rogeliofg – Page 2 – TI2011 Spring 2020

¿Qué tan remoto es el futuro?

--Originally published at TI2011 – Roger's Rad Records

Me gustaría escribir esta entrada en español ya que tengo varias cosas que decir al respecto y quiero darme a entender completamente.

Hace ya casi un par de meses la contingencia por el COVID-19 llegó a México. Esta situación nos ha obligado a encerrarnos y seguir prácticas de seguridad para evitar ser contagiados o propagar la enfermedad. El Tec de Monterrey fue de las primeras (por no decir que la primera) instituciones en tomar medidas al respecto, y no solo hablo de instituciones educativas, pues actuó incluso antes que el propio gobierno nacional. Fue a mediados de marzo de este año que la universidad decidió suspender actividades presenciales y transicionar a clases en línea. Originalmente se planeaba seguir así por poco menos de un mes, pero debido al desarrollo de la situación hemos de terminar el semestre de manera remota.

“Closed as in Closed” flickr photo by cogdogblog https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/26743273439 shared into the public domain using (CC0)

Este semestre comencé mis estancias profesionales en una pequeña empresa de Guadalajara. En cuanto supimos que ya había casos de coronavirus confirmados en México (muy poco después del anuncio por parte del Tec) se tomó la decisión de comenzar a trabajar en el formato de Home Office. También hemos seguido con el formato remoto desde entonces.

La tercera de mis responsabilidades este semestre es el servicio social. Estoy inscrito como tutor en un programa de preparatoria en línea llamado prep@net, donde me encargo de revisar tareas, resolver dudas y proporcionar retroalimentación a los estudiantes. Afortunadamente, esto ya se hacía de manera remota, así que esta parte no sufrió de graves cambios, o por lo menos de forma directa.

El episodio 469 del podcast de CBC Spark se grabó al poco tiempo de que la situación de contingencia afectase a Canadá. Tanto anfitriones como

DEADLINE, chapter 12. How deep do metrics delve?

--Originally published at TI2011 – Roger's Rad Records

This chapter has another of those moments in which something or someone is introduced as mostly irrelevant, but turn out to be a big deal in our reality. It happened before with the introduction of the NNL (Bill Gates) and now it happened with a ’charming small company’ that turned out to be none other than IBM.

“IBM” flickr photo by Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine https://flickr.com/photos/opengridscheduler/22848635441 shared into the public domain using (CC0)

T. Johns Caporonus was the trigger this time. This man was the consultant of the company that created a unit that determines the size of a software product entirely from the outside. These units are called ‘function points’. Mr. Caporonus went to Morovia and had a long session of research and calculations with Webster and Gabriel which resulted in a little chart that displayed the sizes of each of their products in function points.

When Belinda showed up, she was amazed at how useful function points could be. She immediately made a correlation between those units and their simulation model. A lot of information can be retrieved from such measurements, for instance: how productive the company is or how much certain product will cost.

Function points are an actual unit of measurement that express the amount of business functionality, an information system (as a product) provides to a user. They were originally created by Allan Albrecht from IBM in 1979 and are currently accepted as a standard in the industry. As of 2013, there are five ISO standard specifications regarding function points, this website has some information about them, as well as a more detailed explanation of how FP work.

According to Mr. Tompkins, Caporonus spat out several statistics and pieces of information that could be useful to them. I found this document that

DEADLINE, chapter 11. This situation we ought to leaven.

--Originally published at TI2011 – Roger's Rad Records

The plot of the book thickened in this chapter: Mr. T was having a great morning until Waldo came and told him that the NNL had to go to the US and put someone else in charge. “Allair Belok, Minister of Internal Affairs and Deputy Tyrant” is how he introduced himself. He made a strong first impression by joking with Mr. Tompkins’ countdown display and making it display ‘420’. By the way he was described, Belok seemed like an infuriating person. Mr. T got all sarcastic and the two of them started discussing about the deadlines, the teams, the managers, profit, among other things.

“Belted Kingfisher” flickr photo by YoungSue https://flickr.com/photos/95782365@N08/24419080976 shared into the public domain using (PDM)

Belok basically wanted to let Mr. Tompkins know that things would be different while he was in charge. He ordered to merge the three teams for each product into one bigger team, he set a new deadline six months earlier than the previous one* and didn’t seem to care about what Mr. T had to tell him. He just wouldn’t listen and turned out to be just the kind of boss Webster despised.

The NNL was gone, and so was Ms. Hoolihan. Mr. T, Belinda and Gabriel had no alternative: they had to do as Belok commanded and all of their efforts until then would go to waste. Or would they? They actually decided to obey their new superior, but not without making new secret teams to stick to their original plan and secretly work on three different instances for each of the products, as they initially intended,

This chapter was heavily focused on the story, so there isn’t much technical content for this entry. The only thing I can think of is the Pathological Politics mentioned in both Mr. T’s

DEADLINE, Chapter 10. “Run that simulation again!”

