Project Scheduling Quotes

Don't be a slave to history. Don't let existing code dictate future code. All code can be replaced if it is no longer appropriate. Even within one program, don't let what you've already done constrain what you do next -- be ready to refactor... This decision may impact the project schedule. The assumption is that the impact will be less than the cost of /not/ making the change.

It must have been almost 2.30 a.m. How could I have lost track of time like that? It was a severe lesson in the dangers of messing with the schedule.

Most often, our water is shut off because of some reconstruction project, either in our village or in the next one over. A hole is dug, a pipe is replaced, and within a few hours things are back to normal. The mystery is that it's so perfectly timed to my schedule. That is to say that the tap dries up at the exact moment I roll out of bed, which is usually between 10:00 and 10:30. For me this is early, but for Hugh and most of our neighbors it's something closer to midday. What they do at 6:00 a.m. is anyone's guess. I only know that they're incredibly self-righteous about it and talk about the dawn as if it's a personal reward, bestowed on account of their great virtue.

My schedule and social skills had now been brought into line with conventional practice, to the best of my ability within the time I had allocated. The Don Project was complete. It was time to commence the Rosie Project.

The Big Nurse is able to set the wall clock at whatever speed she wants by just turning one of those dials in the steel door; she takes a notion to hurry things up, she turns the speed up, and those hands whip around that disk like spokes in a wheel. The scene in the picture-screen windows goes through rapid changes of light to show morning, noon, and night - throb off and on furiously with day and dark, and everybody is driven like mad to keep up with that passing of fake time; awful scramble of shaves and breakfasts and appointments and lunches and medications and ten minutes of night so you barely get your eyes closed before the dorm light's screaming at you to get up and start the scramble again, go like a sonofabitch this way, going through the full schedule of a day maybe twenty times an hour, till the Big Nurse sees everybody is right up to the breaking point, and she slacks off on the throttle, eases off the pace on that clock-dial, like some kid been fooling with the moving-picture projection machine and finally got tired watching the film run at ten times its natural speed, got bored with all that silly scampering and insect squeak of talk and turned it back to normal.

There was only one bar of that name, in a back street of an inner suburb. I had already modified the day’s schedule, cancelling my market trip to catch up on the lost sleep. I would purchase a ready-made dinner instead. I am sometimes accused of being inflexible, but I think this demonstrates an ability to adapt to even the strangest of circumstances.

To maximize productivity, schedule 3–5 hour blocks or half-days of singularly focused attention on ONE single activity or project, rather than trying to switch tasks every 60 minutes.

Strictly speaking, I never had nor do I have projects. I simply get carried away by the circumstances. I accept the ones that seem pleasant and try to avoid the ones I don’t like… If I think of a story, and I don’t feel bothered writing it, then perfect, I write it. And if I can’t think of anything, that won’t make me commit suicide or bring me down into depression. I take literature as a pleasant activity, without deadlines or schedules, and never as a job or a burden that creates inconveniences or pains. During certain times in my life I’ve had to carry out very unpleasant jobs (for example, I was an office worker), and for that reason I would never let literature (which is, above all, a game and a pleasure) turn out to be a job.

The alternative to systematic planning is decision-making based on history. This generally results in reactive management leading to crisis management, conflict management, and fire fighting.

Many rookie software managers think that they can "motivate" their programmers to work faster by giving them nice, "tight" (unrealistically short) schedules. I think this kind of motivation is brain-dead. When I'm behind schedule, I feel doomed and depressed and unmotivated. When I'm working ahead of schedule, I'm cheerful and productive. The schedule is not the place to play psychological games.

I would normally have scheduled my driving time according to published studies on fatigue and booked accommodation accordingly. But I had been too busy to plan. Nevertheless, I stopped for rest breaks every two hours and found myself able to maintain concentration. At 11.43 p.m., I detected tiredness, but rather than sleep I stopped at a service station, refuelled, and ordered four double espressos. I opened the sunroof and turned up the CD player volume to combat fatigue, and at 7.19 a.m. on Saturday, with the caffeine still running all around my brain, Jackson Browne and I pulled into Moree.

