June 11, 1993
Dear Everyone:
Busy week. Meetings every
morning. Class every afternoon.
I started the week off with a meeting at 8:00 am (shudder!) Monday
morning to "kick off" the new Project to find a replacement for CRMIS.
Yes, we've done this before; so
this time, I'm trying to come up with something new to call it.
Something like, "In Search of…a
new Records Management Software".
It's official: I'm the Team
Leader on a Project worth easily over $100,000.
No kidding.
Assuming we find a software to
recommend, even if the license is only $10,000 or so, the cost to
convert the existing data already in CRMIS into the new system could
very well go to 6 figures.
Consequently, this Project is already looming over me like the Rock of
Gibraltar. Gibraltar isn't just a
commercial. When I lived in
Morocco, we visited the Rock one weekend.
We even climbed to the top of it.
That's not such a tremendous feat in itself, you just stroll up
a rather long, winding road until you reach the top, or at least as near
it as they'll let you go without losing tourists off the precipice.
But having been there, I can tell
you that it's a really big
rock. They don't call it the
Pillar of Hercules for nothing.
With this in mind, I've been spending my afternoons over at the Learning
Center boning up on "Project Management".
The Learning Center is a company facility where you can take (or
check out) self-paced courses. Project
Management is "computer-based", meaning that you sit in front of a PC
and follow the course through a series of screens.
It starts out slow and easy, explaining basic terms like Event's,
Activities and Activity Times. Then
it teaches you how to figure out how long a project will take to
complete. You determine the most
likely amount of time each Activity will take, then string them along on
a Network Diagram. Sometimes
Activities are "independent", which means they go wandering off on their
own for a while, but eventually they returned to the fold.
These strings of activities are
called "paths".
Next, you go from one Activity to the next, adding up times until you
find the path that takes the longest time to get from start to finish.
This is the
Critical Path that tells you your estimated Project Completion Time
(ePCT). However,
your ePCT may not agree with when your boss thinks the project
should be finished. In the case
of Gibraltar, Bob wants us to make a recommendation by the end of the
year (which gives us less than five months when you factor in all the
holidays and vacation time). This
is your "contract time" (CT), the deadline.
Now comes the fun part. You need
to figure out the Latest Possible Time (LPT) that you can start your
project and still meet your deadline. This
is easy. I've been doing this all
my life. Here is a simple
example:
The movie starts at 11:30 Saturday morning.
It's going to be a blockbuster,
so get there at least an hour early (10:30).
(Make a note to take along
something to read, or some work to do.) Now,
normally, it takes me about 20 minutes to get there from my place.
But
normal is 5:45 on a weekday
morning, with no one but commuters barreling down Treat at 55 mph,
heading for the freeway or BART. At
10:30 on a weekend, there are going to be a lot of non-commuters milling
about, shoppers, tourists and other impediments.
So allow a few more minutes
(10:05).
Now we’re at the point in time (Event) of leaving “Jeannie's” place.
Allow at least 5 minutes for
“Jeannie” to locate misplaced keys, purse, sunglasses, belt, samurai
warrior*, jacket, sweater, cat(s) (yes, the Cat-With-No-Name is still
living at “Jeannie's” place). The
time is now 10:00. Allow 15
minutes to get from my place to “Jeannie's” (9:45), then round off to
the nearest quarter-hour. The
Latest Possible Time for me to leave my apartment is 9:45.
Now all I have to do is LPT my way back through shower, dressing,
breakfast, etc., to find the Last Possible Time that I have to wake up
and get out of bed. The most
important LPT of all.
Back to the project. If your LPT
is more than the beginning time for your project, you have Positive
Slack Time. This is a good thing.
If your LPT is less than the
project beginning, you have Negative Slack Time and you're in trouble
before you even start.
Up to this point, taking the course was easy.
But then I ran into that old
problem, mathematical formulae. This
is the same problem I had in school. Looking
at a problem, I know what the
answer is, but I can't get the formula to work.
I call it the Mathematic
Cassandra Syndrome (MCS): The
teacher looks at your paper and sees the answer, but no formula.
When he asks how you arrived at
the answer, "Leap of Faith" doesn't cut it.
He wants you to use the formula.
But the formula never comes out
the same as the right answer.
So when it came time to "compute" the Event Slack Time, I knew that the
answer was 1. But every time I
tried to use the formula, it came out anything
but 1.
The formula goes something like
this: Event Slack Time (EST) =
(LPT - ET), where LPT = (CT - AT) and ET= (ET + AT), carry the 4, drop 3
partridges out of the pear tree and forget it because this is never
going to work.
Every time I look at the Critical Path, the answer was 1; but the
formula kept saying it was -1. Well,
I knew it was supposed to be 1, but I figured, what the hell, maybe
I'm wrong and the formula is right. So
I punched in -1 in the computer came back with "No, the correct answer
is 1".
Now, the people in the Learning Center are very nice to let me use their
equipment and it wouldn't be very polite of me to fling their PC out the
window, so I said, "Fine,
have it your way", and went on with the lesson.
At least I understood the
principle.
Once I got out of the math quagmire, the rest was easy.
Now that I’ve finished with the
course, I'm going to take a look at some
Project
Management software. If I can
find one that does what I'm hoping it will do, I can use it to plan and
track my project and the software will automatically take care of all
that pesky arithmetic. Isn't that
what computers are for?
Love, as always,
Pete
*No, not really. Just
checking to see if you’re still paying attention.
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