| Tuesday 9th February 2010 18:19CST | → 0 Comments |
I came across this observation on what it is to be a project manager, on the website Herding Cats (which is dedicated to the subject):
Project estimating, and project management is hard work. Software development is fun work. Still hard but fun. Project Management is hard work, with almost no fun.
When I wanted to move into project management, my immediate boss at the time and other project managers I worked with kept trying to persuade me against it. They weren’t entirely serious but wanted to make it clear exactly what I was getting in to - one way it was put to me was that project management was 50% paperwork and 50% being yelled at by the customer. Not only that, but when the project finished it was the team that got the credit and the PM might get some recognition, but more as an afterthought and only if it was brought in on time and under budget.
Despite all that I became a project manager and, shock horror, I even enjoy it (most of the time). Thinking about it today I wondered if it was because I’ve always liked organization and abhorred chaos. I actually like reading books on project management processes, such as the PRINCE2 manuals (though agile is more my schtick).
You have to be a particular type of nerd to like processes. However, at least I haven’t got to the stage where I’m using the word ‘process’ in casual conversation.
| Wednesday 3rd February 2010 16:59CST | → 2 Comments |
Some people have asked me about my electronic document management system (though I often suspect it’s a reaction to me going on about it so much). However, the philosophy behind is worth discussing as I consider it to be an example of the principles: the perfect is the enemy of the good or worse is better.
That comes about from previous attempts to create such a system. Essentially, the idea is to scan in all my paperwork, including legacy stuff going back years, so I can access it quickly, easily and efficiently on my computer - and consequently get rid of all the paper (as I only have a small apartment). The ideal solution would have been:
- being able to access documents online
- searching through them, preferably using tags
- linking related documents
- a shiny custom made application for viewing, with resizing and converting to other formats
However, I found it was turning in to more trouble than it was worth trying to satisfy even one of these requirements. I never seemed to be able to get a lot of the functionality working to my satisfaction or come up with a decent subset of tags that was small enough to be useful but large enough to cover all situations. Consequently, given other priorities, I abandoned and restarted the project several times.
Eventually I tried tackling it with more pragmatism: just start scanning in images a page at a time, in greyscale (so I don’t lose detail) and at a decent resolution (150dpi) and in .PNG format with the scanned timestamp (to the second) as the unique filename - after which I’ll worry about how to file them. I wrote a simple shell script to handle this.
After scanning a thousand or so (oh yes, this is going back a good decade), I temporarily filed those I’d done in directories with a deep structure so there wouldn’t be too many images in any one folder. A typical example was:
/document_management/utilities_services/electricity/npower/bills/2009/
When I’d finally completed all the legacy documentation and filed it away, I realised “Isn’t this good enough as a system?” The highly detailed directory structure was good enough for me to quickly locate documents and the scenarios I’d previously conjured up, such as “Find all insurance documents for 2006″, never arose - in other words, that type of search was never needed. Finding documents from a purely functional point of view (i.e. for one company or for one house) was the approach I was likely to use 95% of the time.
Now I simply access the documents with the built in image viewer, all of which have a built-in ‘display next image in the directory’ feature that helps stepping through multi-page documents.
It’s far from perfect - but the perfect never got built and there were no signs it ever would.
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