Dylan Wan

Suggestions from Microsoft Copilot

2026-02-09T13:11:10.191-08:00

If your company is truly Google‑centric, you should consider switching away from Teams

You’d get smoother workflows using:

✔ Google Meet

Native to your environment
Instant Calendar compatibility
No authorization issues

✔ Slack

Great for cross‑company communication
Works perfectly with Google accounts
Best-in-class app integration

✔ Zoom

Stable, widely compatible
Easy scheduling from Google Calendar

These tools are built for the Google/macOS ecosystem.

If you want, I can help you:

Compare Slack vs Google Chat vs Teams
Recommend the ideal toolset for a Google‑first company
Map migration options if you want to move away from Teams
Explain how to structure workflows to eliminate Microsoft dependencies

Just tell me what direction your organization is considering.

2025-03-11T02:37:00.000-07:00

It is good to know that I am not alone.

This is very annoying, isn't it?

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/discussions/microsoftteams/microsoft-teams-is-accessing-your-screen-notification/4366669

..

2025-01-06T13:06:00.001-08:00

I don't have problem with the software that is not working. It takes time for developing a software. Software bugs can be fixed. Functional gaps can be fulfilled over time.

Some time, when a product is not yet ready, it is ok to release a trial version to get feedback.

It is ok to not know all requirements in the beginning.

I am not ok if developers are producing videos to replace real delivering a working product.

Customers won't give you a second chance if the product is labeled.

Starting my day with Microsoft team...

2024-07-31T08:28:00.000-07:00

A frustrated day beginning with Microsoft Team...

My client shares with me a link during the meeting. Of course, using chat functionality from Microsoft Team.

After the meeting finished, I come back and want to click on the link...

Now, the situation is awful. My client thinks that he has shared with me. I need to ask them to share again?

Microsoft Edge

2024-07-23T07:06:00.000-07:00

It stopped working properly. I am not sure if it is related to Microsoft problem.

I am switching back to Chrome browser.

Why did the consultant get promoted?

2024-03-27T13:41:00.000-07:00

Because he aced every status meeting!

Punchline: He never actually did any work himself, but he always knew what everyone else was doing and how to take credit for it.

Release Readiness

2024-03-08T09:38:00.000-08:00

Release Readiness refers a series of activities that run in parallel with software development. When you deliver a software, giving people the tested codes is not enough. There are other activities required for releasing the software.

Documentation - User Guide, Installation Guide, Upgrade Guide, Implementation Guide
Release note - What features are available, what are known issues, what bugs were fixed
Knowledge transfer - from Product to the rest of the organization
Installation - extra install steps?
Upgrade - How to uprade from various releases to the current
Course materials - new trainings?, existing training materials need to be updated
Support - How support know the feature? They need to be ready so they can serve customers
Marketing collaterals - How we position ourselves? Any campaign
Sales / Demo - prepare the demo that can show the features
Cloud enablement - if the software is delivered to cloud, how to manage the changes

The release readiness coordination is required for a release manager, who behaves like a program manager from the project management perspectives. Each of these activities may handle by different departments and they have their own lead time requirement and dependencies among them.

Snowflake Lawsuit

2024-03-05T18:19:00.000-08:00

Snowflake Lawsuit reminded me that in the year 1996 when I started my career in building enterprise application for Oracle, Informix CEO, Phillip White went to jail. I remember the case as it later triggered the SOX law. Informix’s 1996 financial statements were inaccurate. The SEC charged that White had inappropriately included revenue from contracts where side letters existed (secret agreements that enable customers to cancel contracts and receive their money back) and engaged in barter transactions with computer manufacturers where reciprocal purchases of hardware for software were made.

Now, the former CEO, Frank Slootman may face the same type of issues. According to the register:

The class action suit, launched by law firm Robbins LLP on behalf of individual Suzanne Flannery, alleges that during the "Class Period" Snowflake "systematically oversold capacity to customers, which created a misleading appearance of the demand for Snowflake's products and services."

The legal document also claims Snowflake gave customers discounts leading up to its IPO, which it alleges "temporarily boosted sales" even though this would not be sustainable thereafter. The move, or so it claims, led to later "platform efficiency adjustments" that reduced client consumption, in turn allowing customers to "roll over a material amount of unused credits" thereby reducing future sales.

