Thursday, May 24, 2007

My Boy’s All Grown Up!


I am happy to say that I am no longer a blogging virgin! It’s amazing how much you can learn and develop in such a short period of time when pushed outside of your comfort zone. They say that if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger. Not only has this assignment made me stronger by building my knowledge of current technology trends, I actually found it to be the most enjoyable experience of the entire MBA program thus far. Over the weeks, months, and years to come, I‘ll surely forget many of the facts that were memorized and regurgitated during this past year. However, with such a high engagement level on this assignment, I will never forget my first blog.

I was out of town on the first day of class and therefore missed the course introduction. Looking at the syllabus, the steps involved in creating a blog were unclear to me. I thought I would place a short call to my fellow students who would fill in the gaps for me….nope. No gaps to fill in. They knew no more than I. It was “sink or swim” time, baby! I have always found this to be the best way to learn. However, it’s one of those things you generally look back on with positive feelings. On day 1, the sink or swim approach can be a real tension builder. Now that I am a seasoned veteran, I calmly refer to my site as a blog, having replaced the original name I gave it: “*!#!-ing BLOG!”.

Honestly, it began as tedious task. My thinking was “let’s just bang out 10 articles and get this thing over with”. However, after getting started, I found myself completely engaged in the content. The goal was no longer to “knock them off”. The new goal was to create articles that could be entertaining and informative. In addition to the articles, I became very interested in providing blog add-ons that would enhance the visitor experience. Using my own interests as the foundation, I added a sports ticker and a Sudoku game, along with a few others. As a major fan of both sports and Sudoku, I can entertain myself for hours on my site. I find that having your own forum to post your views is like having your own little talk show.

Although I have thoroughly enjoyed the experience of creating and maintaining my own blog, what I have found to be the most enjoyable aspect of the course has been following the blogs of my fellow “MBAers”. With such busy lives, we don’t get to know each other like we would if we were undergrads. We have families and jobs. These blogs have provided me with the wonderful opportunity of getting to know my classmates just a little bit better. What began with a simple visit to blogger.com has culminated with a network of entertaining, informative sources.

Gaining Competitive Advantage Through Technology with the Poor Man’s BMW

During the last year of my programming career, I had the opportunity to design and build a computer assisted ordering system for Co-op Atlantic. The company had been suffering from overstock and out of stock problems in the Co-op Basic stores for some time. The total value of lost sales was unknown, but was estimated to be quite significant. The money tied up in inventory had the stores in a very precarious financial position. Something had to be done, so we set out to design a system which would alleviate the situation. We looked around the industry to get ideas on what style of system to purchase/develop. One of the most well known ordering/replenishment systems was the one utilized by Wal-Mart. Unfortunately, we did not have millions of dollars to spend. After considering our options, we embarked on a development effort with a shoestring budget of less than $50 K.

We decided to use the Pocket PC technology, with Symbol technologies being selected as the supplier of handheld computers. Essentially, the system worked as follows:
1. On a nightly basis, the store’s sales figures were loaded into a SQL Server database located on a back-end PC.
2. The average daily sales of each product were calculated for the past 8 weeks.
3. The average daily sales figures were then transferred to the handheld Pocket PC.
4. The store employee would begin the ordering process by entering the dates for the next two scheduled deliveries (for example, if it was Monday morning, he may enter Wednesday as the next scheduled delivery day and Friday as the following scheduled delivery day). The goal was to order just enough inventory for the next delivery that would last until the second delivery. The system design was our attempt at creating a Just-In-Time inventory system.
5. The employee would then walk the aisles, scanning the bar codes of the products. The handheld Pocket PC would then calculate the number of units to order based on the average daily sales figures and the days between scheduled deliveries. The employee had the option of accepting the recommendation or ordering a different quantity.
6. After walking the aisles, the Pocket PC would transfer the order information to the back-end PC.
7. The back-end PC would transfer the order to head office via existing communication technology.

We launched the system in 30 stores within the first month of rollout. We estimated the first year savings to be $500K. Last I heard, the system had been successful in achieving its objectives. After I left the organization, I came across an article which referenced the system.

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

MS Office Project Server Web Access Time Entry: Welcome to my Nightmare!

If you had a sibling growing up, you may be familiar with the following scenario: you’re working hard to complete a complicated puzzle you’ve been struggling over for hours. You think you are getting close until……wham! Your kid brother comes along, knocking the puzzle onto the floor into several pieces, then runs away laughing. If you’re like me, several “F-bombs” would be going off in your head or better yet, coming out of your mouth. My experience with Microsoft Office Project Server Web Access has provided me with the same “character building” opportunities, having left me with a few grey hairs over the years.

I’ll start by saying that I love working with Microsoft Project. It makes schedule development a fairly painless process. Its ability to link tasks and allocate time to tasks is an invaluable asset to the Project Manager. However, when you attempt to integrate the web access Time Entry functionality, it’s like setting a bull loose in a china shop. If managed correctly, it can be fairly painless. The challenge is in managing it correctly. In my last job (my favorite part of my new job is that there is no time to approve), we were responsible for approving time on a weekly basis. There is an expression that states the only certainties in life are death and taxes. For me, the third certainty in life was that my project schedule was going to look like crap every Monday after approving the employees’ time. Here is why:

1. Using a very simple example, assume you have 5 tasks in your schedule: Task 1, Task 2, Task 3, Task 4, and Task 5.
2. In creating the schedule, you estimate that each task will take 5 business days.
3. You only have 1 resource, so you schedule the tasks to be completed consecutively. In order to do this graphically, you set it up so that Task 2 starts after the completion of Task 2, Task 3 after the completion of Task 2, etc. In the end, you have a nice, tidy 5 week schedule.
4. The next step is to publish it to the MS Project Web Server, so that your employee can enter his time on Fridays.
5. On Monday morning, you approve the employee time entry. However, rather than entering his time into Task 1, your employee enters 40 hours against alternate tasks, some on different project schedules.
6. When you look at your schedule, it has pushed out a week. It was anticipating 40 hours worked on Task 1 for the week. When it didn’t arrive, it assumed that the task was late starting and shows your project as being behind schedule.


However, this is not a realistic scenario. In a real project, you’ll have many employees with many task assignments. In my last position, I had over 50 employees entering time concurrently into my project schedules. Some weeks, the damage was minimal, other times fairly significant. All this being said, it can be tightly controlled if the Project Manager is given the time to manage the schedule. It is a full-time job. With only a couple of hours per week to work on schedule repair, it puts the Project Manager in a difficult position. This was a major point of contention with my fellow managers. In fact, one outburst was captured on security video, as seen below: