lualba2020 – Page 2 – TI2011 Spring 2020

Partial 1 – TI 2011

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management Reflections

Reflective and prospective post on the course TI 2011 – Project Evaluation and Management

What have I learned so far in this class?

During the lectures so far, I could learn about different concepts regarding economic engineering which are relevant to project management and software development:

Concepts & elements of economic engineering
Money value throughout time
Simple and compound interest
Nominal and effective interest rate
Minimum acceptable rate of return
Net present value
Internal rate of return
Investment recovery period
Economic life of an asset
Depreciation
Taxes
Inflation
How to estimate in software development
Influences of economics in our daily life

As I am reflecting on project management topics each week by writing weekly book reflections on the book „The Deadline: A Novel about Project Management (Enlaces a un sitio externo.)“ by Tom DeMarco, I have learned already a lot about the important tasks and skills for managing people and (software) projects. So far, the topics discussed included:

Essentials of managing people (Hiring, matching people to tasks, motivating, team building)
Important requirements for successful projects (investments, support, location, scheduling, timeliness)
Importance of safety for employees and how to lead change
The importance of sticking up for your employees and for your job
The effects of dishonest communication and the effects of honesty, motivation and collaboration
Important skills a manager needs to learn on team building and team leading (leading with heart, trusting in yourself, building soul into your team, develop an instinct for problems)
How to interview people and to which clues to look out for (listen more than speaking, observe interactions with the team, talk to the team)
Identifying and managing risks in projects (identify, assess probabilities, costs and indicators, monitor, follow emergency plans)
The importance of both, success and failures
The value of modeling system dynamics Continue reading "Partial 1 – TI 2011"

Life with Covid-19 – How to slay working from home

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management Reflections

130 Days

It´s been 130 days now since the first patient was diagnosed with the corona virus in Wuhan, China. With its rapid spread around the world, our everyday lives changed almost instantly, sweeping us off our feet and completely turning around our routines and the things we took for granted until now.
The economy in many countries has come to almost a full stop. A lot of companies are now forced to switch to remote working models to keep the business going at least a bit while at the same time protecting their employees
(everybody who doesn´t really need their employees to come to work should be doing that actually!!).
However, most companies and individuals are poorly prepared for working from home. Essentials like trust, equipment and tech, experience etc. are missing.

People already see this pandemic as the trigger for a fundamental shift in business, changing business models, communication channels and working models alike. So how can we master this shift into working from home as good and especially as fast as possible? How can technology help us make the long-distance (work) relationships actually work?

CBC Spark Radio’s podcast #469: Remote from Toronto this week focuses exactly on this topic. Nora Young and her colleagues talk about working from their kitchen tables while entertaining children, bad internet connections and how to interview guests when you don´t have access to recording studios anymore. During the podcast they are talking to Natalie Nagele, Wildbit CEO and co-founder, a company with employees working remotely from all over the world on a 32-hour week. They also spoke to Shawn D. Long, the dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences of Kennesaw State University, about the informal aspects of remote working such as the hallway chat or

Review on Chapter 11 of “The Deadline: A Novel about Project Management”

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management Reflections

Office Politics

This chapter shows us that in real life, there is never a straight line from A to B, no matter what we are talking about…
However, as Mr. T. also realizes during his morning walk, you should always be aware of your surroundings and notice as well as appreciate the little things, otherwise you will scare them away or not even notice them at all.

The same applies to project management, as despite that there will always be problems, you need to appreciate the smart people, the team you can work with, the facilities and resources you have available, the opportunities to are given and the environment you are able to work in, especially if you are given a lot of freedom and no pressure but instead trust from your boss(es). But simply bear in mind that projects and people WILL cause problems over and over again (people with talent demand recognition, no matter how you schedule there will be time problems etc. etc. etc.).

When Minister Belok, the Minister of Internal Affairs and Deputy Tyrant takes over for NLL, we see excatly why we should appreciate the small things and not take them for granted… instead, now Mr. T. all of a sudden has a boss who is someone whose „particular focus is the financial“…
People like thim express the cost of a day in terms of profit it could have generated. And they simply cannot be convinced of a different approach towards the same goal, even if it clearly has advantages over their plan, as they just do not want to look right and left, but all they want is people to follow their orders no matter if it produces a worse or a better outcome.

Contrary to the leadership style his boss is demonstrating, Continue reading "Review on Chapter 11 of “The Deadline: A Novel about Project Management”"

Review on Chapter 12 of “The Deadline: A Novel about Project Management”

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management Reflections

Welcome to the World of Data

The fact that Tompkins needs to reorganize the entire organizational structure simply to please an ignorant manager seems quite realistic. Even though they had carefully planned the projects and the experiment and had set up the project teams with a lot of expertise, now all these need to be done “hidden away” just so the top management is pleased.