I am interested in watching this case to see what is the result.

Why don't I like Microsoft 365? It is counter-productive.

2023-10-01T13:44:00.000-07:00

A file is shared with me for review. All files by default are shared as read only. How can I request the permission to allow me to put comments?

Here are my chats with Microsoft New Bing:

Prompt:

Now my situation is that at the site level, the default probably set to the "read only". Most people by mistake does not override the permission to comment only while they are sharing. The recipient, like me, can only have the read-only to those files shared with us. Now, my question was how can I request the owner of the file to adjust the permission for me so I can have the comment access? I don't need the site admin to change the default. I don't need the edit right. Most of cases are shared for review and we need the comment right.

Answer:

If you need to request comment access for a specific file in SharePoint, you would need to contact the owner of the file directly. There isn’t a built-in feature in SharePoint to request additional permissions from the file view.

Here’s a suggested message you could send to the file owner:

Subject: Request for Comment Access to [File Name]

Dear [File Owner's Name],

I am currently reviewing the file [File Name] that you shared with me on SharePoint. However, I noticed that I only have read-only access to the file. 

In order to provide my feedback effectively, could you please grant me comment access to this file? This will allow me to add my comments directly to the document, making the review process more efficient.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Best,
[Your Name]

Remember to replace the placeholders (the text inside the square brackets) with the actual file name, file owner’s name, and your name.

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.

Sam Altman talked about startup

2023-06-25T13:27:00.001-07:00

https://youtu.be/0lJKucu6HJc

Micorsoft Outlook Update Your Password

2023-04-03T10:38:00.002-07:00

Staying in this page

more than one hour

Microsoft is too hard to use.

It makes you secured by not allowing you work

Microsoft Team has issues

2023-03-15T06:41:00.005-07:00

Technical issues are easier to solve. Microsoft team has design issues.

It does not know how to handle a laptop that can have multiple users.

Microsoft is counter productivity

2022-11-01T11:37:00.002-07:00

Keep being asked to verify my Microsoft account - Microsoft Community

I am not sure how to deal with this...

My phone has no power as I forgot to bring my power cord.

they can claim that they are more secured by not allowing people to work.

System Theory

2022-09-08T03:13:00.001-07:00

I found that the system theory has produced a great influence in my thinking but I may not aware.

I learn the system theory when I studied the Information System course.

It tells us to think a system first as a blackbox.

It has inputs and outputs. The internal processes are transforming input to output. Those processes are subsystems.

Here are slides from slideshare - https://www.slideshare.net/AshisKumarBehera1/system-theory-by-von-bertalanffy

While I learned it from the perspective of an information system analyst. Today I learned that the discipline was actually developed by a biologist, Ludwig von Bertalanffy.

The above slide describes the theory by applying to analyzing the organization. I guess that let's why I may observe the behaviors of people in the organization from the system's perspective.

One of my managers told me that I analyze too much. The life would be difficult if you keep analyzing. Analytically thinking is good but putting every human being into a system may be inhuman.

Each system has to interact with the environment.

I am not sure if I can agree that a system is goal-oriented.

Sometime I found that the existence itself may be a goal for some of the systems.

System theory tell us that we can hide the details and we can also decompose a component to more details and keep drilling into it.

What it does not tell us is how to measure the interaction and how to prioritize.

For me those come later in my life when I studied the Theory of Constraint or when I studied project and project scheduling. Those two for me come about the same time but from different reasons. ..

Characters of a company

2022-07-21T04:51:00.000-07:00

I learned the McKinsey 7-S Framework sometime back. In the McKinsey's framework, the placement of Shared Values in the center of the model emphasizes that they are central to the development of all the other critical elements.

It s good to see the practice in the real world with a CEO that emphases the characters of a company.

"Remind everybody the characters of a company. The characters of a company is really the way we act and we interact with our colleague, our customers, our partners, people in our ecosystem, when nobody is watching"

Customer Success Measurement: NPS and CSAT

2022-05-19T09:39:00.002-07:00

It is important to constantly measure your customer success. However, there are too many factor that may affect the customer success and I am not sure how we can make someone to hold responsible for these measures. It is still good to know how to measure it.

