Author: Juan Antonio Melendres Villa

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management

Chapter 23: Passing Through Riga on the Way Home

Mr. T. was dreaming. This was to be his last night in Morovia. The party that evening at the Residence had gone on forever, with a huge, celebratory crowd present. Everyone was there. Frankly, he’d had too much to eat and far too much to drink. That was probably the reason for this dream, in which he saw a swirl of smoke with a light inside and something else there, too.

The journal that had been his companion for the whole adventure was open on h s desk before him. It was turned to page 102, the first blank page. He would have liked to make a final entry, but there was really nothing he could think of that would sum up his Morovian experience.
He turned back one page to see what he’d written in what he now knew would be the last entry.

There was one more thing that wasn’t resolved, and apparently it wasn’t going to be. He hadn’t seen Lahksa since the party last night. She hadn’t turned up at the airport with all the others to see him off and when he had called her, there had been no answer.

He settled dejectedly into his seat in the corporate jet. Seafood was already asleep on the seat beside him, knocked out by his pill. Mr. T. was just strapping himself in when the steward came back to check. Mr. T falls to sleep in the jet and then a voice wake-up him “Mr. Tompkins. Wake up, sir. We’re in Riga.”

Mr. T. looked around. The airport seemed to be in the middle of a wide, pleasant meadow. There were palm trees beside the runway. The driver grunted. He Continue reading "Chapter 23 Reflection"

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management

Chapter 22: The year’s hottest IPO

The count down starts on May 24th the QuickerStill B-Team delivered its product, on May 29th the QuickerStill-C delivered and on May 30th the PMill-C delivered. Mr. T was happy because they actually pulled off three deliveries, all before Belok’s dates. Belok had actually committed to the distribution chain for all six products to begin shipping starting tomorrow. June first wasn’t even a sensible stretch goal for any of the larger projects.

A good goal is right on the edge of possible. So, it makes a lousy scheduling date. A good schedule is likely to be met, so it doesn’t make much of a goal. On June 1st, word came that NNL was finally back. Mr. Tompkins was summoned with some urgency to see him. The assistant who had made the appointment seemed almost breathless with excitement. Head Office people tended to get excited when heads were rolling or work was about to be canceled. He took the morning train to Korsach with some trepidation.

As it was during Webster’s first visit those many months ago, NNL’s office was again unlit but for the glow of his mon- itor. Again, it took a moment to locate the man, lost in the huge room. The IPO is scheduled for next week. This is a major coup. The underwriterssay it’s going to be the hottest IPO of the year.

The NNL clamed himself and start to talk with Mr. T. the underwriters inform the NNL that they have to terminate his contract before the offering. That means he gets paid off but has no further obligation to them as of the offering date. For legal reasons, apparently. New management will be after he signs on for another contract.

As soon Continue reading "Chapter 22 Reflection"

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management

Chapter 20: Standing on Ceremony

Mr. T piled with his new consultant into the back of the Institute’s ancient Buick and told the driver to head toward the old town of Varsjop, where there were some nice little coffee shops. He looked across the car at Mr. T but I have a hunch you’re going to tell me you don’t really have any problems. Oh, just some little minor annoyances maybe, but nothing significant.

Mr.Tompkins introduced Dr.Winnipeg to Melissa Alber, who led him away to take part in the weekly PMi11-A staff meeting. It was not until just before noon that his new consultant showed up again. Dr. Winnipeg looked at him sharply. It was as if he were puzzled that Mr. Tompkins hadn’t seen anything obvious. “Why don’t you bag the project Webster? PMill-B and -C seem to be in pretty good shape. The A project has just been through too much. Progress has come to a grinding halt; nobody has any idea of what to do next the design is a botch the implementation effort is, as you’d expect, totally misdirected.

As soon as the staff meeting was adjourned, Dr. Winnipeg and Osmun had repaired to his office. After a very shoa conversation, they came out, both looking pleased. They explained to the staff that Osmun was being transferred to a new responsibility. Then, Osmun went back into his office to pack. Dr. Winnipeg spent the rest of the morning wandering around the Aidrivoli complex.

One thing that he found was on the Air Traffic Control project. He happened upon a working meeting mid morning and sat in for an hour and a half, not saying much of anything. The meeting was in the largest conference room in Aidrivoli-3. The

Continue reading "Chapters 20 & 21 Reflection"

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management

Chapter 19: Part and Whole

Aristotle Kenoros was a morning person. If he was going to make an appearance, it was most often the first business of the day. This morning, Mr. T arrived at his office to be told by Mrs. Beerzig that Morovia’s First Programmer was waiting for him inside. Mr. T. found him sitting on the desk, staring up at a matrix of letters he had drawn on the whiteboard.

For the purposes of this grade, I did not consider so much the quality of their designs as whether they had produced a design at all. If you have a low-level modular design that serves the function of a blue print that is, it establishes what all the coded modules will be and what interfaces there will be among them then Kenoros gives you an A.

All the small teams got A’s and B’s. The big teams got all the F’s. and the Oracle’s concept of Last Minute Implementation is going to be impossible without a good design. In fact, they are not going to be doing Last Minute Implementation. The six A Teams started coding long ago. I had no success persuading them to defer implementation. all the B and C Teams are trying out the Oracle’s approach. They are all trying to push back implementation, and to do as much verification work as pos- sible before a single line of code is written. Some of them are trying rigorously to defer coding until the last sixth of the project.

