19 October 2014

A (good) picture is worth a thousand words

Immersed in world of projects, it has been great to see so many other people explaining the world with diagrams and flow charts.  It looks like my much used www.mindmeister.com may be replaced with Visio for a while.  Skimmed through a 47 page document on Business Process Modelling Notation (private link here due to copyright).

13 October 2014

Intro to Agile Scrum in Under 10 Minutes - What is Scrum? - YouTube

Inception phase begun for project.  Had a day of start up and explanation with Ernst & Young (EY) including this short intro to Agile.  It is not in any way officially endorsed by EY.  Apparently there is some advertising blurb at the end but the beginning is a concise and useful quick run through.

NEW Intro to Agile Scrum in Under 10 Minutes - What is Scrum? - YouTube:

11 October 2014

Pension contribution limits

Started the weekend by reading an article about allowable contributions to pensions. Pension contributions are now subject to new limits of £40,000 a year (down from £50,000) and a further limit that employee's (not employer's) contributions must be less than salary.

Below is a link to the article that I read, however it only works for me because of copyright restrictions on the article. If you really want to read the article you will have to subscribe to www.tipsandadvice–tax.co.uk.

My restricted link

01 October 2014

Excel data verification to ensure that the value in a cell starts with a C

Click this link to see instructions and screenshots.


Excel - avoiding cross casting errors (or SAP rejection due to decimals)

This is a good solution to those times when your data has say 3 decimal points but you are showing your numbers to 2 decimal points and so your totals do not seem to add up.  Excel will round the numbers to the decimal points you have shown.

Warning: remember to check that the total comes back to the number that you had in mind (if there is any cumulative rounding you may need to adjust one of your numbers somewhere along the way).

This is also really useful for SAP journal uploads where any numbers with too many decimals may be rejected.

Scrum reference card

This article is an introduction to the scrum way of working. The scrum is a self organising cross departmental team to deliver a project in a series of sprints. Each sprint delivers a version of the project which can be seen to be working, and although initially greatly simplified, is more complex than the previous version. This aims to avoid the risk of a project that gradually becomes more and more delayed and bogged down with unresolved problems until it fails.

Training related to client project



Three hour training session relating to client project. Access to this link is currently restricted due to client confidentiality.