What is NPS (net promoter score)?

Net Promoter Score®, or NPS®, measures customer experience and predicts business growth. (Source: https://www.netpromoter.com/know/)

It is the answer to this question: Using a 0-10 scale: How likely is it that you would recommend [brand] to a friend or colleague?

What is CSAT?

CSAT is a customer satisfaction (CSAT) metric that is used to measure the overall performance of customer service based on the customer’s experience every time they interact with a business, service, or product. Customers express their satisfaction on a five- or 10-point likert scale, which is converted to a percentage between 0 and 100 – with 100 meaning that customers are completely satisfied with their experience. (Source: https://monkeylearn.com/blog/csat-calculation/)

The Likert scale is a five (or seven) point scale which is used to allow the individual to express how much they agree or disagree with a particular statement. The response categories in Likert scales have a rank order, but the intervals between values cannot be presumed equal.

If you are calculating on a number scale, the calculation is slightly different. You add up all of the response scores given, divide by the maximum scores possible and multiply by 100

Hide Firefox Tabs during presentation

2022-03-17T00:17:00.000-07:00

about:config

browser.fullscreen.autohide set to True (double click on it to toggle)

Once it is set, use Maximize mode (Cmd + Shift + F)

Three monks have no water to drink

2021-10-08T11:46:00.003-07:00

“Three monks have no water to drink” is a proverb with the story about three monks.

In the beginning, the first monk living in the temple alone high up on the mountain has to walk down the temple to carry his own water everyday.

Later on, a second monk arrived and together, they walked down to carry their daily water consumption.

At last, a third monk arrived and in the end, none of them would walk down the mountain to carry the water up. What is the result of this? Well, in the end, the three monks ended up having no water to drink.

If don't hold people accountable, even people are willing to help each other, they don't know how.

Project Planning and Scrum

2021-09-21T10:54:00.000-07:00

One of the major drawback of the Scrum Method is that it overlooks the fact that many changes have to be done in a longer period of time and those big project has to be managed in a different lifecycle across multiple sprints.

Here are some possible ways:

Estimation Task

Estimation is taking time from engineering team. Just for initial investigation, the duration should be considered.

One possibility to create JIRA tasks for estimation. The time taken is tracked in the daily standup as well.

These tasks have to be prioritized against other tasks.

If it is important as we have to use the estimation or assessment for future planning or feedback to customers, It should be reflected in the board.

This type of ad hoc request needs to prioritized to protect resource from distractions.

Research Projects

We may have not yet created the branches and we may put the initiative to be released in a future sprint, but if any task required for discussing, brainstorming, gathering feedback, reviewing the different approaches, we should track these activities as well.

Remember that we are taking resources away from the current sprint that has the branch open for checkin. These resources are still contributing without checkin any line of codes.

A product feature is plan for a future release does not mean that there is no activity (or investment) in the current release. Not everyone is working on the current release since we are invest for the future.

Merge Often even the feature is not complete

As long we have hide the features, having the old code and new code coexist and allow them to be switch on/off for testing may be a way to gathering feedback and also stablize the code earlier.

Merging a big branch into the main will make the merge longer and riskier.

Run multiple sprints in parallel

Different sprints may have different deadline.

But we need to be careful about this.

I don't like scrum as it tends to be very political. It is easily to get someone who are not really capable to be involved in a project to claim that they are scrum master, and organize projects by these scrum masters.

Teams should own their scrums and scrum method is not the way to push these people or for them to gain training.

I think that those activities that are sharing the same resource pool (team) have to be placed on the same board.

Prepare the browser for recording

2021-09-05T11:48:00.000-07:00

This works for me in MacbookPro Big Sur.

1. Enable Automatically Hide Show the Dock

2. Enter the Full Screen Mode

3. Command + Shift + F to Hide the Browser Tab (Chrome Browser)

Remember to use the same key to leave this mode

Beyond Make or Buy decision

2021-08-04T02:00:00.001-07:00

It the past, there are only two choices: Make or Buy.