Kenoros has a teory that the teams were too big. During the whole time that design should have been going on, they had too many people to involve in that activity. Design is a job for a small group. they Continue reading "Chapter 19 Reflection"

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management

Chapter 16: PLANNING FOR THE SUMMER GAMES

Mr. T. arrives at the office, I found a huge pile of documentation in black, loose-leaf notebooks waiting for him. On the huge pile of documents was an accompanying note on the engraved stationery of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, that says: “I had Hoolihan steal this from the States. With a head start like this, there will be no excuse for missing the summer year 2000 deadline.”. Also was Kenoros that was waiting for him. He had one of the black notebooks open on his lap. He look to the notwbook and see specifications from the FAA NASPlan contracts. He think that all of those projects ended up in litigation. Then he think that if Belok really wanted to help us, he might have stolen the specs from the French system, or even the Spanish system.

Mr. T. began scooping them up and loadmg them into Aristotle’s outstretched arms, and then into his own until there was only one notebook left. Kenoros voice came out muffled fiom behind the pile of black notebooks. “We take on too much,” the voice said, “because we are terrified of too little.” Osmun Gradish was still pleasant-seeming and still soft spoken. Mr. T. invited himself to sit in on the weekly staff meeting for the PMill-A project. Also present was the PMill product manager, Melissa Alber, Gradish’s boss.

Mr. T. shook his head and say “Our response to having the A-Teams overstaffed and overpressured was to set up B- and C-Teams. Now, when I’m feeling down at all, I just stop by Notate-C or PShop-C or Quickerstill-B or almost any of the others.”. webster say that the All projects are sacrificial pawns. But we shouldn’t think Continue reading "Chapter 16 reflection"

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management

Chapter 15: Think Fast

Kenoros’s letter had bought him a few weeks of respite, but then at the end of August, Mr. T. was summoned again. Mr. T. wandered past the office suite occupied by NNL, hoping that Himself might be back in town. He figured he had a few markers to call in with NNL, maybe enough to have Belok refocused onto some other poor soul somewhere. The NNL will return on June 1. Belok’s receptionist led Mr. T. back though several ornate rooms to the minister’s secretary.

Mr. Belok was waiting for Mr. T. to tell him that everything he was doing was costing a lot, since every year he spent $ 31.5 million and Belok did not see anything clear, because everything seemed that the products were not going to come out in the specified time and that Belok did not like. Belok says this to Mr. T. “It would be a bad day for you if you had to stay here and tell me that you weren’t going to make the first June delivery for all six products.”.

Mr. T. began to tell them the times of the products, apparently everyone could finish on date and form, but PShop was the only one that was not going to be on time that had a remnant of Six hundred measly hours of overtime scheduled project. That works out to barely ten hours of overtime per person on that project for a whole month.

The Olympic Games are leading international sporting events featuring summer and winter sports competitions in which thousands of athletes from around the world participate in a variety of competitions. NNL stopped in at Olympic headquarters in between his other projects and Continue reading "Chapter 15 reflection"

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management

Chapter 13: Quicker Still

From the beginning, NNL had decreed that the Quicken look-alike product would be called Quickerstill. The name caught on with the teams. the result was that the performance requirement for the product had to be bumped up in order in order to justify the name of the product. There are only 345 days left until the products were finished, from now on there was only a little of the year left until June 1, which is the day of the delivery of projects. In developing the six products, Mr. T. knew, they’d be lucky to achieve anything more than three function points per person-month. The problem was that PShop would take at least three years to put out the door. There was no chance for a project of this magnitude to be completed in the established time.

These projects must be put under the gun to demonstrate improved process. They’re currently rated at Capability Maturity Model Level 2. And Minister Belok wants them at Level 3 before the end of the year.

The Capability Maturity Model is is a development model created in 1986 after a study of data collected from organizations that contracted with the U.S. Department of Defense, who funded the research. The term “maturity” relates to the degree of formality and optimization of processes. The model has 4 levels:

1. Initial – the starting point for use of a new or undocumented repeat process.
2. Repeatable – the process is at least documented sufficiently such that repeating the same steps may be attempted.
3. Defined – the process is defined/confirmed as a standard business process
4. Capable – the process is quantitatively managed in accordance with agreed-upon metrics.
5. Efficient – process management includes deliberate process optimization/improvement.

Process improvement results

Continue reading "Chapters 13 and 14 reflection"

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management

They’d had the assis- tance of the six product managers and the twelve newly redundant B- and C-Team managers. They’d divided them- selves up into groups of three and blitzed through ex-General Markov’s staff, looking for the best people. Now all the good developers had been combined into the six A-Teams, great idea. The official org chart showed him sitting directly on top of the six A-Team managers. This was something of a fiction, generated to keep Minister Belok off their backs.

Mr. T and the A-Teams were housed in the prestigious and very visible Aidrivoli-1 building. The six product man- agers and the B- and C-Teams were all hidden away in space that the ex-General had found for them in Aidrivoli-7.

Mr. T received a fax from a Cam bridge company instructing him to meet T. Johns Caporous at the Varsjop airport the next morning. When T. Johns arrives, He spoke about twice as fast as anyone Mr. T had ever met before. His words came like bullets out of a machine gun. Mr. T come to guide with some of the data they had, asked how much equipment they had and was surprised to hear the amounts of computers, people, etc. that they had at their disposal. He helped them create the numbers they needed.

Data is valuable, and this system of metrics could give them a lot of it. Belinda saw its potential and was eager to retrieve information from previous projects. In order to get it, though, a lot of research was needed. They need to find as much information as possible about past projects and their new projects in order to model their information. if not, the information that T. Johns is giving Continue reading "Chapter 12 reflection"