When I returned, wearing an uncomfortably large white shirt, with a decorative frill in the front, I tried to introduce the Wife Project, but Claudia was engaged in child-related activities. This was becoming frustrating. I booked dinner for Saturday night and asked them not to schedule any other conversation topics.

All winter long, I had glimpsed his deeply set habits, his regimented schedule. When I left, he would eat a dinner of leftovers, then continue to work until sleep. Everything revolved, to a fault, around work, around his next book project. If I had lived alone, I would have turned out the same way. It is the thing I have been most afraid of happening, my strictness toward myself calcifying into a lifestyle, my traits ingrown so deeply that my oddness surfaces, apparent to all.

It is easy to launch a project if you have no clue about the cost and schedule.

APM's core purpose of creating innovative new products and services means dealing with constant technological and competitive change, generating novel ideas, and continually reducing product development schedules.

Let’s see, you will need a project plan, resource allocation, a timeline, test cycles, a budget, a contingency budget, lots of diagrams, flowcharts, a media release, a strategic vision, a charter, technical specifications, business rules, travel expenses, a development environment, deployment instructions, a user acceptance test, stationary, overtime schedule, a mock-up, prototypes…” “Tell me,” she said, “did the people who built the pyramids have any of those?” “Mostly, they had beer. Come to think of it, if there had been such a thing as a Business Analyst in ancient Egypt, then the hieroglyph for it would have been very graphical, if you know what I mean.

The construction industry is the world’s second largest (after agriculture), worth $8 trillion a year. But it’s remarkably inefficient. The typical commercial construction project runs 80% over budget and 20 months behind schedule, according to McKinsey.

Schedules are simply a kind of prediction. No matter how precisely they are drafted or how convincing they appear, they are just a summation of lots of little estimations, each one unavoidably prone to different kinds of unforeseeable oversights and problems.

Nothing has a more profound and long-term degrading effect upon a development project than bad code. Bad schedules can be redone, bad requirements can be redefined. Bad team dynamics can be repaired. But bad code rots and ferments, becoming an inexorable weight that drags the team down.

God shows us what authentic love is in John 3:16, probably the most famous verse in the Bible. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (NKJV). God so loved the world. He loved the whole world; not just the good part of the world, the part that loved him already, or the part that he knew would love him back. We need to expand our hearts, our comfort zones, and our friend zones. He gave his only Son. He was willing to make real sacrifices to build real relationships. Sometimes we need to put aside projects and schedules for the sake of people. Like Jesus, we need to be interruptible. Whoever. He showed unconditional love and acceptance. Love is risky. We might be rejected. We might be crucified by the people we are trying to help. But ultimately, love will prevail.

for higher-class parents, children are ‘projects.’ They have tightly scheduled lives and coordinated activities; high-income parents spend significant time and energy thinking about how to fulfill their kids’ ‘potentials.’ For the working class and poor, Lareau argues, parenting is more about ‘the accomplishment of natural growth.’ Top priorities in these families are safety and health.

In the most highly stressed projects, people at all levels talk about the schedule being “aggressive, ” or even “highly aggressive.” In my experience, projects in which the schedule is commonly termed aggressive or highly aggressive invariably turn out to be fiascoes. “Aggressive schedule,” I’ve come to suspect, is a kind of code phrase—understood implicitly by all involved—for a schedule that is absurd, that has no chance at all of being met.

As we drank champagne in the lounge, I explained that I had earned special privileges by being particularly vigilant and observant of rules and procedures on previous flights, and by making a substantial number of helpful suggestions regarding check-in procedures, flight scheduling, pilot training, and ways in which security systems might be subverted. I was no longer expected to offer advice, having contributed “enough for a lifetime of flying.

