🚧Project Management: Project Management [PM] (Definitions)

"Project Management is an approach which has been developed and successfully employed for more than a decade to systematically plan and control efforts which have an identifiable end item, the production of which involves complexity, risk and some sort of a fixed deadline." (G F Blanchard & D L Cook, "Project Management and Educational Change", 1973)

"Project management is the planning, organizing, directing, and controlling of company resources for a relatively short-term objective that has been established to complete specific goals and objectives. Furthermore, project management utilises the systems approach to management by having functional personnel (the vertical hierarchy) assigned to a specific project." (Harold Kerzner, "Project Management for Executives", 1982)

"Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to a broad range of activities in order to meet the requirements of the particular project. A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to achieve a particular aim." (Irene Chen, "Instructional Design Methodologies", 2008)

"The act of planning and managing a series of tasks and agreed-upon deliverables. It is based on standard methods and processes." (Steven Haines, "The Product Manager's Desk Reference", 2008)

"The application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements." (Cynthia Stackpole, "PMP® Certification All-in-One For Dummies®", 2011)

"The process of managing a project. Deploys tools, processes and attitudes that deal with the complexity and uncertainty inherent in a project." (Mike Clayton, "Brilliant Project Leader", 2012)

"A profession in the programmatic sciences that focuses on the design and completion of work plans to ensure the efficient delivery of specified work products on time, on budget, and to specifications. Project management is practiced by project managers who apply professional knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to ensure the effective management of operational uncertainty and the resolution of operational complexity." (Richard J Heaslip, "Managing Complex Projects and Programs", 2014)

"The application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements." (PMI, "Implementing Organizational Project Management: A Practice Guide", 2014)

"The process of managing required project activities and tasks in a formal manner to complete a project; performed primarily by the project manager." (Robert F Smallwood, "Information Governance: Concepts, Strategies, and Best Practices", 2014)

"Project management is the application of methods, tools, techniques and competencies to a project. Project management includes the integration of the various phases of the project life cycle [...]" (ISO 25000)

💠🛠️SQL Server: Administration (Part VI: Troubleshooting Who is Active)

I checked ReplTalk’s post on “waiting” statements, realizing that I had to write a similar query when troubleshooting performance of running queries in general, respectively blocking issues in particular. The novelty resides in Adam Machanic’s comment to the respective post, the link leading me to sp_whoisactive stored procedure which provides a collection of wait stats, lock information, outer command/batch, etc. The procedure is impressive from the point of view of its complexity (and number of lines), the author spending many hours on this piece of art. The parameters are well documented but not the logic, some additional information could be gathered from the several posts on this topic, however that won’t make easier reviewer’s work. After a first review I’m missing a few examples and scenarios in which to use the procedure, without them I’m kind of starting from 0. 

I am a little reticent in using other people’s code when the code is too complex and requires too much time to be understood, especially when the respective code is not documented, requires a whole manual and/or the code isn’t easy to use. These aspects don’t decrease the merit of the person who wrote it but it decreases the overall utility of the respective code, because when people don’t understand the usability and/or range of applicability of a piece of code, the risk of people misusing the respective piece of code is quite high. From my perspective I find it more useful to have in place a set of queries and procedures that help you troubleshoot performance issues than having a stored procedure that attempts to do everything, requires many parameters, time to be debugged and understood. 

SQL Server lacks in documentation describing in detail how its internal actually work. The stored procedure could be used to understand how various situations were handled, one of the first problems residing in identifying the piece of code corresponding to each scenario, “isolate” it and make most of it. Most probably a developer who’s trying to understand the respective code will need to break down the code in chunks, like I did, and use them in isolation in order to prove code’s logic. Sure, the followed approach depends also on each person’s skills, level of understanding and exploration techniques. As too much philosophy is not good, especially when divagating from the subject, I will end by inviting the reader to look over the respective stored procedure and, why not, to improve it, eventually derive more knowledge out of it.