There are two kinds of project, one use proper project management techniques and the other has absolutely no project management. Managers in my old department are the firm believers of the first kind. We try our best to do project planning, estimate the scope of work, resource requirement and schedule. We have objective matrix to to measure project progress and individual performance. So, the projects are running quite smoothly and in general people are compensated fairly.

On contrary, people in the new department, from top to bottom, lacks any viable project plan. No wonder the project is in a mess and people feel like being slaved. The leader and manager have no clue whether the schedule is on track, since they don’t have any estimations to begin with. There is no way to keep track of progress, they don’t even know what the scope of work should be. All they have is just a date and the mentality is to meet that date at all cost. The task assignment is vague, you have no idea what is the real amount of work you have signed up for. You don’t see the light at end of the tunnel, you don’t even know how far you are from the finishing line. To make it worse, people refuse to do proper planning, using lack of time as an excuse. Here is a catch 22 situation. If you didn’t plan ahead of time, it is guarantee you will run of of time at the end. How can you meet the schedule if you don’t even know what is the scope of your work? Then the busier you are, the more excuse to ignore planning, hence formed a downward spiral all the way to the doomed land.

When it comes to evaluation, since there is literally no data on how well you perform, it all comes to the boss’ impression of how hard you work. In project management, evaluation should be result oriented instead of effort oriented, lots of effort does not always mean good result. Result is what delivers to the custom at the end of the day, not the effort you spend in making the result. Measuring on effort will tempted people to creates artificial effort out of thin air which is not tend to any result, with sole purpose of leaving good impression to your boss. Luckily, my intermediate boss of the project is a nice guy, so its not a big issue for me. However the boss one level up lacks visibility of my work, how can he evaluate me fairly?

Responsibility and expectation of the deliverable has to be clearly define, otherwise it will only lead to the tragedy of common. Being flexible does not mean refusing to laying out any job boundary. Dynamic adjust the job boundary to cope with the need is perfectly fine, as long as at a certain moment, everyone knows who is responsible for what. Theoretically speaking, anyone can do anything given enough time. The question is whether the time is spent efficiently. For example, the verifier can dig out the required information from the design if necessary. But the time of verifier is not best use in document hunt, it takes much less time for the designer to update the document in the first place. It is the designer’s job to provide adequate document to the verifier. Busy is not an excuse for the designer not doing his job right, since verifier is equally busy.

People are willing to walk a few steps further when they are working with friends. However, friendship cannot replace the need to define job boundary. It is OK when things are working fine, but sometimes things may get edgy. In this case, the job boundary definition comes in handy, it prevents friendship turning sour from misunderstanding. Just like no matter how good the friendships you are, money matter always have to deal with absolute clarity.

If any project management courses wants counter examples on productivity. I think I have a textbook case of poor project management. Enough bragging for today.

I am totally exhausted today.  After work, I drove 30 minutes into Surrey to take the Firearm license training.  It is 4 hours of lectures and practice after a long day of work.  In Canada, it is required by law to acquire the firearm license in order to own a gun.  The license exam is on safety and regulations.  It has two parts written exam and partical exam.  In the course, we are not allow to discharge any weapon, but there are lots of disactiviated real gun for us to practice proper handling.  We are taught all the new terminologies used in firearm and hunting, different parts of guns, types of guns and bullets, shooting and carrying position, etc.  Although there are tons of new materials I have to memorize, I found the lecture is very interesting, even the history of guns section.  The instructor even perform a small expreiment, show us the difference between lighting black powder and smokeless powder.  Now I know the real gun powder doesn’t look like anything they use in the movie.  Technically speaking, gun powder is not explosives but propellent, which push the bullet down the bore and shot out from the barrel.

In the pratical exam, we have to demostrate we can handle 5 types of rifle and 4 types of handguns safely by follow the ACTS and PROVE procedure.  So, after the classroom time, the instructor let us play with the guns.  We are not really playing with the guns.  We are just repeatly unloading every gun, inspect all the check points, then load it back, pretend to fire, unload the gun once again before putting it down.  Putting your finger into the trigger or pointing the gun to anyone is an instant fail in the exam.  Gun has to handle with great care.

Contrary to popular beliefs, firearm is actually very safe if you know what you are doing.  In Canada, only 1300 death from firmarm, much lower than the toll of death from automobile or cigerrates.  As a sport, shooting has a much lower death ate than swimming.  Many people’s phobia to guns are unjustified, and it mostly rooted from the myth created by all those Hollywood movies.

This world is full of interesting people.  I just know a guy from Hong Kong, Pazu, open a coffer shop in Tibet.  Well, actually I don’t exactly know him, he is the webmaster of a site I used to visit a lot back in university days.  This guy is quite legendary, after he graduated from university, he became a full time traveler for the past 7 years.  I was following his foot steps on and off from the travel journals posted in his site.  He spent 3 years backpacking the every  in China, India, Pakistan, Nepal and Afghanistan(!), visiting places I would not even visit in my dreams.  After he come back from his long journey, he begin another even crazier journey in 2004.  He spent another 3 years going back and forth between Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia in bicycles!  Finally, his long journey comes to an end.  He decided to settle down and open a coffee shop in Tibet after biking there all the way from Thailand.  There is a saying that travel ten thousand miles is better than reading ten thousand books.  This guy traveled ten times more roads than I will ever travel in tens of my life time combined.  I can imagine talking to Pazu would be full of eye opening stories.  Too bad that I don’t have the patient to follow his trip day by day in his travel journal.  If he write a book about his years long journal, I will get one at once.  Maybe HK’s television station should interview him and produce a hour long special program.  That would be more interesting than the usual brainless entertainment shows.

I would like to announce to all my good friends that I am now official engaged.  My days of being single is numbered, I am moving on to the next stage of life.  The date of my big day is not yet confirmed.  It depends on the availability of the church, the booking of the restaurant for banquet at night and fortune of day in the Chinese calender.  In Chinese calender, each day is categorized being good for certain events and being bad for some other events.  The pattern of the good days and bad days are pretty random, I wonder how the good day / bad day is determined.  The calender publisher must use some kind of ancient equation.  Today is already in the 21st century, this good day /bad day scheme sounds so superstitious to me, yet the older generation still follows this non-sense rule in the Calendar fortune telling book.

Maybe I should revise that ancient equation to make it suits better of modern civilized way of living.  Then I will publish a new Chinese calender with my new good day / bad day scheme, so setting a day will be much more convenient.  Every weekend is a good day for getting marry.  Every weekday is a good day for opening business.  The scheme should take public holidays and season patterns into accounts.  For example, Christmas day is a bad day for wedding, since your guest will be busy for their own holidays and probably you can not book any church for the ceremony.  Of course, I will steer the good days away from the traditional bad days that everyone knows, like the ghost festival.  Other than those few obvious bad days, who can tell scientifically the difference in effectiveness between my calendar from the old one?