TI2011 Spring 2020 – Page 11 – Project Evaluation and Management

The Last Changes

--Originally published at The Awesome Blog

If I have to say something is that I’m kind of sad because the Deadline is almost over, I had a really nice time reading this book and I have to say that I was very surprised at the beginning of it. But let’s get down to business.

Chapter 22 is an emotional rollercoaster, of course, everything has to come to an end, but to be sincere I wasn’t expecting this kind of chapter, Tompkins has been released from its contract, as well as Minister Belok, and to be honest, I couldn’t be happier about the fact that Belok is no longer the Minister of Internal Affairs. But there’s more to take into consideration from this chapter.

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At the very end of the chapter, Belok talked to Tompkins and he said that he was going to change the company to a Lean and Mean formula, this is a formula followed by failing companies, which is the opposite to any organization’s natural goal. In other word is the result of a Failing and Frightened company. And of course Morovia’s Inc. wasn’t a failure.

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Overstaff

--Originally published at The Awesome Blog

Overstaffing is never a good option. Chapter 19 talks about the problems with overstaffing, in this case, we had the opportunity to learn that the problem with this is that you have to give all your staff something to do, which in some cases is not the most useful thing to do.

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For example in the case of design, in this case, maybe the best thing to do is to have four to five people working on that stage of the project, but you can’t keep a hundred developers on wait until you finish the design stage, this is not useful.

In fact, in some cases, if you do this you can tear apart a team, and lead them to increased interdependence, rework, or frustration.

In conclusion, Overstaffing is not a good option. The ideal way to deal with a project is to start with a small staff and to increase it during the process.

Sociology and Pathological Politics

--Originally published at The Awesome Blog

If there is something you have to be sure about is that you always can improve your projects. In Chapter 20 we talked about how to improve your meetings. To improve them the best thing you can do is to keep them small since a humongous meeting is not a good option. All the meetings should have a ceremony and a published agenda, this way you can ensure that your attendees are going to get hooked into the meeting and to make sure they are interested/prepared for the topics that you are going to speak about.

We also had the opportunity to learn that Anger is the same as Fear inside the workplace and this is often because the manager is overwhelmed with his project.

But there’s more!

We had read 21 Chapters and finally, Minister Belok is off the table, but this doesn’t happen often in real life, the truth is that you can’t expect to cure pathology from beneath, in a lot of cases you are not going to be able to resolve problems caused by pathological politics. If this is the case the best thing you can do is to bide your time, waiting for the problem to resolve itself, or for a good opportunity for you to move on.

Overstaffing

--Originally published at Site Title

When I was on my first and second semester remember when I have a code assignment, the first thing I used to did was opened my text editor and start coding. When the homework’s and project were small this strategy worked pretty well, there were few bugs of course but they di not affect too much. However, in the next semesters most of the teachers told us about how important is the analysis of requirements and design of requirements.

At first all the theory sound pretty boring and I was like: give me the work I want to code it and I keep with this thought until I was in a final project one day before deadline and realize that most of the time I was coding I did not understand the problem and with a good design everything has change it. From that moment any time I have to make any program first take my pen and paper and star writing how to solve it and if I a have a team in a white board write all the ideas to design the interfaces and this new strategy still good, because the team is 4 people or at most 7, but still is few people.

However, when I was reading “The Deadline”, a good novel by the way I recommend it. In a chapter two managers where talking about how most of the time the big projects use to start overcrowded, the manager has an aggressive deadline that require a lot of work and from the first moment they used to hire a bunch of people and this becomes counterproductive, because the first step of any project is the design and this can be done with at most 10 people but use the whole team of 30 can become

Chapters 20 & 21 Reflection

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management

Chapter 20: Standing on Ceremony

Photo by **Christina Morillo** in **Pexels**

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

Final Reflection – TI2011

--Originally published at Parra’s Project Management Blog

I will not lie when I say that this class surprised me a lot. I think disruptive or different styles of education and teaching are refreshing and should be implemented more in universities. In this article I will explain why my Project Evaluation course this semester exceeded my expectations and I will share some of my final learnings and reflections.