Mr. T. Johns is introduced, who works for a small company which expresses sizes of projects in “function points”. Upon arrival, he already knows the exact number of programmers, workstations, computer models … of the entire country of Morovia. However, it doesn´t stop just there, as he can also recall average temperatures, average rainfall, wine production etc. Clearly, he is that kind of person who likes to express themselves in numbers and who likes to put everything into a mathematical context.

However, even though when leaving it seems like Mr. Tompkins and General Markov still hadn´t quite caught up with all calculations that Mr. Johns produced, the final result was definitely worth it as now, each project has its size expresses in function points ranging from 1,500 to 6,500 points. Yet, did need Belinda to bridge the gap between the table of function points and the simulation models they had done previously. She explains to them that the function points are basically nothing more than the amount of work and effects they had used to establish their simulations.

However, in order to predict productivity and to know the variation in function points of a project, some mathematical values derived from other products are needed to calculate means and variations.

Here we can learn about the importance of archaeology and considering past experiences to make better predictions for the future. Just like Webster wants to

Review on Chapter 10 of “The Deadline: A Novel about Project Management”

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management Reflections

The Hidden Treasures of System Dynamics

While Mr. T. is in Rome to check if Morovia actually does pay him as they had promised (yes, he´s apparently still suspicious and he still cares about the money, despite the fact how much he obviously likes his new job), he gets to meet Dr. Abdul Jamid, an acquaintance of an old friend. Dr. Jamid is working on management dynamics, something that will prove helpful for the tasks to be done in Morovia…

When first looking at the functionality of management dynamics, Mr. T. is overwhelmed by all the information and reluctant to acknowledge the usefulness of modelling management dynamics… something I can relate to better than anyone, after completing a whole module on system dynamics in my previous semester at university.

My professor back then introduced us to system dynamics with the classic „Chicken & Eggs problem“.
If we think that no other variables other than chicken and eggs exist, we have a system consisting of one reinforcing loop, that is „More chicken “ –> „More Eggs “ –> „More Chicken“ –> „More Eggs“ …… (you should understand it by now)
This would lead to exponential growth in the stock of chickens…however, in reality, growth is limited by a certain carrying capacity, e.g. the size of the farm where chicken live. At one point, the farm will be full and chicken will start crossing the road next to it – which inevitably leads to lots of (dead chicken ). This actually represents a new feedback loop, which is balancing the total stock of chicken.
Depending on variables such as growth rate, death rate, carrying capacity and time delays, the total number of chickens could take different sizes over time.

Check out this post by

Continue reading "Review on Chapter 10 of “The Deadline: A Novel about Project Management”"

Review on Chapters 8 and 9 of “The Deadline: A Novel about Project Management”

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management Reflections

Chapter 8 – Welcome to Latvia

After having selected managers for his teams, Mr. T. now faces the task of designing his Project Management Laboratory. Learning from the lesson in the previous chapter, Lahksa is proposing to involve a consultant, as none of them has ever done anything similar before. According to her, a consultant should be involved for „unusual, highly specific need[s]“ – somebody should tell that German politicians, because the Ministry of Defense alone spent more than 200 million euros on consultants…

For this reason, we get to meet Dr. Hector Rizzoli, whom Lahksa „invited“ to Morovia. Actually he is supposed to be giving a speech in Riga, Latvia, but with her connections Lahksa organized for him to be dropped off in Morovia, where they simply pretend it´s Latvia. He appears to be a nice man, but clearly a little bit dreamy as well, as despite all small hints and discrepancies he just doesn´t realize he isn´t in Riga. Not only does he seem to be a nice person, but when Tompkins casually mentions that he is running some experiences, he instantly gets excited – prove enough that he should be the right man for the job. When he designs with Mr. T. and Belinda the experiments later on, his approach is quite simple:

For each project, they had a single, designated learning goal, a
particular effect that the relative performance of the competing
teams would help to prove or disprove.

So instead of asking many questions and trying to vary/conclude/include/exclude a lot of factors, simply one goal is defined that will serve to compare the performance of the different teams.

In the chapter, we can also learn from Dr. Hector Rizzoli a few lessons about managing the experiment of Mr. T. and projects

Review on Chapters 6 and 7 of “The Deadline: A Novel about Project Management”

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management Reflections

Chapter 6 – Women can not only be good spies, but also good managers

As a manager, you have a lot of responsibilites. The decisions you make directly affect the company, the people and yourself. An important task is to learn how to deal with this stress and how to avoid procrastination. As we learn later in the book when B. Binda is introduced, too much of that stress can even lead to a burnout. Instead of tackeling every challenge on your own, it helps to involve others who have experience in making such decisions or with knowledge about the current situation and the company’s business.

When Mr. T. realizes he needs help to start forming his project teams, he decides to involve B. Binda, another men who was selected for his job – at least in his imagination. Learning that she is a woman makes him realize that he was biased, even if the is trying to deny that. Yet the sad truth is that women are still not considered to be top managers. When hearing of people with such a resume as Binda (Berkeley, Harvard, Xerox PARC, Apple…Hewlett-Packard…), people tend to picture a man behind such success, someone you can „drink beers with and talk about war stories“.

