Author: parmichano

--Originally published at Parra’s Project Management Blog

As Tompkins says and forshadows, he didn’t have until this point someone that caused problems to his strategy. Everything was going perfect, the members of his crew were the best and deadlines were fine, but, where is the challenge? In this story, it has a name: Minister Belok. Today I’ll be talking about chapter 11 of The Deadline, by Tom De Marco.

Turns out the NNL went out to a trip that will take long, so he put his finances director in charge of the project led by Tompkins. As a financial guy, he decided to cut the time in the deadline of the project and decided to merge the separate teams working on the same project in order to “maximize output in less time”. As seen in the past chapter, this would not be the case, as aggregating people into a team costs effort and time in unification.

So how will Tompkins be getting out of this one? Simple, by playing to his rules. Since he is powerful, they had to obey his demands, but Mr. T devised a solution: they would merge all the teams, but form another two teams with extra members, the ones that aren’t doing anything related to the project led by general Markov. This would be the ultimate experiment: getting a team of the best engineers all together and overpopulated, vs normal engineers that will work in less quantities.

As seen by the predictions using Abdul Jamid’s method of modeling, the smaller teams would finish first, but let’s see what happens. It was time to spice things up, that is why I liked this chapter. We learn about politics, in this case pathological politics, the ones that make things worse every time. They form Continue reading "Belok: the enemy arrives"

--Originally published at Parra’s Project Management Blog

Welcome readers, this time we’ll continue to cover the book of The Deadline, by Tom De Marco, and as I suspected last article, this new chapter grants us with new information to learn from. Tompkins meets a man called Abdul Jamid, a young man that is very talented in data analytics regarding project management.

He meets Mr.T in Rome while he was out for some personal business affairs. There they ate together and talked about the same subject Tompkins brings: you guessed it, the Morovian project management laboratory. This time the new stuff that this random character brings to the table is a way to turn the subjective into objective: hunches into a simulation.

Every project manager that has experience has its personal feelings, they are their instinct of experience that helps them to make decisions. The truth is that they are 100% subjective, as there are no ways to clarify if those personal hypotheses were true at the end. What Jamid taught Mr. T that evening was a sort of pre-machine learning process to make a model that simulated one of those feelings involved in PM.

After developing a sort of flowchart in which the model is represented the manager has to test it and refine it, along real case scenarios. The more info you feed it with, the more ways it will simulate the real hunch. It is sort of machine learning, but human made. Finally, you can use this tool to compare an initial hunch with real results at the end, thus verifying or rejecting the proposed version of the model.

This could be a useful to use, when refined of course. Instead of waiting for a hunch to be true or false, you could instantly know if you hypothesis is correct or not, and save Continue reading "Hunch simulator"

--Originally published at Parra’s Project Management Blog

Times are weird in this era, as a giant pandemic known as the COVID19 struck the world violently. There is currently no cure to this new disease and could be life threatening for the older people. Businesses are starting to close, all mass events, in which people are seriously in danger of contracting the virus, are getting canceled all over the world. What started as a local problem to the Chinese government is now a responsibility for all.

Even though things are closing and people cannot leave their homes, economy is still running and you must pay your bills at the end of the month, so how in the world are going to get past this series of tragic events? Home office is the answer. Many companies and organizations are already in transition for the times to come until COVID-19 is contained. If you have a hard time with working in solitude at home, you are in luck this time around!

I worked for Apple Education for over 2 years and I’ll tell you one thing: I almost never saw my work colleagues and I was the only responsible person for my job in my workplace. I worked for the Campus Rep program, in which one student is selected to represent the brand in their university and find ways to make exposure to Apple’s core education initiatives. I’ll tell you about how I worked remotely and at the end I’ll throw some useful tips for working and managing inside your home.

When I entered the job I only had one physical event to attend: a massive training course given at Mexico City, in which all 40 members of the program, including leaders and managers, came together to ensure that everyone was well prepared for the job. Only 5 days I Continue reading "Hate Home-office? I’ll tell you why it could be your BEST office"