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My Client’s Customer Visited this Last Week

Scot Stockton — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:04:32 +0000

I’ve just spent a few minutes reflecting on the week just passed, attempting to organize my thoughts into a post. I don’t think that I have, so I will resort to a simple chronological narrative.

Monday, it rained here in Southern California. This is such a rare event that I would have worked from home, except that my client‘s customer was scheduled to visit and I braved the traffic, smoking much of the lifetime off of my clutch in the process (inching over the pass). In the end, the visitors were stuck in the same conditions and cancelled that day.

On Tuesday, I met with customer and client at the site of a potential supplier as far south of me as the client is North. A wrong turn made me late, but the remainder of the visit was acceptably fruitful.

Wednesday, is something of a blur of discussions with the customer.

Thursday, the customer – who is a very large company with many resources – supplied both a resource to achieve the milestones they require and a different resource to help navigate the 50 foot document of previous posts. The new doyen of this document disagrees with the format and is first going to change the file we need to populate, and will then show us the different means of de-constructing our information to fit into the program building blocks. Yes, this is starting over from less than scratch.

Friday, was another blur of discussions, with the client, of the ramifications of the new directions and a disturbingly surreal range of diverse interpretations of what was asked by the customer.

The interactions of the cat and dog in the ‘Get Fuzzy‘ strip, are again more appropriate this week – as I have witnessed actors who will not be deterred from their agenda, however gently, in real life. I again wonder if Darby Conley is knowingly or intuitively following in the tradition of Greek and Shakespearean plays by his use of the dog as the chorus or jester?

The Stables of Documentation

Scot Stockton — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 18:23:07 +0000

One of the tasks of the dodekathlon, or the Labours of Herakles, was to clean the Augean stables in a single day. Shoveling through the minutiae of what I termed ‘The 50 Foot Document’ in the last post seems to be a comparable task – and neither I, nor my co-worker in this are Herakles. Strangely, I recently used the analogy of the ‘Hydra’ of my clients customer snapping at the ‘Cerberus‘ of their customer. Makes me wonder about asking after a toga dress code.

I did manage to explain my position on one of the documents, have it understood and accepted, and therefore was able to complete the update of one document this week. It is now fed into the maw of the configuration management process.

And during the work on this documentation, we were asked to add more documents to the list, each of which being more important than spending the time on the design process itself.

This morning I became nostalgic for the short period of time where I was able to apply a modified version of the Agile management process known as the scrum to product delivery. During that time I had almost adequate resources and we were able to design and build (and minimally document) a product then test and deliver it. Starting off greatly behind schedule we were able to deliver it only somewhat late – making up a lot of schedule in the process.

Considering the changes made after that delivery, it must not have been profitable.

What is there to learn from this? I will think about this some.

Maybe I’ll document it.

Attack of the 50 foot document

Scot Stockton — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 18:06:54 +0000

Last week I described the hyper-meta-documentation on which we labor now. This past week we are suffering a kind of task-creep where all information has to be everywhere so that each head of the customer hydra sees the information in the format it wants. This becomes an information issue in trying to keep all of the documents corrected in tandem as updates are made. My usual response is to use one document as the source, or create an information source document and have other documents either reference this source or be linked to it. I investigated this course, but I’ve not found a way to do this (I’ve asked) – leaving as the only option, the time consuming method of manually updating all documents in the case of an information update.

Oh, and you know that plan to plow through this effort efficiently that I spent time on last week? This linking of information from the previous paragraph forces the completion of the least efficient document first.

This has consumed all of my time this week.

Tenuously connected are the interactions of the cat and dog in the ‘Get Fuzzy‘ strip. I wonder if Darby Conley is knowingly or intuitively following in the tradition of Greek and Shakespearean plays by his use of the dog as the chorus or jester?

Entering the last phase of hyper-meta-documentation to close out the activities from ‘The Big Meeting’ of last November.

Scot Stockton — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 17:36:06 +0000

In the middle of the week just past, I wrote out (are you ready?) : The plan to efficiently schedule the work to write the responses to the criticisms of the documents describing the plans to perform the analyses on which to do work involved in producing the product.

On the side, when I’m not writing out the hyper-meta-documentation, I’m trying to make progress on the product. I’m learning about the discrepancy between reliability analyses from the advances of technology having outstripped the ability of analysts to write the rule book under which said technology should be analysed. And I’m learning to manipulate Word and Excel more than I ever expected to do.

This weeks Dilbert has little relevance to my situation, but I just like it:

Last day to work from home.

Scot Stockton — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 18:09:05 +0000

I’ve worked from home this last week, and spent much of that time in design related issues. Maybe that is mostly due to the shutdowns of other companies, and the holiday spirit generally. How so? Since I couldn’t work on the issues that involve coordinating the activities of other entities, I didn’t and therefore had the time to delve into some design details and point out corrections and improvements.

It has all been very enjoyable.

So here is a strip more appropos of my last fortnight than Dilbert. It is how we are treating our holiday decorations this year:

Happy Hoidays Everyone!

Scot Stockton — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 14:51:19 +0000

Actually, even though my clients site is closed, I’m looking at a technical question posed ( a modified crowbar ) – but it is design work and enjoyable.

A Week Heavy with Meetings

Scot Stockton — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 18:02:06 +0000

I spent about half of each workday this past week in meetings to screen the comments on materials presented concurrent to the Big Meeting of mid-November. About half of the remaining time of each day was spent in reading through the comments so as to prepare responses to deliver in the meeting. And about half of the time left after that was in answering questions engendered by my responses to the material in the meeting.

But, in the time left in my workday, even though it is shared with gathering and reporting status, I have been able to scrub the schematic some and a couple of small other engineering tasks.

Another Quiet Week

Scot Stockton — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 19:30:36 +0000

I may have to mimeograph the last blog post. Betcha you never expected to see those two memes in the same sentence!

Yes, this past week I researched quotes formatted and reviewed docs and responded to the formal comments written against the documents we prepared for The Big Meeting last November. We get to do this response for another month. In between time I may have a chance to get some engineering work done.

I try to learn new things as often as I can, and while I have learned details about vendors, not many neurons have been dedicated to tech storage. Well, there is this, one of the board design houses I contacted can place die directly on PCBs – so maybe that would be a way to get closer to a product that my client company does not yet realize it needs.

And even after all these years, I still like Dilbert:

A Quiet Week

Scot Stockton — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:38:18 +0000

I’m having trouble recalling what I did this past week. I think that I actually got to solve some equations and figure out topologies … wait that is engineering! I got to do a little engineering work this last week. And there were quotes to get and questions to answer. In other words progress on producing product, just a little later … by about three months. That is actually an interesting realization to include in scheduling – that prepping for The Big Meeting interrupts progress for that amount of time.

And Dilbert this week is peripherally relevant:

A Short Holiday Week

Scot Stockton — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 17:34:50 +0000

I’m writing this on the Sunday of the Thanksgiving Holiday, so the three days of work are a faded memory. There were a few things work related that I was hoping to accomplish this weekend that I have not been able to attempt.

I tell myself that starting the week relaxed is better anyway.

Now that I think of it, I played around with an iterative model of the battery developed by the end-user that was interesting. My hope is to use it to predict the behaviour with transients. That might even contribute to the clients knowledge base.

Now why didn’t I find this Dilbert strip when looking for presentation relevant strips? Oh well, I’ll put it in here: