April 26, 2007
Dear Everyone:
I am reveling in my second week of catlessness. No fighting to get out the door. No making sure I don’t step on little furry people on the stairs. Adorable creatures, true; but I’m glad they’re home and I can just visit them whenever I please.
I visited “Jeannie” and her cats last Saturday. The remodel is still ongoing. The bathroom door is still in the garage because the washer-dryer is still too far away from the wall to clear the doorway. “Jeannie’s” plumber friend is going to take care of the washer-dryer as soon as he can get the proper “crimping” tool.
In other news…
Our GIL3 File Plan project is galloping along in Phase 3 (Develop the Selected Alternative). What this means is many, many meetings called Design Sessions, Vetting Sessions and Feedback Sessions. I attended my first Design Session this week.
We get a bunch of people together, in this case the “Tiddly” Department. We get them to identify various “activities”, or “processes” that they do. Then we get them to work out a “Context Diagram” for each process.
This is where those Business Analysis classes that I took last year and this year begin to pay off. In Business Analysis I, we learned about the classic Context Data Flow Diagram. It’s intended to show exactly how data flows into and out of a particular part of a software application. It’s very technical.
The diagrams we’re using are sort of a bastardized version of the classic data flow diagrams. But instead of showing how data moves from one place to another, it shows the activities that generate documents like emails, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint slides, etc. And it’s the documents that we’re looking for. What kinds of documents do the people in the “Tiddly” Department receive and create?
Then we take the Context Diagrams and look to see if there are any documents that are not already represented in the current version of the File Plan. The File Plan started out as a compilation of some file structures that were already being used by various groups of people in the company. For instance, last year we helped an Operating Company come up with a standardized file structure for all of their personnel to use on the shared drive (a specialized kind of computer).
That, and others, were scrambled together into 18 “functions”, each of which is subdivided into “primary activities”, then “secondary activities”, then “information groups.” Now we’re figuring out which kinds of documents go into each information group.
It is, as we like to say, “A work in progress.”
All of this business, plus a two-day class that I took Monday and Tuesday, have precluded my having much personal time in the evening to study for the CRM Exam. I’ll be taking Parts One through Four next week. I missed Part Four by only one point last year, and Part Three by three points. So I’m hoping a little brushing up on those subjects will get me over the “hump”. Parts One and Two are an unknown entity, but a co-worker gave me some notes he had made for Part One and I intend to spend as much time as possible this weekend working on it.
Everybody keep your fingers crossed.
Love, as always,
Pete
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