Was this boring? Yes, she knew it was, and she wanted someone, anyone, to understand the monotony, the mind-numbing routine, the way in which her mental activity began to slow the moment she woke each morning, beginning with high hopes, thoughts of art projects and energy, a sunny day and happy boy and goals fulfilled, and the slow yet steady grinding down of hopes to rote considerations of what to eat and what to clean, the slow agony of The Schedule- time for breakfast and time for a walk and time for lunch and time for nap and time for snack, time for pooping, time for dinner- this and then that and then this again, until every single thought had been emptied from her head and left in its place only the physical sensations of exhaustion, a pain in her lower back, greasy hair, a bloated feeling from eating too many fish-shaped, sodium-laden crackers. She spoke in toddler talk and was constantly asking different questions about poop.

I’ve seen this movie before. The plot is simple: First, you take an urgent date-driven project, where the shipment date cannot be delayed because of external commitments made to Wall Street or customers. Then you add a bunch of developers who use up all the time in the schedule, leaving no time for testing or operations deployment. And because no one is willing to slip the deployment date, everyone after Development has to take outrageous and unacceptable shortcuts to hit the date.

We know from project management that there is usually slippage, and tasks almost always take longer than what one envisions. There is also no room for fitting human well-being into task schedules. We need to instead relearn what designing a day should be in the twenty-first century digital world. It should include strategies to not exhaust yourself, and to improve your well-being. And it includes understanding your own rhythm of attentional states, and the fact that you have limited and precious cognitive resources.

In knowledge work, when you agree to a new commitment, be it a minor task or a large project, it brings with it a certain amount of ongoing administrative overhead: back-and-forth email threads needed to gather information, for example, or meetings scheduled to synchronize with your collaborators. This overhead tax activates as soon as you take on a new responsibility. As your to-do list grows, so does the total amount of overhead tax you’re paying. Because the number of hours in the day is fixed, these administrative chores will take more and more time away from your core work, slowing down the rate at which these objectives are accomplished. At moderate workloads, this effect might be frustrating: a general sense that completing your work is taking longer than it should. As your workload increases, however, the overhead tax you’re paying will eventually pass a tipping point, beyond which logistical efforts will devour so much of your schedule that you cannot complete old tasks fast enough to keep up with the new. This feedback loop can quickly spiral out of control, pushing your workload higher and higher until you find yourself losing your entire day to overhead activities: meeting after meeting conducted against a background hum of unceasing email and chat. Eventually the only solution becomes to push actual work into ad hoc sessions added after hours—in the evenings and early mornings, or over the weekend—in a desperate attempt to avoid a full collapse of all useful output. You’re as busy as you’ve ever been, and yet hardly get anything done.

Outcomes indicators include product vision, business objectives, and capabilities (high-level product functionality), not detail requirements. These outcome characteristics define a releasable product and quality objectives define a reliable and adaptable (works today, easy to enhance) product. These are the critical value traits, then teams need to strive to meet constraints—scope, schedule, and cost—but as secondary in importance to the value components. In many, if not most, agile projects schedule becomes the most critical constraint and is timeboxed (fixed) and scope varies.

Or, suppose you want to motivate your managers to ship products on time, so you conspicuously promote each manager whose product goes out the door on schedule. All goes as planned until the situation arises in which one of your managers has a project where the testers are reporting numerous problems. Because managers who have shipped products on time have been promoted, this manager thinks, I want that promotion so I need to ship this on time, but those bug reports are getting in the way. I know what I'll do! I'll put the testers on another project until the developers have a chance to catch up.