Now, there are other choices:

Open Source is another source.

You don't make or buy.

You just use it and it is free.

But it is not totally free.

When it is not fit, you have to customize it.

You may not have the choice to just take part of it. The whole thing may be too big.

but it is indeed another source to consider.

2021-08-03T08:40:00.004-07:00

Nobody needs to reinvent the wheel.

However, we may do so when we do not realize that we are actually inventing a wheel.

Other situations:

Too much time

Too much resource

People would like to show off that they can invent a wheel

Inventing a wheel is fun

To produce an wheel alternate

what else?

SMART to FAST objectives

2021-07-01T10:48:00.003-07:00

Today I learned FAST goals and I would like to compare it with SMART goals:

SMART goals:

The original version:

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time Bound

All these are for correcting the commonly seen problems in defining goals.

Too ambitious goals won't motivate people. It becomes dreams and later become joke.

When goals are not specific, not measurable, and not time bound, there is no feedback. Defining goals are defining the measurement.

Relevant is reflecting how goals are aligned with values. Shared values should come first.

These are what I learned long time back.

Later, some changes applied:

Relevant becomes Realistic. It seems a reaction to those goals which are relevant, but not realistic.

Time bound becomes Timely. Time bound means that we need to have a deadline. Timely means that the goal should be adjusted according to the environment.

FAST goals:

Each of this guideline is for correcting the problems seen in the world. I guess that today's issues are

Goals were defined but people never discussed about them

Goals were archivable but not challenging enough

Measurable and Time bound are the same as Specific

Transparent is emphasized since many organizations have goals just for managers.

All these comes from MBO developed by Peter Drucker. MBO itself was challenged by Deming:

Goal setting does not consider capacity
Goals created Silos. This is probably due to the lack of alignment tools. Local optimization is useless when we have constraints from others. in Chinese, this is called 木桶理論
Deming and Eliyahu M. Goldratt taught us that we should focus on constraints and removing them one by one. It is a very good model for looking at an organization, but MBO does help if the goals can be aligned.

End User Validation

2021-06-28T09:23:00.002-07:00

It is difficult to design a product feature purely based on user feedback.

Users are good at providing user experience related suggestions and validation. However, when we design a product feature, we are frequently thinking about automation which is eliminating the job.

To think of the product feature and design, as a product management professional, we need to think from business process perspective. Learning how users handle the work is important and it is the job of a system analyst. A system analyst does not have to have the experience as specific user role before he or she can conduct the business process analysis.

It took me sometime to figure out but it was a good experience. To learn how a project manager work, I got PMP certified in order to fully understand project management process from the professional organization's perspective. To learn how a project cost engineer work, I got certified as a cost engineer from AACEi. To learn how intercompany accounting and shared service work, I studied accounting and all the way to Advanced Accounting. These knowledge was helpful but the best experience and learning coming from interviewing with the user. The most important skill is analyzing the business process and map the product into the business process.

The real challenge comes from that many product managers and analysts falls into the trap of trying to matching product feature from competitors or trying to think from product feature list perspective. Another trap is to come up something cool, nice to demo, but not really usable. On the other hand, a product which is not demoable may never reach the customers and gain any attention. That is the dilemma.

Customer Validation of Requirements

2021-06-16T08:09:00.004-07:00

Validating the requirements and assumptions with customers are important. However, we need to consider the follow situations:

1. Customer may not know what they need.

Customers may just want to get what the system can do and they don't have specific requirements.

Customers may not just buy a solution but want to buy the best practice. When they implement ERP in twenty or thirty years ago, they get the ERP and willing to change their business process according. When they started BI/Analytics, they get the metrics as a library as they see this is what their competitors do.

2. They want everything you can offer

When you ask, do you need to have XX? Can we just do YYY? The XX is costly but YYY seems enough, do you agree?

If the person is not responsible for the cost but may be responsible for the lack of the feature, the answer will be yes as they can avoid the risk.

The bottomline is that product management makes the decision and be responsible, not customers.

As a vendor, we work with IT analyst from the client and describe the other factors as costs and availability of the feature when we validate with customers.