testblog

Conflict over the design strategy. My management has come to some sort of understanding with the PMO and related departments about the design of a solution. It is my fear that these "understandings" from management's perspective are based either incomplete or inaccurate information. I have come to this conclusion after discussions with technical peers who raise serious and valid concerns about the high-level approach presented by management.

Yesterday, I made a nice little Visio drawing and used to discuss the design issues with a peer whose technical opinions I respect greatly. His suggestion was that, as designed, things would not work well. His recommendation:get an exception. I went to our boss and the PM with the reasoning for getting an exception. Both came back with the same response: That was the very first thing that they looked at and decided against it. So, at least I am getting up to speed.

Next, I brought up to my management that we should do the two big chunks sequentially, not in parallel. The chunks are: the design response and UAT acceptance of the new mainframe app, and moving of the business unit's functions out of UAT and into a production "customer setup" environment. That was shot down too. No sequential. Parallel it is. All this simply confirms that my task now is to quantify the effort in more detail so that my management can get more resources--or at least try. And that is confirmed by my management.

I am going through anything I have--emails, draft documents--to try and nail down requirements. I am entering them into RequisitePro and a place to keep them.

Posted by David at 11:56 AM | Permalink

I decided that I am going to blog it. What I mean by that is I am going to blog my project management class project. Some reservations: confidentiality for my company and how it will work for my instructor. This could be a very short-lived experiment, based on the feedback that I get from him. First, a test to see if this will publish. It did.

Objective: writing here will contain no direct references to people, companies, or products. Even if it doesn't work for my professor, this is a good way for me to think through things, and keep track of ideas and actions.

One thing that I realized yesterday was that in order to get to consensus and management agreement on the Software Project Management Plan, I need to draw pictures, create a PowerPoint presentation, get buy-in from my technical peers on an approach.

I have been interested in the process of creating a Work Breakdown Structure, fascinated with the idea of Post-It notes on a whiteboard. I asked my instructor about that after class last Monday, and he pointed out that Microsoft Project's Ganntt chart displays dependencies and critical path, though critical path calculation is not turned on by default. Nonetheless, I did play around with Visio and a WBS, and got the connection between MS Project and Visio working. That is probably as close as I will get to the big visual of the Post-Its on the whiteboard.

I am converting a template Statement of Work (SOW) to the SPMP. While doing this, I am referring to the annotations. Now that I am done with that, I am thinking requirements, thinking a charter. Especially after the following incident.

I worked on a nice Visio drawing of a high-level diagram of the system to be modified. My reasoning was to put on paper in front of people the extend of what is involved. I took that drawing to a colleague, someone experienced technically and who has been at the bank for years. His response was of the order "that won't work--try to get an exception." Emailed all of the above to my boss, who reminded me that those discussions are done--there will be not exceptionis.

One thing that occurs to me is that I feel that decisions are always fair game for being revisisted. As new information becomes available, it might actually be wise to adjust.

Anyway, now that I have the SPMP roughed out, now I am very motivated to get my management to sign-off on what they want to be done.

Posted by David at 09:31 AM | Permalink

The quote below is a slightly cleaned up set of pages that I sent to myself on Thursday morning, from the kitchen. I was home in the morning before going to work, which was unusual. Usually, I am out the door by 6:30 on my way to the YWCA. But I was home to see Liam off to his school bus, since Dorothea had left to go up to Bemidji to attend at a birth for her sister Monica. (I am having some trouble with this expression, since it sounds to me like what I am saying is that Monica is being born, which isn't true. Or is it?)

Posted by David at 09:00 PM | Permalink