Getting my priorities straight (both with project team members and potty-coaching)

Yesterday I was working at the computer and keeping an eye on my almost 4 year old as she was playing nearby in the same room. She needed to take a potty break and is at the *fun* stage where even though she can do the whole business independantly, if I'm around she wants me to stay in the bathroom with her and help out, etc. I know, I know...I should cherish these moments, and I'll regret not enjoying this time more when she hits the stage where I am just not cool enough for her and she doesn't want to hang out with me anymore. But, I'll be honest, I was focused on what I was doing, frustrated that I had to stop, and impatient with her when she was in the bathroom.

She was finishing up, and I found myself nagging her with different tasks:

"Pull up your panties"

"Put the seat cover down"

"Wash your hands!"

"Flush the toilet!"

All those things she knows to do, but since I was in there I felt like I had to coach. I was so busy giving her more stuff to do, I didn't stop to think that I might have been confusing her with all these different tasks, that were actually not in logical order. She stopped for a moment and looked up at me with this look of such total confusion, so I slowed down and started over, this time being careful to be more patient and take it one step at a time.

I find myself in the same position both at home and at work, when I am given several tasks and told that they are all equally important. I don't know what to do first, what needs to be done when, and how to properly manage my time to make sure the important stuff gets completed at the right time. When I saw the way my daughter looked at me, I knew exactly what she was thinking and I've been through it enough times myself.

Fortunately I am not involved in potty training any of my project team members, I trust that they are all fully competant in that area. But, I do occasionally find myself sending over one email after another with this task or that, sometimes related sometimes not at all. I have to remember to stop and think that this puts my team members into that same position of frustration that both my daughter and I were in. I've been good lately, I sift through that list of tasks and send out another note (or even walk over to the person and discuss with them face-to-face...imagine, so low tech!) that will list all of the tasks in order of priority, with any other relevant notes that will help him/her figure out how best to get it all done, without going crazy.

Having just finished and thoroughly enjoyed reading "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams", I know the importance of happy, comfortable and focused team members. Since I didn't have a camera handy with my at the time, I'll have to make sure to keep the mental picture of my daughter looking up at me so confused and pin it up at my desk at work, to make sure I don't put any of my team members into that same frustrating position.

Maybe I'm just spoiled - my new calling in PTSTC

Maybe I'm just spoiled by all of the technology that I see and use around me, I work in the technology field after all. Words like RSS, social networking, blogs, email, text messaging, and others are a part of the daily vocabulary where I am each day. And when I get home at night, I get the time to catch up on all of the blogs, feeds, social network site activity, etc. (after the kids are asleep of course).

So, now that my older daughter is beginning pre-k and we have gotten a taste of how her new school works and especially the private minibus system chosen to bring her to and from school each day, I am painfully aware of how spoiled I am with the technology I have at my fingertips.

What DO they have? Two phone lines ( I give them credit for having more than one). No voicemail, no message system to let you know if your child's bus is delayed or has forgotten you entirely (like what happened to us a few times this week). They put you on hold forever and you're stuck there waiting to see when your kid will get picked up, held completely hostage to the phone attendant lady.

What DON'T they have? No website, no email, no efficient communication system. It's hard to even find them on Yellowpages.com or Google Local, sometimes I wonder if they even exist.

What's my perfect dream scenario? The bus company sends me an email the night before reminding me that my daughter's bus pickup will be the following morning at 8:45 am. This is good to do, especially in the first week when things are hectic and the route is getting figured out. This probably won't be necessary every day of the schoolyear, maybe just reminders when the bus service isn't running, etc. Then, the morning of the pickup, I would like a text message sent to my phone to alert me if the bus is behind schedule. I would like to know approximate location, which kid is getting picked up, and how many more need to get picked up before they come for mine. I would like to be able to go to a website and see a live map with the bus on it, and each pickup pinned and the order that the bus will go to them (and it would be extra nice to have the pin label show the name of the family, so that I can call that home to introduce myself and my daughter and help start a bus-riders playgroup).

This is really not so much to ask, right? If I wasn't rushing off to get my younger daughter to daycare and then myself to work, I probably wouldn't mind sitting around dealing with all of the uncertainty of it. But, since I am... then I do. Maybe this is a new career calling - Private Transportation Service Technology Consulting (PTSTC).

Ultimately I will probably cancel the bus service and use the good 'ol MTA and the Coney Island bound F train to get my daughter to school, atleast then I will have more control over when we come and go and it will be nice to see her classmates and teachers each morning. Then I won't have to feel so much in the dark ages when working with these bus people, and guilty about demanding so much more of them.

