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I am not on the consult list. Feel free to cross post. But given subsequent discussion, perhaps the consult list should be advised what subjects to review in the latest archives. My post on Columbus 3 ships was intended as a bit of tongue in cheeky. I always thought the mythical man month was a big joke, like Dilbert before there was Dilbert, until I was in a conference on a project that involved some consultants. It was a General Ledger package that we were implementing, that came from these consultants. There were some decisions needed from top management how to implement & stupid me suggested that perhaps the auditors should be told about this so they could reccommend what we ought to have included. There was this meeting in the CEO office which included the CEO & some other top managers, all the leadership & some rank & file from accounting dept, myself & my IT boss, the consultants in force, the auditors in force. The meeting lasted about 4 hours. Absolutely nothing got decided. I presented what I had learned about the package relevant to our prior processing trade-offs & what I felt were the areas that needed an executive decision. The auditors had a lot of questions about the capabilities of the new package that the consultants were not able to answer, but me & the accountants studying the package were able to answer & in the process this raised reference to some terminology & functionality of what is done in accounting that the CEO & other top managers had never heard of before & wanted explanations of. So a lot of people in the meeting got a good education about what was doable in computerized accounting & the importance of some aspects of it, but also that kind of meeting unweildy. The consultants were really quite ignorant of our business & their package at detail level. The auditors were really quite ignorant of our business outside the stuff they audited, and the computer aspects. Top management was really quite ignorant of the details of several departments under their authority. IT (me) was really quite ignorant of what the company needed outside specific requests of me. Very rapidly any answer by anyone led to multiple questions by people who needed to understand the framework of what was going on & the importance of all this. The meeting gave me a profound respect for the Mythical Man Month. I think that its discussions of team structuring make a lot of sense in the context of the kinds of software projects I have been on, but it did not even address the problem of the meeting I illustrated, which has been all too common problem of my career. I think part of the answer to that is an intranet web site using hyper text to brief staff about what is going on or being attempted, so they have access to background info ... I have never actually done that, I just speculating on how best to extricate projects from the bogging down of intercommunications between all the players. The last big project I was in was an ERP conversion. The players included one person from each of several corporate departments ... five all told, plus an executive boss of the project, plus me, plus 3 people from the consultants. We had a schedule that involved intense education in the new reality, conversion of data to a series of pilots in which the team would evaluate what needed modifying or done differently & I would implement this in time for the next pilot. A secretary was added to keep the books of special forms up to date for everyone. One or more people filled in forms with what the problem was that they had seen. Other people would investigate what caused the problem & reccommended either that there be a modification to how the new software functions, this is a data conversion issue with reccommendation how do something different, this is an operations issue where users need to do something different, this is a bug that the vendor has to fix. Depending on the aspect of software involved, there would be a 2-3 person team specializing in that area who approved or denied the suggestion, indicated whether or not we could live without this fix, and relative priority to have it implemented. This meant that I had approx 250 modifications to be implemented in under 2 months. I told the boss that it was humanly impossible, and made some suggestions where non-technical people could take over some of my work to relieve some of the load but that would not be enough. It seemed to me that the project design was really great to get the job done with minimum people (minimum cost) but also mandated SOS to consultants at key moments & I figured that was part of a deliberate plan. We had to get a bunch of people from the consultants to help out with the programming & here the mythical man month principles reared their head. Although as much as possible no more than 2 people working the programming of any one area, everyone specialized in know-how ... only a few knew SQL ... very few knew AS/400 printers ... almost none of the new programmers knew the flow of info through the ERP ... our programming standards (what objects belong in which libraries of the library list) existed but not easily accessible because the first bunch knew them & not need them easy accessible. eMail@James-W-Kilgore.com (James W. Kilgore) wrote > Mac, > > So true! > > You should post this on the consult list. Really. > > I've been in the biz a long time and I have formulated a 10% increase in > total time for each additional person on the project. > > MacWheel99@aol.com wrote: > > > > > If Columbus sailed across the ocean in 3 months with 3 ships, how > > > long would it take with one ship? > > > > Certainly less than 3 months because they would not periodically stop to > > bring 3 captains together to argue. Have you read the mythical man month . > .. > > about how the more people who have to communicate, the less work that gets > > done because more time spent on communicating? MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac) BPCS 405 CD Manager / Programmer @ Global Wire Technologies Incorporated http://www.globalwiretechnologies.com = new name same quality wire engineering company: fax # 812-424-6838
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