project milestone tracking

So for the past two months, I have been involved with larger scale, longer duration projects. I have been wrestling with our current project reporting and status reporting from the field. I have seen varied customer types. Some want detailed reporting on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Some want just the end-result in a master database or spreadsheet. Some want daily detailed reporting. If the project reviewer is higher up the "food-chain" or "chain of command", typically the level of detail is looser or lost to some degree. The more complex the project (no, we have not been using Microsoft Project which complicates my situation even more), the more quantity of projects one is juggling at a given time, the lesser project monitoring is done.

This is just a function of capacity and human bandwidth. The dilemma then becomes, do you monitor a project status quantitatively or qualitatively. Being a melancholy by nature, I prefer the quantitative measurement of milestones hit and achieved. Instead of a descriptive text-type reporting of project status, issues log, project reporting, I have come up with a template (simple Microsoft Excel template) for the field engineer or field technician to populate. It is a simple yes or no, for specific milestones completed/not completed. This will be a weekly report to be submitted to the PMO. As a project manager for a different industry, what is your preference? What industry are you in, and what type of reporting do you prefer?

Ketsana's aftermath

Hopefully  by now you have read all the news and video footages of the recent flooding in metropolitan Manila and norther Luzon provinces. For comparison, the rainfall amount in 12 hours was a lot more (measured in mm and not in inches) than what we experienced with Katrina. I have not kept up with the death toll, and scores of people missing. The financial costs of this calamity is still to be determined. We do have to count our blessings in light of the recent earthquake, more lives lost in the recent massive earthquake in Sumatra (that just occurred this week, and flooding in American Samoa).

The easy part is finger pointing and doing the blame game. The following questions do need to be answered:

1. What happened to the study done by Urban Planner Palafox regarding the risks of flooding (I will get the reference page on this study, this was done years ago)?
2. How much of the damaged settlements, e.g., parts of Marikina Valley, or population actually built and settled in 20, 50, or 100-year floodplains?
3. Where was the Disaster Relief and Emergency Response System? Why is there no FEMA-like agency?
4. Why haven't local government units organized even volunteer or non government associations to organize Disaster Preparedness and Local Emergency Response Teams?
5. How much of the flooding caused, or indirectly caused by garbage-choke rivers and estuaries?
6. Are any of the private developments, or buildings insured when these are built on flood plains? Where did they purchase insurance, or were these properties insured, who insured them?

All of these questions are classic PMBOK questions and key project management input variables, or process groups:

• Risk management,
• Proper project planning,
• Risk mitigation,
• Project implementation,
• Budgeting,
• Disaster preparedness, and 
• Disaster response and recovery.

What project are you working on? What are the potential risks? What are the payoffs? Are you prepared for a major catastrophe? What are your risk mitigation plans, and disaster response systems? Easy to ask, very difficult to implement.

Fishing and being seasick

Today being my birthday, I was inundated with greetings (both on the Wall and personal messages via e-mail) on Facebook. (Thanks to the calendar reminder on Facebook, even your 2nd grade classmate remembered to greet me on my birthday.) The common (courteous) question I was asked apart from the greeting, "what kind of fun stuff did you do today?" And I tell the entire story.

This was a trip that had long been planned by my Sales Director, won from a fund raising auction at World Relief back in spring of this year. Due to schedule conflicts and marine forecast, the fishing trip had to be re scheduled a couple of times. Then the day finally came. We are going fishing at 7 am from Winthrop Harbor North Point Marina, on a Saturday. Woke up at 4 am, got out at past 5 am and made the trek from Warrenville to Winthrop Harbor, Illinois. While waiting for someone else, my Sales Director asked me, "so, Bobby, do you ever have problems with sea sickness?" "Bill, I grew up in the Philippines, of course not!" I have been paddling on canoes on mild rivers, rode in canoes with outriggers in Mindanao Sea, have taken a passenger (overnight) cruise ship from Manila back to Butuan, a ferry from Playa del Carmen to Cozumel--of course I have never had problems with sea sickness. (I did remember Captain mention that the waves farther out would be far better than the waves' height further inland.) So I thought I hope we catch Salmon and Trout today, lots and lots of them.

One and half hour after venturing out, and having half eaten a bagel with lox and cream cheese, I started feeling sick. Not wanting to ruin the trip for everyone, I did my best not to lose my breakfast. And the three and a half foot waves felt like ten foot (or more waves, like the Perfect Storm, or it felt like it for me), and this went on for four hours. When the captain finally saw me puking three times, he said "let's head back in" and started to pull the poles. A ruined trip and no Salmon caught. Disappointing, and I felt bad for both Bill and Paul. And the captain has to clean the sides of his boat.

Not sure if it was over confidence or oversight on my part about the risks involved with this trip, the Dramamine might have help prevent nausea and motion sickness. I took two tablets after attempting to reel in the line (thinking we had caught something about two hours into the trip). Pretty obvious it was too late. Lesson learned: what possible risks could come up with a trip or a project. Identify it, take steps to mitigate it, or plain avoid it. With the marine forecast of 3.5 and less than 5 foot waves, it was safe to venture out and go fishing. But it is not for the faint of stomach.

shopping for fresh fruits and vegetables at Jenny's Fruit Stand

My wife and I spent last weekend or Labor Day weekend in Sawyer Michigan. Although I have lived here in the states for almost 20 years now, I cannot help but notice the differences between how "production" (collective term) works between here and the Philippines. (I wanted to post photos of my wife shopping at the fruit stand but I lost those digital photos. That is a whole different story.)

