issues from this testing session are entered into a JIRA workf
Post a Comment
Read more

IETech - The First 10 Years...

Image
10 Years - Interactive Event Technologies Inc Written by: Shawn Berney Thanks to the Internet Archive "Way Back Machine", I was able to pull these old articles that I had posted on my very old weblog . The links included within the blog all work - most refer to the archive to take you to the snapshots of the website at the time. The PDF documents I have reposted for your access.  In Transition This was a transition time for me - I moved to  Toronto after completing my undergraduate degree in British Columbia at Thompson Rivers University. I was inspired to start a business by the academic interest in my undergraduate work. These are the blog postings and web pages from that period. At the end of each of these three blog postings, I've put some of my current thoughts on the topic.  I've also included some snippets of the old website for interest and color. Enjoy! Taken From: https://web.archive.org/web/20140102132358/http://raguiding.ne
Post a Comment
Read more

Guiding a Crew - 3 Tips for Project Managers

Image
Shawn Berney guiding Pillow Rock on the Upper Gauley River, WV (Fall 2000) As another summer long weekend arrives, I spent some time reflecting on it being 21 years ago this spring that I arrived at the New River Gorge in WV. I left my job at Radio Shack - a job I had been working for around 5 years since grade 10 of high school - packed up my volkswagen golf with camping / paddling / rock climbing gear and and headed for the hills of WV. In the following week, I would paddle some of the states most spectacular and challenging rivers. Hooked, I spent the next 3 years travelling between WV and Kamloops, British Columbia learning the trade of adventure guiding. Here are several of the lessons that I learned as a guide that help me in Project Management: The boat moves forward best when we are all paddling together. If we aren't paddling together, we look like an epileptic spider bouncing down the river. If you want reliable results, be disciplined in your approach and a
Post a Comment
Read more

Building AI Muscle

Image
Are there any tech startups which don't care about AI these days? At IETech, AI muscle is a key strategic component of Knowledge Exchange products we are working on. These days, any company of any size and maturity can easily incorporate AI into their product lineup and these companies don't even have to be traditional technology companies. This has been made possible by cloud platforms such as AWS, AZURE, and the like. About 9 months ago at IETech made a strategic decision to invest and build an in-house general purpose AI muscle machine. Although AWS and AZURE do provide everything we might need, it is impractical and expensive to train custom AI models. When training custom models one has to invest computing resources in the design of the AI architecture which includes the neural network layout and all the hyper-parameters. In traditional software engineering you have the luxury to design the architecture upfront, or be able to work on parts of the architecture in isolatio
Post a Comment
Read more

R&D efforts highlighted by Thompson Rivers University

Image
Thompson Rivers University has written an article that highlights my efforts to create business value around Blockchain Smart Contracts! You can find the article on the Inside TRU website here . I'm excited to transition into corporate practice in such an exciting time of technological change. With the emergence of Blockchain technologies and smart city projects all in the early stages and experiencing rapid growth here in Toronto!
Post a Comment
Read more