TI2011 Spring 2020 – Page 17 – Project Evaluation and Management

Chapter 16 reflection

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management

Chapter 16: PLANNING FOR THE SUMMER GAMES

Photo by **Frans Van Heerden** in **Pexels**

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"

Function Points

--Originally published at TI2011 – DVant Blog

In chapter 12 of the book The Deadline, a numbers man appears into place. This new character which is introduced very fast also ends its appearance in a flash, goes to the point of his work and helps Tompkins' dream team. This man, called T. Jons Caporous, is presented as an incredible person with mathematics... Continue Reading →

Chapter 15 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"

Second partial exam [WIP]

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

Right now, I’ve only done one of the reviews from this period. I will try to catch up in the next few weeks. I have some ideas that can help me get through them all quickly.

I will update this entry once I’ve read every chapter considered for the second partial.

“Work is Going On” flickr photo by cogdogblog https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/38065460945 shared into the public domain using (CC0)

First partial “exam”

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

The first partial covers the first eleven chapters of the book Deadline. I’ll summarize all of the things that I’ve learned from Mr. Tompkins during my reading. As I wrote every single review I tried to find websites that complemented the given information, either by stating different points of view on whatever subject was being discussed or by providing updated information. I will try to focus a little more on these.

“203” flickr photo by thecmn https://flickr.com/photos/97947597@N00/48057456022 shared into the public domain using (PDM)

Risks and risk management

Risks are threats that every organization has to deal with, not the kind of threat that others make looking for the company to stay out, but rather the ones that are caused by management errors, accidents or other factors.

Identifying and controlling these risks is what is known as risk management.

There are multiple processes, approaches and standards regarding this subject, and there are several things that have to be taken into consideration before opting for one of them.

Regardless of the chosen approach, the intention of risk management is making said threats do as little damage as possible.

Productivity

There are some common mistakes that managers make when trying to improve their employees’ productivity that actually end up being counterproductive. One of them is mentioned in the story: when employees are distracted or paralyzed by fear (sometimes caused by the manager).

Also, there’s no way of immediately improving productivity in the workspace, but after some time and effort, productivity improvement may be apparent in the long-term. It’s, in a way, an investment.

Gut feelings

One of the essential components of a good manager. It’s that little voice that tells you if you’ve found what you were seeking for or if you need to keep looking even if the opposite

Going Nuts: The Deadline Chapter 15

--Originally published at TI2011 – Luis Wilson

I was really invested in this chapter, as it talked about working under pressure, and terrible managers and stuff. So fun!

Even though the letter they sent to Minister Belok made him believe that everything was going as he ordered, this didn’t exempt Tompkins from dealing with him forever. Belok summons Tompkins and gives him a couple of more impossible tasks. For one, he wants to go from CMM Level 3 to 4 (by the end of the year). Tompkins isn’t even surprised at his behavior and just brushes it off. Belok also tells Tompkins to prepare the town for the 2000s Olympics.

Belok is piece of ass. The whole time he was talking to Tompkins he was yelling at him, telling him how he wasn’t putting enough pressure on the team. That’s the main theme of the chapter, pressure. Of course, Tompkins didn’t believe that pressure was the key to being productive, so him, Binda, Waldo, the General, and Aristotle began cracking everything down to metrics and charts.

I know that there are real people just like Belok. They ask for things in impossible time frames and don’t listen to reason (their people telling them why it’s impossible). Expect 100% quality even when they put a lot of pressure on the team, making them less productive.

With all of these analytics and charts and simulations people try to quantify something that is inherently not quantifiable. Sure, it gives useful insight and predictions, but there’s a reason why we can only get estimates from these things. Sometimes, we forget that people are just people with feelings and emotions that impact on their performance. There are things that are out of our control that affect us negatively and don’t allow us to give our 100% (do we ever, really? Continue reading "Going Nuts: The Deadline Chapter 15"

High hopes

--Originally published at Site Title

The dynamics of the course TI2011 has changed a lot since the last partial, now I can’t write about my experience in the classroom, only about my laptop, me and a zoom conference.

However, zoom conferences has taken a new value thanks to this class, instead of hear boring theory and a long pptx presentation where we hear professor speak like if there was no tomorrow, we have the chance to hear about successful people that bring to use a resume of all their experience in their professional life and their contacts, is like go to a talent convention from the comfort of your home.

From these speakers I learned a lot of skills that are necessary to be a good manager and I know it because everyday at work see how some guys in manager positions are not the right one to the job, e.i., some of them are really good in their technical skills, domain most of the concepts, but they do not know how to treat their people and at the end they are only a smart guy and no more.

Another great resource of knowledge is “The Deadline”, is AMAZING it could look like simple novel but emanates knowledge, every chapter begins in a day of this amazing manager Mr. T. that is an expert solving problems and the book teach you the key to become like him, the first rule is learn about every mistake you do, if is necessary write in paper, is good to have them but only if you get something from them and the other one keep open, I feel that this is pretty important, this guy of the novel has the amazing ability of hear everyone opinion either for an improvement or a complaint, he makes people feel

Chapters 13 and 14 reflection

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management

Chapter 13: Quicker Still

Photo by **Ricardo Esquivel** in **Pexels**

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:

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

Process improvement results

Rules are meant to be Broken: The Deadline Chapters 13 and 14

--Originally published at TI2011 – Luis Wilson

If things can get worse, they will get worse. On chapter 13 we got a vivid example of this happening. We knew things were in a hurry thanks to last chapter’s bad guy’s impossible deadline goal, and what happened now could set them back even more. Turns out, there’s this organization called the MSEI which audits your projects or something. Sounds like a real pain.

Apparently, Minister Belok wanted to improve the teams’ CMM (Capability Maturity Model) Level from 2 to 3 by the end of the year. From reading the chapter, it looks like some scale to determine your team’s productivity based on following standard practices.

Okay, so… it is real. It actually measures the formality of your procedures (hence ‘Maturity’ in the name). It tries to optimize processes to eventually increase productivity and is not only applicable to software. There are five stages: initial, repeatable, defined, managed, and optimizing.

It corresponds with what is being told in the story. I just had to look it up because I don’t know what is real and fiction with this book.

The model seems quite beneficial… in the long run. Doing the audit and attempting to increase CMM levels will definitely set the projects back.

Mr. Tompkins seems to appreciate the intentions of the process’ formality, but that there has to be an exception for them. Not only because they are in a hurry, but because they are building knock-offs of other products (that’s how I see it, sorry. I mean, ‘PShop’, really?). So, the documentation and manuals are there, why do it all over again? It’s a waste of time.

MSEI manager was of course against the idea. Tompkins and the manager agreed on the order that they Continue reading "Rules are meant to be Broken: The Deadline Chapters 13 and 14"