This fruit stand was not manned, sat in a corner of a street, in a private property. It had a wooden cash box (i.e., cash and check payment only), chained to the structure. It had three security cameras (more than likely with motion detector), one of which had a short antenna (I can only imagine it works off 802.11 protocol). I noticed that the power adaptors were plugged to an outlet and did not seem secure (someone can just unplug them, if someone really intended to abscond the fruits, vegetables, organic honey, and the cash box). On a white board, the following works were scribed: "Smile, you are on candid camera. Thou shall not steal."

Where is this all leading to? What I can conclude are the following. Any production business process that can be automated or outsourced, whereby there is significant cost savings to labor cost--such solution needs to be examined and implemented. A lot of our economic "transaction" is based on honesty. (A fudged resume can be discovered. A dishonest time sheet will be caught. A dishonest tax return will be audited. A substandard part replacement discovered. This is very true in the US. Sadly, I cannot speak the same about the Philippines. It may be different now.) Thus, such automation and BPO (business process outsourcing) ought not to be ruled out when trying to cut production cost. Then again, this might be stating what is now too obvious.

US/Boeing versus Airbus/European Union

There is not much news happening (not earth shaking at least) that I wanted to blog on but the following article prior to the long Labor Day weekend caught my eye. (Well, the forest fires in Los Angeles is being contained, and it is being investigated both as an arson and as a homicide in light of two firefighters' death.) Ever since Boeing moved their corporate office to Chicago, news related to Boeing hits the Chicago Trib and becomes easier to follow. In light of the economic meltdown, large drop in corporate travel (airlines reportedly losing billions in 1st half of 09), the competition on new plane orders becomes more heated between Airbus and Boeing (along with Canadian, Brazilian, Chinese and Russian plane manufacturers intent on breaking up the monopoly by the Big 2).

The following is the recent development on this on-going battle. Excerpted from the Chicago Tribune article today:

"The United States and Chicago-based Boeing Co. scored the first victory in a lengthy trade conflict Friday when the World Trade Organization found that the European Union had provided illegal aircraft subsidies to Airbus SAS.

But the extent of their win, like much else in this clash, was disputed. The only certainty is that the 5-year-old imbroglio, already one of the longest and costliest on record, is far from over, trade experts cautioned."

I had taken the Micro Economics class at VA TECH years ago, and I still do remember the following "ideal." Government subsidies are bad, since it interferes with free market forces. It does not level the playing field for all players. It tips the playing field in favor of another. I will not debate the merits of the European Union's subsidies, which part is legal or not (70 % has been ruled by the World Trade Organization as not illegal).

What I have come to the conclusion are the following. I find it interesting that the US is taking this issue with Airbus at WTO, siding with Boeing. This makes me ask the following questions, what about the farm subsidies to US farmers? What about TARP? What about the billions in Stimulus money to state and local governments? Is this tinkering with market economics? Where is the consistency in government policy related to government subsidies, primarily to US farmers. One may argue these are very different times, and call for very different solutions to different problems. Is the US government right in taking Boeing's case to WTO? In this case, I think so.

Chicago's bid for 2016 Olympics

An interesting development just transpired in Chicago's bid for 2016 Olympics. Mayor Daley had been reluctant to sign the contract with IOC. This provisioned that the host city will have full ownership of financial cost of sponsoring the summer Olympics. China had spent 13 bllion Yuan or close to $2B to finance the recent 08 Beijing Olympics.

AON is willing to underwrite the insurance to cover $500 million in the event the city's cost exceeds revenues accrued from hosting the games. Mayor Daley's was reluctant to stick the cost of the games to Chicago taxpayers. I am wondering however what is the premium or cost of this insurance policy? AON's policy will not be pro bono, it will come at a cost. However, this is a win/win situation for the city and 2016 bid team. The caveat is, how much policy is enough. The statisticians, demographers, consultants and forecasters better be accurate on their pessimistic, most likely, and optimistic forecasts, i.e., to ensure some semblance of accuracy on their sufficiency of insurance amount.

Not foreign to performance bonds and other insurance policies for vendors and contractors, this definitely is a development in the right direction for the city to move forward with the bid. Now if they can now convice all Chicago Aldermen, that the city taxpayers will not pay $1 in case the 2016 Olympics bleeds red ink, it is "all good."

CIT 1122 Routing Protocols

Yesterday was day #1 (or night #1) that is for the next class module leading to CCNA certification. I am taking this class at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, IL. This is 2nd of four classes--which hopefully will provide me the necessary body of knowledge and lab exercises to pass the Cert test. (The primary reason I am taking this is to gain some continuing education credits to maintain my PMP certification with PMI.org.)

The intent as well is to enable me to challenge and validate,
a) statements of work,
b) field QC for any IP-based hardware deployment,
c) validate Technical Support documentation,
d) and have a general understanding of Networking (TCP/IP) protocols.

Nonetheless, I am amazed at the caliber of students who have flocked back to school. (One was an electrical engineer in my cit 1121 class this past summer.) Primary reason is to "recession-proof" one's career. A majority of people have gone back to get their undergraduate, graduate or even post graduate degrees while we try to ride out this recession. Suffice to say that there will be a lot of (educated derelicts like me) very qualified, skilled, highly educated work force coming out of this recession.