After having thought a lot lately about the virtues of good project management, I came across this A List Apart article that truely spoke to my heart. And probably many other managers as well.

“Many project managers believe a project has a beginning and an end. Everything that happens within those parameters can be dealt with by a methodology and a good framework of processes. What they forget is the emotional core of a project and the questions that need to be asked: Why does this project exist? What benefits will it have? What features will express these benefits? How will it make users more efficient, effective, and happy?”

Not that this is anything really new if you’ve ever taken a good project management workshop. What I liked about the article was the illustration how not asking the right questions in the beginning will ultimately result in unhappy clients, cost overruns, inevitable delays and non-optimal solutions. Read The Problem, the Balloon, and the Four Bedroom House…

Subsequent to Thursday’s Forbes article, many other media outlets have picked up the story on BMS-354825. Headlines like “Cancer Patient Did Not Take No for an Answer”. You might wonder How the heck did all these reporters learn about the miraculous results? as BMS hasn’t disclosed anything about phase I and phase II results?

Well, ascribe it to the ever increasing power of bloggers, private citizens keeping online diaries for everyone to read. In most cases, it is quite difficult to find these freewheeling writers, but in the case of BMS-354825, Forbes writer Robert Langreth certainly has helped to push the PR machinery into high gear.

“Bristol-Myers won’t discuss the results of the trial until it reports them at a scientific meeting in December. But a patient in the trial, Jerry Mayfield, is writing a Web diary detailing the drug’s early effects on him and other patients.”

I visited his diary, and I have to admit, this is like real-time clinical trials. Sure, as Jerry admits himself, his diary is “no scientific proof of the safety or efficacy of BMS-354825 in CML”, but from a public relations standpoint, this is pure gold for BMS. And it’s free.

I just wonder what the future will hold for clinical trials, with every patient starting to detail their trials & tribulations….

Forbes Magazine writer Robert Langreth reported yesterday on late-breaking clinical results with Bristol-Myers Squibb’s new anticancer candidate BMS-354825, currently being investigated at UCLA in phase II studies on CML patients. According to Langreth’s account, the BMS compound is 500-times more potent than Gleevec, the current miracle drug for this kind of leukemia. In addition, BMS-354825 is active against 14 out of 15 CML strains resistant against Gleevec.

It’s great to read about these kinds of successes from the pharmaceutical industry, especially since they are so rare, comparatively speaking. Langreth pointed out that BMS initiated their CML-program in 2000, after finding that BMS-354825 works even better against CML cancer cell lines than the ones it was originally designed for. I guess you can call that a lucky break.

No, what struck me about the reporting was that it gave the impression that - as of 2004 - pharmaceutical companies have finally learned their game well enough to pump out new drugs within no time.

“The finding has broad implications beyond leukemia because it provides a paradigm for other researchers attempting to design targeted cancer drugs. This is an example of how to do mechanism-driven cancer drug development…”

What can I say? [a] Rarely do you have a mono-genetic disease such as CML, where jamming up a single kinase stops the cancer dead in its tracks. Most of the time, a given disease has multiple pathways that compensate for each other should you fiddle with individual parameters in the equation. [b] It’s great when you have structure-based drug design at your disposal, meaning you can get 3-D pictures of your compound bound to the protein. A picture is worth more than a thousand words - only problem is, what if your membrane-bound protein doesn’t form crystals ?

We should certainly celebrate our successes with the public, but at the same time we shouldn’t raise expectations that success is a routine matter in our industry.

“Customers who use a number of the top online banking sites are at risk of falling prey to a new Web-based attack that snatches user IDs and passwords for these sites. Among the sites targeted by the attack are some owned by Citibank, Deutsche Bank and Barclays Bank.” In a recent article by eWEEK writer Dennis Fisher, he discussed Pop-Up Programs Snatching Banking Passwords.

Now his colleague, Steve Gillmor, goes one further and details additional threats that come free of charge courtesy of Microsoft Explorer’s reliance on Active X scripting. In a nutshell, Active X is used to facilitate many tasks - the computer just goes off on its own and does stuff that’s supposedly helping the consumer. Only, when it gets exploited by malicious hackers, it does useful stuff for them, like logging your every key stroke.

That’s right - this search engine optimisation article is telling you not to submit your website to any search engines. Not Google, not Inktomi, not AltaVista. Sounds a bit strange? Yeah, I thought so too - but writer Trenton Moss really has a point. Read more…

Commercial talk - advertising - has always been a top-down proposition: the corporation tells you its story. That’s going to change. Current marketing theory believes that corporate interaction with the customer will soon cease to be a one way exchange. At least that’s what obtainium.tv, a Massachusetts-based agency pushes. Check out the clips…