Reflections on "The Sprint"

I am really enjoying reading the 'Slack' book by Tom Demarco (Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency). It's setting in enough that I am pressuring myself to not do real work right now and write something for the blog instead. He makes many great points, and ones that I've already been trying to push on my colleagues (for example, by ordering one of the support staff to not stay a minute past quitting time and "Go home!").

One section I found interesting was his description of the "Sprint" at the end of a project. He describes one way of handling the sprint, where team members pull marathon weekend work shifts, taking naps on the office couch or overdose on caffeine to keep going. The team will stick it out together until Monday morning, and (hopefully) will finish victorious. Another way is to have people work regular overtime in the last weeks/days before the launch to finish everything up, rather than crashing all of the resources at the very last few days. He explains that each one of these methods has a different effect on the team morale. To do the sprint over a couple days rather than the last few weeks, although exhausting, can create a real bond and almost a 'high' for the team as they pull together their last bit of energy to bring themselves to the finish. The extended overtime will more likely lower the morale, cause stress and problems with personal life, etc.

The description of the weekend marathon sprint brought back memories of college, of the last days before my senior engineering project was due. Three other Mechanical Engineering pals and I had spent the year together designing, building and testing a small low-cost and feul efficient turbojet engine. In the last days before our project was due the engine was built to the best of our ability and we were gathering our reports, writing up our research and putting it into as presentable a thesis as possible (engineers trying to write a paper...funny). We were in and out of the engineering building at all hours of the night, taking turns sleeping and writing, and thankful for the one or two 24 hr takeout places nearby. It was an amazing bonding experience, and we did finish in the end and get our report written, nicely bound and in our advisors office by that Monday at 5pm.

I was 22 back then, and had alot more energy and the drive to do those marathon work sprints. The best I can compare it to now is the first few months after each of my daughters were born, staying up at all hours of the night to handle feeding & changing and whatever other needs they had, trying to get daddy to help with whatever he was biologically able to do, although even that was a project sometimes.

But, enough reminiscing about those wonderful sleepless nights, I started to think about the sprints I've been involved with for my software projects. Not too many I'm happy to say, and I even wonder if the ones I was involved in were very effective, especially when it comes to quality of product.

Writing, fixing, and migrating code is not exactly something you want to do when you're tired, there's way too high of a risk of error and more problems as a result. We like to joke "Hey, don't drop the database by accident" when our programmers write scripts on the database, because someone did once, by accident of course and thankfully not on the live database. Making critical decisions about a project is not something you want to do when you're tired, it's too easy to get caught up in the moment and not be able to think clearly. System test and bug checking is not something you should do when you're tired, you don't have the focus you should have and will be too quick to rush through testing because you feel so close to the finish.

The times when my project team has had to do these types of sprints to get a project done have not ended in disaster, for the most part things were ok (except for that one time years ago when we realized at 2am Monday morning that we had to roll back an entire project and months of programming work, by the time people got into the office at 9). And even though it might have been a nice bonding experience, I can't say I love doing it this way. I would like to think that in an ideal world we won't be in the situation where we have to pull marathon work shifts to get the project out in time, and I'd like to say that in the interest of quality we should avoid this all-together.

Is it possible to always avoid? Probably not. I am fortunate to have a client who allows me flexibility most of the time with my launch dates, and I guess I should just be grateful for that!

"To Catch a Bug" - New Quality Assurance related post on Flightpath blog

This latest is nothing about adventures with contracters, but stuff about bugs that's been floating around my head for a while and wanted to get it all written down...

To Catch a Bug: Quality Assurance at all Stages of the Project

My Failed Project, and Lessons Learned

I'll probably come up with a couple more posts about my contracter before this is all over, he's finally back in touch and doing some work for us. It's always interesting having him around, especially when I can reflect on how work we do with him can relate to good or really bad project management.

This time I might as well take the blame.

We asked Fernando to install two wall unit air conditioners in each of our daughters small and stuffy rooms. For reasons I wont go into, window unit A/C's were not an option and fans weren't cooling down the rooms enough (nothing like getting woken up at 2am by a very sweaty baby, I felt terrible about it and we had to fix it as soon as possible).

So, what went wrong? Well, the air conditioners were cemented into the walls and put through to the back, but without a sleeve to hold them. So, two big problems here - the mechanics in the back of the A/C are exposed and not protected by the elements, and there is no easy way to remove the A/C if and when it breaks down. How did this big (expensive) mistake happen? A serious of bad decisions...

