October 4, 2007
Dear Everyone:
Last week’s File Plan workshop in “Hobby” was very successful. The File Plan team had been concentrating on holding Design Sessions with as many of the Business Units as possible. Consequently, there were many Context Diagrams that needed to be Rationalized.
(You may recall from an earlier Letter that Design Sessions are meetings with people in various Operating Companies and departments. During the meeting, they use paper templates to identify their work processes and the various other entities that they interact with to do these processes. These interactions result in many electronic documents (Word, Excel, email, etc.) which need to be filed somewhere in the continuously-growing File Plan. The team takes these paper templates back and converts them into “Context Diagrams”. Other team members then go through these diagrams, identifying the document types and either finding them, or inserting them into the File Plan. This is called “Rationalizing”.)
By the middle of September, more than 500 of these diagrams were waiting to be Rationalized. That’s why the team leader called for a rush workshop. I had less than a week to get airline tickets and a hotel room booked. The computer let me buy the roundtrip ticket, but wouldn’t allow me to reserve a seat on the Oakland-”Hobby” leg. That told me the flight was already overbooked. On the return trip, I was able to reserve seat 26B – the middle seat three rows from the very back of the plane.
When I got to the airport that Monday morning, I found out that the computer had given me a seat, so I could relax. It was even a window seat.
Once in “Hobby”, we got down to business. The contracting company had hired three new people to work on the Rationalization. My job was to figure out who should be doing what – and to give the team leader up-to-the-minute statistics.
The Tracking Log (really just an Excel spreadsheet) needed some revising, such as separating Design Sessions from Review Sessions, and adding some more metrics like number of Context Diagrams created and number completed, who they were assigned to and when, and when they were finished. This involved a lot of digging around in our collaboration application, called “eRoom”.
Once I got that squared away, I started figuring out the best way to parse out the work. This turned out to be creating a lot of email messages with the exact name of the session as the Subject and including a link to that folder in eRoom. When I had about a dozen of these messages waiting in my Drafts folder in Outlook, I printed the list so I could write in the number of diagrams in each session. That way one person wouldn’t get assigned 20 diagrams while the person next to them got only one.
In fact, a couple of people who had never done rationalizing before specifically requested “just one page so I can get a feel for it”. The regular rationalizers, however, dug right in and started churning out results. As soon as one sent the message back, with the link to the folder where they had placed their work, I’d record it in the Tracking Log, then send them another.
That was Tuesday, when we worked a mere 12-½ hours. By Thursday afternoon, I was able to interrupt a meeting to inform them that I had just assigned the last available design session. Of course what this means is that the “controller” who updates the actual File Plan was completely swamped with work that only he can do. You can’t really have two people working in the same spreadsheet at the same time, unless they happen to be seated right next to each other in front of one computer.
So we had over 1100 diagrams completed (including the ones already done before the workshop) by the time we flew back to the Bay Area. The GIL3 Project Manager (many, many levels above us) mentioned it in a “town hall” meeting this afternoon. Now it’s just a matter of keeping up with the ongoing design and review sessions.
And hope nothing happens to that “controller” before the File Plan is “completed”.
Love, as always,
Pete
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