Our inner lives must be lent a structure and our best thoughts reinforced to counter the continuous pull of distraction and disintegration. Religions have been wise enough to establish elaborate calendars and schedules. How free secular society leaves us by contrast. Secular life is not, of course, unacquainted with calendars and schedules. We know them well in relation to work, and accept the virtues of reminders of lunch meetings, cash-flow projections and tax deadlines. But it expects that we will spontaneously find our way to the ideas that matter to us and gives us weekends off for consumption and recreation. It privileges discovery, presenting us with an incessant stream of new information – and therefore it prompts us to forget everything. We are enticed to go to the cinema to see a newly released film, which ends up moving us to an exquisite pitch of sensitivity, sorrow and excitement. We leave the theatre vowing to reconsider our entire existence in light of the values shown on screen, and to purge ourselves of our decadence and haste. And yet by the following evening, after a day of meetings and aggravations, our cinematic experience is well on its way towards obliteration. We honour the power of culture but rarely admit with what scandalous ease we forget its individual monuments. We somehow feel, however, that it would be a violation of our spontaneity to be presented with rotas for rereading Walt Whitman.

There was no escape: The entire Elliott 503 Mark II software project had to be abandoned, and with it, over thirty man-years of programming effort, equivalent to nearly one man’s active working life, and I was responsible, both as designer and as manager, for wasting it. ... How did we recover from the catastrophe? First, we classified our 503 customers into groups, according to the nature and size of the hardware configurations which they had bought ... We assigned to each group of customers a small team of programmers and told the team leader to visit the customers to find out what they wanted; to select the easiest request to fulfill, and to make plans (but no promises) to implement it. In no case would we consider a request for a feature that would take more than three months to implement and deliver. The project leader would then have to convince me that the customers’ request was reasonable, that the design of the new feature was appropriate, and that the plans and schedules for implementation were realistic. Above all, I did not allow anything to be done which I did not myself understand. It worked! The software requested began to be delivered on the promised dates. With an increase in our confidence and that of our customers, we were able to undertake fulfilling slightly more ambitious requests. Within a year we had recovered from the disaster. Within two years, we even had some moderately satisfied customers.

Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality, understanding technological weaknesses and imperfections well enough to be actively trying to eliminate them. They must live in a world of reality in comparing the costs and utility of the shuttle to other methods of entering space. And they must be realistic in making contracts and in estimating the costs and difficulties of each project. Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed -- schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the government would not support NASA, the so be it. NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources.

Common, Healthy Autistic Behaviors Intense studying of a new favorite topic Not noticing sounds or social signals when focusing on an engrossing task Needing to know exactly what to expect before entering an unfamiliar situation Sticking to a very rigid schedule, and rejecting deviations to that schedule Taking a long time to think before responding to a complex question Spending hours or days alone sleeping and recharging after a socially demanding event or stressful project Needing “all the information” before coming to a decision Not knowing how they feel, or needing a few days to figure out how they feel about something Needing a rule or instruction to “make sense” before they can follow it Not putting energy toward expectations that seem unfair or arbitrary, such as wearing makeup or elaborate grooming

The twentieth-century mystic Thomas Merton wrote, “There can be an intense egoism in following everybody else. People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular—and too lazy to think of anything better. Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.”20 Merton elegantly articulates how the pressure of the create-on-demand world can cause us to look sideways at our peers and competitors instead of looking ahead. The process of discovering and refining your voice takes time. Unnecessary Creation grants you the space to discover your unique aptitudes and passions through a process of trial, error, and play that won’t often be afforded to you otherwise. Initiating a project with no parameters and no expectations from others also forces you to stay self-aware while learning to listen to and follow your intuition. Both of these are crucial skills for discovering your voice. It’s completely understandable if you’re thinking, “But wait—I hardly have time to breathe, and now you want me to cram something else into my schedule, just for my own enjoyment?” It’s true that every decision about where we spend our time has an opportunity cost, and dedicating time to Unnecessary Creation seems like a remarkably inefficient choice. In truth, it is inefficient. Consider, however, the opportunity cost of spending your life only on pragmatics. You dedicate your time to pleasing everyone else and delivering on their expectations, but you never get around to discovering your deeper aptitudes and creative capacities. Nothing is worth that.

