I point this out because in management and scheduling, we often

Confuse which stakeholders are most important to a project

In priority-based scheduling (need I bother plugging eManagr, at this point?), this is extremely important.  If you insist on giving your programmers or your boss more of a say than the client who pays the bills, the project is a failure.  Microsoft has a formal development process that is otherwise unremarkable except for the idea that everybody’s job is to sell the product, from the salesman to the CEO to the worker bees to the poor guy who unclogs the toilet.

Meanwhile, Columbus may have had entirely other motivations than fame and fortune for his clients.

Deal with technologies and rules that only make sense or are fully useful when we know their true, obscured origins

When you see strange requirements or can’t understand what a tool does, always ask.  Often, you’ll find that a requirement is easier to implement once it’s in context and isn’t being followed blindly.  For example, I once worked on a project where the client insisted on being able to change the size of any text.  Why?  A previous software vendor delivered tiny boxes on the screen with enormous amounts of text.  We solved the problem with pop-up screens instead, which were more readable.

Stumble on useful information, but refuse to share it because the route we took to find it exposes ignorance or an error in our judgement

Often, we begin working on a project and, in doing so, find amazing tools and data sources that could help…only to realize that we’ve misinterpreted the project.  In the scramble to get back on track, evidence of the mistaken trail gets covered so as not to distract us or make us look bad.

That’s understandable, of course, but extremely wrong-headed.  For  Columbus, it meant being unable to give a return on his investment, since the Carribbean natives aren’t exactly known for their precious metals and spices…though they have fixed the spice problem.

Find that the people who did the real work miss the accolades and rewards in favor of some bozo with a better press agent

Such is life, really.  Columbus was several centuries too late to be the first European in the Americas.  He wasn’t the first then-modern European to set foot on either continent.  Contrary to popular myth, everybody who cared knew the world was round, and Columbus’s only contribution was to underestimate the size.  And disease.  He and his men spread plenty of disease on landing and mixing with the natives.

And yet, he has the day of celebration.

It happens in every organization.  There isn’t much you can do about that, except to make sure that you credit your own star players whenever you have the opportunity to talk them up.  Eventually, someone will notice.

For example, in most of Latin America, the day is Día de la Raza, the Day of the (Hispanic) Race, celebrating and remembering the (sometimes brutal, granted) combination of the Spanish people and the Native Americans.

So let’s celebrate Columbus Day by refusing to let our teams make the same mistakes.  Some people may find it an acceptable ending to the story, but I’d just as soon avoid spending my dying days decrepitdly writing of apocalypses.

But there’s good news.

First, to my fellows in the United States, happy Labor Day.  It may interest some of you to know that the holiday didn’t originate as a “day of rest” or a counterpart to the Socialist May Day/International Workers’ Day celebrations.  No, it was a reaction to President Cleveland‘s military strikebreaking resolution to the Pullman Strike.

Not that you’d ever know it from the Department of Labor‘s version of the story.  Not even a mention of Congress rushing the legislation to prevent a nationwide uprising.

Today, Labor Day is different, depending on who you are:

• Back to school for the kids, teachers, and retailers,
• The “unofficial end of summer” for parks departments and the media,
• An unavoidable day off for employees, and so forth.

I’m pretty sure that nobody marks the passing of those killed by the strikebreakers, though.  Like Mothers Day, the origins of the day are lost on most people.

Moving along, this blog has slowed to a trickle because we’ve been moving around behind the scenes, which leads to a couple of minor announcements.

• First off, eManagr will soon have a baby sister of sorts.  It’s too soon to release any details, but you might expect some major news (and a discount) at the end of September or early October.  If you love your social networks, keep your eyes peeled.
• Some corrupted data in the blog database has been cleaned out.  If you wondered why you couldn’t read certain articles for a few days…well,  we still don’t know why, but a few odd characters snuck into a table.  If you didn’t notice, ignore me.
• We’re testing some new enhancements to the blog.  If they pan out, we’ll offer up another article soon to credit the extensions and point interested parties their way, as in our Under the Hood article from the spring.
• Most importantly,  we did some work on the eManagr internals.  You won”t see any changes to the interface, but some bottlenecks have been widened and things should be more efficient.  Slowdowns no more…we hope.

Here’s hoping everybody’s pleased with the rollout of the faster eManagr,  the blog gets back on schedule, and you’re all having holiday burgers instead of staring at a computer screen.

(There was also one questionable “attaboy” comment from a highly communal IP address from someone named Jessica who has a blog in more sophisticated Russian than I can read. If you’re a real person, Jessica, I’m sorry about deleting your message. Comment in this post, and we’ll make sure that people can find you.)

In other news, publicity links are making the rounds. Spreading the love around, we’ve been seen on SimpleSpark, Listio, NetWebApp, KillerStartups, a few microblog notes and Diggs, no doubt somewhere I’m not seeing right now, and a bunch of aggregators using those sources. Welcome, very belated in some cases, to those finding us through those routes, and thanks to those who submitted us for review, wherever you are.

I (John) was also happy to give my two cents to Mike over at The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur. “If you think it, you can create it,” sounds much better than what I said, so thanks to Mike for fixing it up and for letting everybody see the rest of the advice. There’s a lot of good information in a very concise post, and if you manage anything or ever want to, then you owe yourself to take the five minutes it’ll take to read it.