Just have a look at this Forbes gallery, and you´ll see some prime examples of women in leadership positions.

Yet, this is only part of the problem – equal pay, equal appreciation and acknowledgment and much more aspects are part of this issue as well.
However, it is funny to observe that when Belina is talking about managers, she on the contrary is always talking about women, the exact opposite to Mr. T.

Her story shows the hard work and effort are required to achieve such success. But even

Review on Chapters 3,4,5 of “The Deadline: A Novel about Project Management”

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management Reflections

Chapter 3 – Leaving Your Comfort Zone

Thomkins wakes up in an unknown environment, with Lahska sitting next to his bed.
He complains and wonders how she could be so mean, but even he has to recognize that he actually had nothing to lose and in fact, only things to gain.

On top, Lahska took his cat „Seafood“ and other personal items from his home such as „his familiar pajamas, […] sheets he´d had for years [and] his favorite molded pillow“ and even the old rocker of his grandmother’s. This somehow shows that she is an empathetic character, even though her job is to spy or kidnap people.

You could even argue that while he had nothing to looe, his cat does need an owner with a job – so for the cat, his kidnapping and new job could turn out well…

By presenting him with a seemingly impossible task and saying he´ll „never catch up“ on the schedule of his new job, Lahska lures him out and wakens his interest. One thing from his response that we can take away for project management is that „if a schedule is impossible to catch up with, it has been designed wrongly from the beginning.“

Even though Mr. Tompkins pretened to be quite uninterested at first, it is amusing to observe how he first inquires about all monetary aspects of the job before actually asking about the job itself.

Yet, once he actually starts considering the job, we can once more learn a few things about managing, especially on such a large scale (15,000 senior software engineers, six key development projects, six software produtcs!)… According to him, a few things are inevitable to success in such a task:

Investment in people, training, equipment
Support (in form of P. Continue reading "Review on Chapters 3,4,5 of “The Deadline: A Novel about Project Management”"

Economics of Software Engineering

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management Reflections

This post reflects on „Concepts of economic engineering“, more specifically on
1. General concepts of economic engineering
2. Elements of study of economic engineering
3. Money value throughout time
4. Simple and compound interest
5. Nominal and effective interest rate

General concepts of economic engineering

The concept of economic engineering describes the understanding of relating business to software engineering. Even though both areas are extremely important for companies nowadays, it is still rare for people to have an understanding of both areas at the same time. Possessing this understanding can be very valuable to companies these days and can help managers to understand and support their employees better.

Elements of study of economic engineering

While studies of economics includes mainly the study of value, costs, resources and their relationship, studies of software engineering are related to building and maintaining software, using data and constructing processes with the help of IT.
The study of economic engineering thus relates those concepts in order to take into account both feasability of software solutions as well as economic returns for the company using those.

Money value throughout time

The value of money is one of the must fundamental and commonly recognized concepts of finance and business. Even though in my personal opinion, it can be hard to grasp the idea of a changing value over time, it is indispensable for analyzing or comparing investments. The most important influences are factors such as time frames, currency developments, inflation rates, taxes or risks.

Simple and compound interest

Interest in general is used to describe the cost of borrowing or lending money, such as when taking out a bank loan.
The main difference between simple and compound interest is the way the interest is calculated:
• Simple interest is calculated on the principal (the original) amount Continue reading "Economics of Software Engineering"

Review on Chapter 1 & 2 of “The Deadline: A Novel about Project Management”

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management Reflections

The first two chapters serve as an introduction into the story. The story starts right away with a description of Mr. Tompkins, a systems manager, and his status as an ReSOE – an employee „Released to Seek Opportunities Elsewhere.“ Along with thousands of other employees of the telephone and communciations company, he is attending a program that includes presentations and trainings for ReSOEs. His boredom and ironic reflections on the program clearly demonstrate that, in fact, the program is only superficial to keep employees who are not needed anymore entertained.
After falling asleep, he meets Lahska Hoolihan, an industrial spy and agent from the fictional country Morovia. As she tells him that her job is to kidnap other people, their conversation turns into a conversation about managing people, the most important task of managers. Tompkins states that „getting the right people for the right job. That´s what makes the difference between a good manager and a drone.“
During the second chapter, he recalls a conversation during a corporate project management training class with the instructur Edgar Kalbfuss. The memory is a practical example for many people who immediately think of GANNT charts, project milestones and so on when talking about project management.
Tompkins on the contrary sees the focus on managing people, which includes mainly the following four essential ingredients of management:
1. Hiring
2. Matching people to jobs
3. Motivating
4. Team building
This point of view of Mr. Tompkins is probably the reason why Lahska Hoolihan is kidnapping him to help Morovia build a new software factory as their manager.

For more information on the book discussed, see: „The Deadline: A Novel about Project Management (Enlaces a un sitio externo.)“ by Tom DeMarco