Let's start with the purchase of the appliances. My husband (who is a wonderful father and very intelligent and talented in his field of English Literature, but not exactly a handy fixit kindof guy) went to buy the wall units. Ideally we would have went online beforehand and picked out exactly what we wanted and done the research to help us figure out what accessories we needed, but we didn't.

Mistake #1: Lack of research & planning.

We rushed to get the A/Cs so that Fernando's guy could install them ASAP, and before the next brutal heatwave. Apparently wall units are sold without the sleeves, because they assume you might already have one in the wall. So, the sales guy was happy to sell us the A/C, but when my husband asked if he needed anything else, the guy said absolutely not.

Mistake #2: Bad communication and transfer of knowledge (assuming that the sales guy knew exactly what our situation was and would know enough to make the right recommendations).

So, we purchased two nice new wall unit A/Cs and brought them home (without the sleeve, of course). Fernando came by to look it over and raised the red flag. He said we bought the wrong thing, these were without a sleeve and we could not put them into the wall without one. I think it was morning when we came to this realization, and I was juggling getting the girls dressed and fed and getting my own stuff together so that I could get everyone where they needed to be and myself to work on time, and had not planned for this little hitch in my schedule. So, I wasn't focusing enough on the problem and trusted that Fernando would be able make everything ok. We looked through the box and took out all the pieces. I asked Fernando if there was any way to make it work, or what we should do. He said he'd figure something out. Sounded good to me... I dashed downstairs, fed the girls and got us all out the door.

Mistake #3: Rushing the schedule and not taking the time to properly reflect on the issue at hand and manage the new risks of the project.

So, Fernando's guy (who is an electrician by trade and not an A/C installation expert) started working on putting the holes in the wall. Within a couple of days the units were in the wall. The units were cemented back in, so no chance of anything sliding out. When I went to look at the work that was done, it was only then that I realized how important that sleeve was, because I saw the 3-4 inches of mechanics exposed in the back of the A/C. I asked Fernando if this was going to be a problem and he said only in the winter. So, he promised to get it covered by winter.

The next day my neighbors (one of whom is an expert in heating & air conditioning I have recently learned) raised about 10 red flags and told me that we needed to cover that A/C as soon as possible, before the first rain. So, now I have my contractor (who I've trusted for many years) telling me one thing and our neighbors (who we also trust) telling me another. I'm just using common sense here and figuring my neighbor is probably right. Another issue that my neighbor mentioned and I'm kicking myself for not realizing sooner is that if we ever needed to remove the unit, we'd have to break through all that concrete. Without a sleeve, there's no easy way to get the units out of the wall.

So, what was the end result? We cut our losses and decided that rather than remove both units from the wall now to put in a sleeve (and risk breaking the new units while separating from the concrete), we'd cover the exposed parts of the units and 5-10 years from now (hopefully not sooner) when they break down for good, we'll break the concrete and put the sleeves in.

I regret not spending more time to properly think the whole process through and expecting that each player would know exactly what to do. At this point I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that the units aren't damaged by the rain we've had in the last couple of weeks and we can atleast salvage our investment.

The bright side is that I learned some great lessons. I try to be super careful with planning, risk management and communication with the software projects I manage from 9 to 5 (I only wish it was from 9 to 5!) but maybe it's time to be more careful with the stuff that happens after 5.

If only I could work with my outside contracts the same way the NY DOT does

Anyone who's run a project with an outside vendor or freelance, contract worker, or third party application knows that it's best to plan alot of buffer into the schedule because anything that could go wrong, probably will. I've learned this the hard way a couple times, from communication breakdown, to technical difficulties, to technical difficulties caused by communication breakdown. It would be so much easier if everyone working on your project was working under the same roof, on the same schedules, with the same work style, etc.

But, if this were the case than project management wouldn't be so much fun!

We worked with an outside vendor on the west coast last year and the only way I was able to get them to respond to my email was to mark them high priorty with the red exclamations, and make sure all relavant parties were copied. Kindof annoying, I know...but it worked.

If only I could work with my outside contracts the same way that the street crew works with theirs...

So, its finally time for my street to get repaved. They've been putting up signs for the last week, letting us know when we can and can not park on the street. Yesterday they did the block west of me and this morning was time for my block. Now, the residents of my neighborhood who own cars and park them on my street are like outside 'contracters' who can have a direct impact the schedule & progress of the street paving project. At 7am this morning there were still a few cars parked on my block, so immediately the street paving project was delayed. Within a few minutes, we hear out the window, very loud announcements from a truck with a megaphone attached "Good Morning. Please remove your car from Chester Avenue. If you do not remove your car we will have your car towed and issue you a ticket."