Brooding is more something I do when I'm working. I know so much more about sitting around worrying about a work project than I do about worrying about kids. This could just be a fact of life for older moms. We've worked and worked and worked and if we are lucky enough to finally have a child or two, we find ourselves suddenly catapulted into a most alien kind of chaos. Work is so much easier. Anyone will tell you that. To have a desk, where you have everything all lined up, and a schedule you more or less get to agree to. Work. I am a worker. This is so funny because I never really think of my work as work. I certainly never though of myself as having a career. Writing, work, this is just who I am. I am a person who sits at a desk and makes phone calls and taps at a computer keyboard and sips coffee and calls her mom at five. That I am anything better or smaller than that has come as sudden news to me. Brand new. News.

Of course, many leaders do ask questions constantly—questions such as these: Why are you behind schedule? Who isn't keeping up? What's the problem with this project? Whose idea was that? Too often, we ask questions that disempower rather than empower our subordinates. These questions cast blame; they are not genuine requests for information. Other sorts of questions are often no more than thinly veiled attempts at manipulation: Don't you agree with me on that? Aren't you a team player? If you tend to ask these sorts of questions, this book is for you. So the point isn't that leaders just don't ask enough questions. Often, we don't ask the right questions. Or we don't ask questions in a way that will lead to honest and informative answers. Many of us don't know how to listen effectively to the answers to questions—and haven't established a climate in which asking questions is encouraged. And that's where this book comes in. The purpose of Leading with Questions is to help you become a stronger leader by learning how to ask the right questions effectively, how to listen effectively, and how to create a climate in which asking questions becomes as natural as breathing.

Your grandfather should not be allowed on social media,” Caroline went on. “He just did a quick and dirty post asking if anyone wanted to go owling with him, and never noticed that autocorrect changed ‘owling’ to ‘bowling.’ And before I noticed it and posted a correction, several dozen people signed up.” “Good grief,” I muttered. “And once I corrected it, we started hearing from any number of people saying how deeply disappointed they were about our canceling the bowling—as if you could cancel something that wasn’t even scheduled in the first place. So he told me to go ahead and organize some kind of bowling event. Open to anyone in the Brigade, no cost, but donation to one of the Blake Foundation’s environmental projects suggested. Brigade members love events like that. We’re sure to get way more donations than it costs to rent a few bowling lanes. Now I just need to figure out how to deal with his other typo, which won’t be quite as easy.” “Why?” I asked. “What was the other typo?” “He intended to say that we’d wrap up the event by singing around a campfire,” Caroline said. “I have no idea why autocorrect changed ‘campfire’ to ‘vampire.’ Or why anyone would suppose he’d be planning to serenade one. Am I really expected to provide a vampire on top of the bowling?

Recognize crests and troughs (beginnings and endings). I’ve learned after torturing myself—and finally deciding I don’t like being tortured—that as a self-employed person, my workflow parallels my inner needs. I used to think life was capriciously “having its way with me,” but eventually I saw there was another principle operating. If I’d been in a period of intensive work with clients, for example, and was beginning to complain that the crammed schedule was a problem, the truth was that I was ready to shift into a spacious phase with some alone time during which I might process insights, collect myself, and gestate new projects. Then my phone wouldn’t ring, or work I had tried to get would fall through, and I’d have my quiet time. I usually wouldn’t recognize it as a personal need; I’d feel I was being punished by having this “slump” and would make the gift of my alone time into a problem. “What’s wrong with me? Don’t people like my work? I have to make more money!” I’d mutter. If I stayed in complaining mode, the period of “space” would be prolonged. If, instead, I thanked myself for the renewal time, saw what I’d learned, and realized I was now hungry for people, communication, and external stimulation, the cycle would shift easily and opportunities would show up on my doorstep within days—sometimes hours.