Previously, some of my colleagues had classes with Ken Bauer, but I didn’t. The common opinion was that “we don’t do anything in his classes”, so I thought that was a bad thing and since they didn’t do anything I wouldn’t learn as much. This was my first surprise. In Ken’s classes, the students who really are interested learn tons without doing much work. The ones who are just heating the bench end blank at the end of the course.

In my case I was the first category of student. Since I have some experience organizing events and being a team leader, I was really interested in project management. I didn’t have an idea of what it was to be one in a professional scenario, just knew some theory. In this class I learned new theory and also connected with this world in which you meet reality. The format of the class is simple: learn theory by reading a very good book, discuss it in class and have conversations involving those read topics. Homework (which are reflections of the chapters of the book) doesn’t have deadlines and the student chooses when to deliver them. This is a double edged sword.

Luckily again, I have been reading for the past year all about time management to take control of my life at fullest, so it was no trouble facing this challenge. In case a reader is interested, my personal organization method Continue reading "Final Reflection – TI2011"

Decent Planning: The Deadline Chapter 19

--Originally published at TI2011 – Luis Wilson

Don’t you love it when random people just show up at your office and tell you how to solve your problems?

This time, it was about design. This guy (can’t remember his name) ranked all the teams from all the projects by whether or not they had a decent design. Turns out, the A teams where the ones with the worst ranks in this matter. What did they have in common? Overstaffing.

According to the story (and real life), whenever you recruit a lot of people in a team you expect them to do something. But, what if they don’t need to be there right now? Do you send them home? I mean, you just assigned them here, how are they going to feel? Or you could just, entertain them with something that’s not really useful, giving you tons of dead weight on your team. It’s not that they aren’t going to be useful, just not right now. What if, we skip to the part where they are useful and just do what was supposed to be done before along the way?

That’s what happened to the A-Teams, they skipped design and went straight to implementation, which costs more time and effort at the end, because, no one knows what they’re doing. It’s a shitshow.

Why can’t people just follow the rules? Design then implement. But no, the deadline, the goddamn deadline. It’s always about that, don’t you want something right? Where’s the sense in asking for something immediately and complaining when it’s not up to standards?

This topic hits way too close to home. It’s happened to me that they give me an absurdly early deadline that goes completely against logic. You just ask yourself why. It’s always some sort of corporate business bullshit.

Final Exam

--Originally published at Hector's Blog

Chapter 19 Reflection

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management

Chapter 19: Part and Whole

Photo by **Negative Space** in **Pexels**

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"

Chapters 17, 18 and Interlude Reflection

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management

Chapter 17: The Guru of Conflict Resolution

Mr. T was telling the to dream team that they don’t know about conflict resolution, but he did not say it for only them, but for all those who were involved in all industries, he told them that they had skills as system design, system implementation, documentation, testing, quality, etc. Conflict is everywhere in our business. For example, they can’t install a system of any magnitude without encouraging conflicts. For example me as a student, the problems are everywhere, when I work with my team of mobile devices, we always have merge conflict because the version of android studio and I understand that in this business there is a lot of conflicts with clients, teams, implementations, testing, etc.

Mr.T starts to say that he suggests that they set out to become experts on conflict resolution. At the very least, we need to find a good book on the subject, or a seminar, or a consultant to guide us. Mr. T wants someone that helps them in conflict resolution. They propose Maestro Diyeniar, he was a programmer in one of the teams, and when Mr. T add him to that team all the problems gone away.

But Mr. T did not trust him for some reason, they think who would be the best Guru of Conflict Resolution in our field, after a long moment, Aristotle spoke up to say that there is a guy, he doesn’t remember his nade , but this guy is the expert on conflict resolution for systems projects and this guy is Dr. Larry Boheme.

Mr. T went to meet Dr. Boheme’s, he traveled to London just to be able to meet him and talk with everything that was happening to help him improve,