Thursday, July 08, 2004

As you may have noticed, I dumped most or all of my previous posts in the transfer of the weblog to this new machine.  I have some of them stored but they were not of much value in keeping with the flow of what the direction of my writing is now taking.  I am going to keep talking about the summer schedule that we are completing at both locations.  I have neglected to discuss the work that is going on at Charter but suffice it to say that my youngest son is handling it so far.  There was a large amount of "dirty work" that was necessary to the cause and needed to be accomplished in the first three weeks of the summer.  He really did a good job in getting the majority of this type of work done and done right.  I have been impressed with his ability to figure it out as he goes along.  I will work on Charter this Friday.  See ya then. 9:15:13 PM    comment []

Made good progress on several projects this week even though it was a short one.  Also I have been able to push the vendors hard on the delivery side of each project.  Pieces of each project are arriving daily and they are staying just ahead of the workers by the slightest of margins.  Once again, when the schedule works out it appears that all cylinders are firing when in fact there may be a misfire sure to come and soon.   I had hoped to be a bit further on the Middle School by the end of this week but I will settle for where we are at for now.  The big push will be when we get the storage array into the tech center and fully install the last of the servers which in fact will control our Middle School systems for what I hope is the next five years without reconfiguration of any sorts.  I am hoping that this will go in next week as well as the first fifteen projectors and document cameras at the Middle School.  I will decide what is up with the schedule after we meet on Monday to determine our goals for the week.  As it stands to really make an impact on the process we will have to accomplish approximately twice as work as was accomplished during the four day period of this week.  Remember, I am not starting anything after August 15th that will not be completed by the start of the school year.  This will include the library work that is slated to be done this summer.  I still have not gotten the necessary purchase orders released for most of the items that are needed to complete this work.  I can only do so much.  I will get those projects to the ready as soon as I can.  I have enlisted Ben Fong's help with the Music Project and we will order the software in a combined worksession on Monday of next week.  Should be interesting having someone help that has more than a passing interest in the system.  This is really the second step in my personal plan and that is the introduction of project involvement with the actual project users and participants.  Many years ago when I received my "formal" systems training I spent two years learning how to make information flow from one process to another.  At that time it took several iterations just to bring data to the top of the stack in order to perform an action upon it.  Once a course of action was determined I would then convert the procedures written up by the systems analyst into system software.  That used to be a  very tedious and tiresome job.  As my career progressed from programmer to lead programmer and into project management I discovered I knew less and less about what I was doing with regard to actually getting a useable product into the client's hands than they did.  Eventually I turned toward more pure systems work and concentrated primarily on operating systems and their support.  What I did learn from that experience was that involving the user to a large extent can ensure that at least a partial amount of success is capable with a systems project.  Which leads me to the lesson for tonight.  Fully involve your users especially those that can help you in all phases of the project.  I will keep you posted on my progress with this latest attempt.  On another note, I am breaking down some equipment in the offices and I will not be heard from for at least three days while I replace and rebuild my writing machines.  I have some voice recognition systems equipment and software that I have conducting a review on and I need to get things set up to do just that.  Until next time. 8:51:21 PM    comment [ 0] 9:09:26 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Gil Chapman.