--Originally published at TI2011 – Roger's Rad Records

This chapter felt different from all the prior ones, so this entry will probably do too. Mr. Tompkins was staying in Rome for a few days and Johnny Jay, his old boss, wanted him to meet with somebody that also happened to be in Europe at the time. Since Mr. T respected Mr. Jay so much, he agreed to meet the guy.

“Rome” flickr photo by boklm https://flickr.com/photos/boklm/28815497551 shared into the public domain using (CC0)

Dr. Abdul Jamid had been working on management dynamics. Specifically, on a program that could translate the gut feeling that has been mentioned several times throughout the book into a controlled model that would be able to simulate different scenarios in a similar way to an algorithm. Mr. T was unsure about the viability of such a program, but after a couple of demonstrations and about two days of exchanging thoughts with Dr. Jamid he was convinced and acquired the software.

The book states that the software used by Dr. Jamis is a visual programming language that was marketed as ‘iThink’. Its actual name is a little longer: Systems Thinking, Experimental Learning Laboratory with Animation (or STELLA for short). It was introduced way back in 1985 as a program for system dynamics modelling.

I had never heard the term ‘system dynamics’, so after doing a little research I found that that’s the name given to certain approach that allows to model and simulate the behavior of complex systems by using several components, including loops, time delays and table functions. This small website explains that one of the main applications of system dynamics in business is, precisely, one of the topics from my last entry: improving performance over time. It also explains that when system dynamics is translated into the business/management context it is sometimes

DEADLINE, chapters 8 & 9. If nobody notices it will be fine.

--Originally published at TI2011 – Roger's Rad Records

At the start of chapter 8, Lahksa and Mr. Tompkins were wondering what the optimal way of performing the management experiments would be, how would they measure which methods are more efficient? They didn’t know how to answer such a question, but they knew who could be able to.

Dr. Hector Rizzoli was an important personality in the field who had run several controlled experiments in the past. Thanks to Lahksa’s shenanigans, the doctor was tricked into staying in Morovia for a few days. Mr. T took this opportunity to get his help for their big experiment.

“Experiments” flickr photo by r i i d o https://flickr.com/photos/riido/25031317738 shared into the public domain using (PDM)

Belinda, Dr. Rizzoli and Mr. T decided the main structure for the projects and their teams. Each of the projects would have three different teams working on different instances of the same product, every project would try to prove or disprove a particular effect set by specific learning goals.

Dr. Rizzoli and Mr. Tompkins got a chance to talk just the two of them. Mr. T told the doctor that even if they had three teams for each project there was no guarantee that any of them would create good enough products. He was scared of failing even if a lot of learning were to take place. This led to the two topics that Mr. T included in his journal:

First, productivity improvement. When Tompkins asks for a way to improve productivity in the short term, the doctor clarifies that there’s no such a thing. Productivity is improved by investing for the long-term. When I googled “How to improve productivity” all of the first results were articles with titles like “15 EASY ways of improving productivity in the workplace”, and they all seemed somewhat sketchy.

DEADLINE, chapters 6 & 7. It feels like this woman fell from heaven.

--Originally published at TI2011 – Roger's Rad Records

Mr. T starts chapter 6 in a tough situation. Not only is he afraid of how many people he’ll have reporting to him, but he also must choose each one of them. At least, eighteen, according to his calculations. How is he supposed to start deciding among 200-ish software managers? Well, Mr. Tompkins uses his secret weapon, a hidden ability that has been in his possession since his early years…the art of procrastination.

“Lazy Like a Sunday Morning” flickr photo by andymiccone https://flickr.com/photos/andymiccone/27058737722 shared into the public domain using (CC0)

To avoid facing the work he had pending, he started reading a book called Structural Cybernetic Management that Lahksa had given him. After a while, Waldo started a conversation which eventually led Mr. T to realize that he needed somebody to help him make decisions, to which Waldo suggested the person who was originally chosen to take Mr. T’s position: Belinda Binda.

After reading her resume and hearing about her from Lahksa, Mr. Tompkins was 100% positive that she would make for a great consultant, even if she was a bag lady living by the docks. He headed out to look for her and once she was found, they had a weird first conversation.

In a few words, they both agreed that the book Mr. T was reading didn’t seem to understand what management is about, to which Binda began to explain the essential “body parts” of a good manager. After a long conversation, Mr. T asked Belinda to work for him and she took the offer.

