Physics for PM or Project time account granularity and progress problems

root — Tue, 12 Aug 2003 14:04:54 +0200

Call it Z or LET or TimeTool or PZV or Excel or AZN or PvB or whatever you need to - an ugly tool that you have to enter your project times into it... splitted by categories of your work like general Design/Implement/Test/PM or accounted on micro-managed tasks like
* "Analyse part of Error #2323 in App-Module KillThreads"

* "Fix part of Error #2323 in App-Module KillThreads"

* "Test part of Error #2323 in App-Module KillThreads"

* "Patch part of Error #2323 in App-Module KillThreads"

* "Rollout part of Error #2323 in App-Module KillThreads"

* "Document part of Error #2323 in App-Module KillThreads"

... the granularity of your project accounting makes controlling it useful or just a big data warehouse that results in a massive waste of time each project-participant, the project-manager and of course the customer. Of course especially very detail-focussed organisations, often public/official relation corporations explain their unbelievable size of organizational overhead with these details... but who needs it?

Apart from accounting times for tasks (let's assume the granularity is a well "medium" granularity) - not everyone spends the same time as hour-accouting into progress accounting.

Or is you concept, after 50 hours of the 100 hours estimated initially, really finished by 50% ? do you track the results-progress only, or just the time that you sat around searching for hidden games on Microsoft Word?

it seems many organizations track time to get an idea about progress. what a dumb thing... check this out: Project Time accounting

Anyway - what counts is only the relation hours spent to the work completition ... a simple one physical formular that applies to projects aswell as to real world.

But where do we get the work-completion data from? We don't have a tool for it you ask? That's your job as a project manager (or team-lead, module-responsible, whatever) ... ask your team-members, talk to the customers, speak to the QA folks and maybe even let your wife play around with the result (application).... and then - measure it with your metrics... Only the responsible project manager can, after a careful evaluation, quantitize progress already normalized... otherwise you will always find task in a mode like 99,9 or 99,99 or even 99,999% finished because a very carefull coder has not yet added all comments according to the projects qa-guidelines... got the point?

And yes - that's work - your work !

The deadline

root — Mon, 14 Jul 2003 23:38:40 +0200

a delightful book especially when compared to dry, heavy feel of others, simple theoretic texts. DeMarco uses the novel technique that more teachers and professors must use, as opposed to a straight lecture style. Like good trainers (like i.e. Chris Stern PhD) he tells you stories and the message itself is materialized in your mind, not his sentences... These type of novel training books have boomed in the last 2 yrs, but I must admit that there are other books of that type that suck... Anyway - if you only want to read one book about project management, get out and read this one!

Att: i actually read the german version: Der Termin. Ein Roman

Professional-PM Project Management - Project Controlling

Physics for PM or Project time account granularity and progress problems

The deadline