What I love most is not the threat, but the way it was delivered. I happened to have been awake already because I have young kids who got me up at 5am, then again at 6:20am, but for those who have a bit more time to sleep in the morning, to be woken up by loud annoucements from the street is just beautiful. This reminds me of my camping days, when the evil counselors would yell at the kids or find some way to be really obnoxious to get them out of bed (of course I never did that as a counselor, I was very nice).

I looked out the window while the truck was going by, and saw a nice big smile on the driver's face. You know he was just loving this job, I bet he was once one of those evil camp counselors. If only I could use these same tactics to keep my outside vendors on schedule and communicating regularly. But, they probably wont ever want to work with me again...

(ps - this is not to say all outside contracts are bad, I happen to be working with one now who is totally on schedule and even more ahead of the game than the rest of us are...maybe he'd like to use the megaphone on us!)

Everything I learned about (what not to do in) Project Management, I Learned From My Contractor

Well, let me preface all this by saying that my contractor Fernando is the most wonderful person in the world, and we have worked with him for years now and (almost) never regretted it. He's bent over backwards for us when we really needed him, rushing to finish up our bathroom renovations in our old apartment so that when I was coming home from the hospitol with my first child I could have a finished bathroom to use. Then he came back late at night to fix the bathroom floor when I (in my drunken, sleepless new mother state) stepped on the still drying tiles and messed them up.

That said, if he was to be my mentor when I started out as a PM, I probably wouldn't be a PM anymore. Let's start from the beginning...

The Estimate
I called Fernando because I wanted to have him walk around the house with me and show him 4 things I wanted an estimate for. He stopped by and I showed him the 4 things needing work:
- installing a storm door
- fixing a leak & ceiling damage in a side room
- installing a cabinet & counter around a dishwasher (we couldnt afford the cabinets last year, just the dishwasher and wood box around it)
- making holes in the wall in my daughter's rooms and installing wall unit A/C's

He didn't write anything down, but I did (it was the PM in me nudging). I called him up 2 weeks later and he gave me my price. He gave me one number, no ranges, no conditions, no specifics about the deliverables, just the flat price. When I asked about specifics of the 4 deliverables, he broke down the work estimates for me. He didn't specify whether the price covered labor and materials (which burned me in the past because I assumed that the price covered materials and I was wrong). He didn't mention how the cost might change if the wall was harder to bust through then he expected (its a 100+ year old rowhouse, needing repairs), just gave me the flat fee.


I remember from my PMP class that this is one type of contract, which can be very beneficial to the buyer but can be dangerous to the seller.

The Schedule
Ok, so anyone who has a contracter knows that they are completely unreliable and if they show up 2 of the 5 days of the week then we should be grateful. Fernando and his team are the same way at times. So, I've stopped asking how long something will take, because I think it will just get done when it's done and I have no idea when that will be. He does good work, so in the end that's most important to me. Fernando doesn't exactly know about the triple constraint, but as long as he does good work I don't bug him about it (so much).



Change Control

..or lack thereof really. Fernando is so nice, he will let us take advantage of him sometimes. When he's in the house doing work, I'll say "Fernando, can you take a look at ___ or ___ ". And he will, and he'll help us out with other stuff, but what he really should be saying is "I can help with this, but it will have this impact on the schedule of the current work I am doing for you and will affect the cost of the labor by this." Not that I'm complaining really, but I know not to adopt this process when I manage my projects!



Revising Estimates in Project Execution

Last year we needed Fernando to redo all of our electrical wiring because it was more than 50 years old and in dire need of replacement. We got our price quote (7K) and his electrician started his work. This guy was just as unreliable as Fernando, and came maybe 2-3 days a week. When he was there, he worked pretty slow (not that I'm complaining so much, electrical stuff should be done carefully!). The entire work effort took about 5 months, and throughout the project the electrician asked for installments of the 7K because he was running low on supplies. It seemed to me that all of the money was going to supplies, what was going to labor? They never asked me for more than 7K, but it started to seem like they severaly underestimated the work and were totally losing money on the job. Maybe this is why they only came half-time, they were putting their time into more profitable jobs. In hindsight, I kindof wish that Fernando would have come back to me and said its going to take 12K and this will ensure the project will complete more quickly and efficiently, and my employees will get the compensation they deserve. Not that I love throwing money into projects, but that's what home equity loans are for!



Fernando's business is thriving, he does great work and he's always got projects lined up. So, obviously he must be doing something right. We probably shouldn't expect our contracters

to follow PMBok, but maybe some happy place in between might be ok.



Maybe it's just my contractor, who knows!