The body parts Binda mentioned were:

Heart. It is what people respond to. Leaders with no heart can lead, but people won’t follow them.
Gut. That little voice that tells you if you’ve found what you were seeking for or if you

Continue reading "DEADLINE, chapters 6 & 7. It feels like this woman fell from heaven."

DEADLINE, chapters 3, 4 & 5. We actually want to keep them alive!

--Originally published at TI2011 – Roger's Rad Records

I just read these three chapters and the story has already gained some more depth. I think that’s cool.

Chapter 3 is practically a big setup for how Mr. T is going to be working. We are informed about Morovia’s future plans and its current situation, as well as how Tompkins ought to be operating. He’s told that the country has way more capable and competent employees than they could possibly need, even taking into account all of the six projects that have been put under Tompkins’ administration. Ms. Hoolihan suggests running a big management experiment that could take advantage of the number of people at their disposal: they could create various different groups with people with different characteristic, backgrounds, ages, experiences and relationships among themselves to work on the same tasks so they could find out what kind of group turns out to be the most efficient.

“Business team” flickr photo by slon.pics https://flickr.com/photos/156723268@N03/31859775947 shared into the public domain using (CC0)

In chapters 3 and 4 we are introduced to some key elements:

Silikon Valejit: the area where all of the projects and operations take place. The name doesn’t ring any bells.
Waldo Montifiore: Mr. T’s personal assistant, he does everything a personal assistant does. This character is useful to provide information and apparently, he looks like Tin Tin.
*The Personal Journal of Webster Tatterstall Tompkins ◉ Manager ◉ : basically, where Mr. T writes about what he learns while running the controlled experiment. It’s also the way the author explains different management concepts.

In chapter 4, Mr. T faces his first problem and has to make a decision. A pressing-plant for CD-ROMs has to be built in Silikon Valejit, but the project is far behind of what was planned. While talking to the construction manager,

€ngineering economic$

--Originally published at TI2011 – Roger's Rad Records

So this is a course about project evaluation and management with a very heavy focus on software development/engineering. I don’t know about others, but for me, when I see the word management I always think of two things: time and money. Some people even say that time IS money, so that narrows it down to just that one thing.

“Money” flickr photo by Worlds Direction https://flickr.com/photos/worldsdirection/34776291250 shared into the public domain using (CC0)

Money is one of the most important factors when it comes to making decisions. According to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) Wiki, economics is the study of value, costs, resources, and their relationship in a given context or situation. Such studies, along with a proper analysis of similar projects, benefits, externalities, costs and other prices, can lead to better perspectives and well informed decisions that can range from whether or not to start a project, to whether or not one should be terminated for good. Engineering economics is basically applying these studies for a particular engineering field.

If you, like me, plan on having (or already have) a career revolving around development, then you may have thought at some point: Finances don’t concern me that much, I just need to get an expert to do all of the needed calculations for me. To be honest, that used to be my mentality until very recently, but I’ve come to realize a couple of things that I’d like to elaborate on.

First, things aren’t as simple as just doing a couple calculations. There are a lot of elements that must be taken into consideration before making important decisions. The Wiki page I mentioned earlier contains tons of concepts that are imperative for economics.

If you ever read one of my UML entries you must know Continue reading "€ngineering economic$"

DEADLINE, chapters 1 & 2. “Is diet Dr. Pepper okay for you?”

--Originally published at TI2011 – Roger's Rad Records

Imagine having to sing a song about you being laid off and getting kidnapped right after while you’re trying to sleep. That’s what happened to poor Mr. Tompkins, the protagonist of The Deadline: A Novel about Project Management by Tom DeMarco.

“Sleeping” flickr photo by Mussi Katz https://flickr.com/photos/mussikatz/13842448454 shared into the public domain using (PDM)

I had never considered that a novel that teaches about management could exist. I always thought that if I were to learn about this topic (or any other, honestly) I would just get a textbook or one of those “Four things you must know before starting your business” kind of books. To me, this seems like a very interesting format, and I hope that the story stays as interesting as it started.

Mr. Tompkins is introduced as a person who falls asleep during boring lectures and refuses to join very forced choruses, but I don’t blame him, I would also be bummed out if I knew I would need to find a new job soon. He meets a mysterious lady during one of those boring lectures, her name is Ms. Lahksa Hoolihan, and she introduces herself as nothing other than an industrial spy. Mr. T is taken aback and starts questioning her.

We learn that Ms. Hoolihan works from Morovia and that she has the ability to pinpoint people whose presence keep the companies they work for afloat. Mr. T is shocked by her skill, but he gets a bigger surprise when Ms. Hoolihan confesses she has come for HIM. Mr. T is told he is a very good manager, and that his skills are required to help Morovia’s government. At this point, Mr. Tompkins would seem like a very clever person, but he didn’t seems that brilliant to me when he just casually