When Oppenheimer took the floor and began speaking in his soft voice, everyone listened in absolute silence. Wilson recalled that Oppenheimer “dominated” the discussion. His main argument essentially drew on Niels Bohr’s vision of “openness.” The war, he argued, should not end without the world knowing about this primordial new weapon. The worst outcome would be if the gadget remained a military secret. If that happened, then the next war would almost certainly be fought with atomic weapons. They had to forge ahead, he explained, to the point where the gadget could be tested. He pointed out that the new United Nations was scheduled to hold its inaugural meeting in April 1945—and that it was important that the delegates begin their deliberations on the postwar world with the knowledge that mankind had invented these weapons of mass destruction. “I thought that was a very good argument,” said Wilson. For some time now, Bohr and Oppenheimer himself had talked about how the gadget was going to change the world. The scientists knew that the gadget was going to force a redefinition of the whole notion of national sovereignty. They had faith in Franklin Roosevelt and believed that he was setting up the United Nations precisely to address this conundrum. As Wilson put it, “There would be areas in which there would be no sovereignty, the sovereignty would exist in the United Nations. It was to be the end of war as we knew it, and this was a promise that was made. That is why I could continue on that project.” Oppenheimer had prevailed, to no one’s surprise, by articulating the argument that the war could not end without the world knowing the terrible secret of Los Alamos. It was a defining moment for everyone. The logic— Bohr’s logic—was particularly compelling to Oppenheimer’s fellow scientists. But so too was the charismatic man who stood before them. As Wilson recalled that moment, “My feeling about Oppenheimer was, at that time, that this was a man who is angelic, true and honest and he could do no wrong. . . . I believed in him.

All the many successes and extraordinary accomplishments of the Gemini still left NASA’s leadership in a quandary. The question voiced in various expressions cut to the heart of the problem: “How can we send men to the moon, no matter how well they fly their ships, if they’re pretty helpless when they get there? We’ve racked up rendezvous, docking, double-teaming the spacecraft, starting, stopping, and restarting engines; we’ve done all that. But these guys simply cannot work outside their ships without exhausting themselves and risking both their lives and their mission. We’ve got to come up with a solution, and quick!” One manned Gemini mission remained on the flight schedule. Veteran Jim Lovell would command the Gemini 12, and his space-walking pilot would be Buzz Aldrin, who built on the experience of the others to address all problems with incredible depth and finesse. He took along with him on his mission special devices like a wrist tether and a tether constructed in the same fashion as one that window washers use to keep from falling off ledges. The ruby slippers of Dorothy of Oz couldn’t compare with the “golden slippers” Aldrin wore in space—foot restraints, resembling wooden Dutch shoes, that he could bolt to a work station in the Gemini equipment bay. One of his neatest tricks was to bring along portable handholds he could slap onto either the Gemini or the Agena to keep his body under control. A variety of space tools went into his pressure suit to go along with him once he exited the cabin. On November 11, 1966, the Gemini 12, the last of its breed, left earth and captured its Agena quarry. Then Buzz Aldrin, once and for all, banished the gremlins of spacewalking. He proved so much a master at it that he seemed more to be taking a leisurely stroll through space than attacking the problems that had frustrated, endangered, and maddened three previous astronauts and brought grave doubts to NASA leadership about the possible success of the manned lunar program. Aldrin moved down the nose of the Gemini to the Agena like a weightless swimmer, working his way almost effortlessly along a six-foot rail he had locked into place once he was outside. Next came looping the end of a hundred-foot line from the Agena to the Gemini for a later experiment, the job that had left Dick Gordon in a sweatbox of exhaustion. Aldrin didn’t show even a hint of heavy breathing, perspiration, or an increased heartbeat. When he spoke, his voice was crisp, sharp, clear. What he did seemed incredibly easy, but it was the direct result of his incisive study of the problems and the equipment he’d brought from earth. He also made sure to move in carefully timed periods, resting between major tasks, and keeping his physical exertion to a minimum. When he reached the workstation in the rear of the Gemini, he mounted his feet and secured his body to the ship with the waist tether. He hooked different equipment to the ship, dismounted other equipment, shifted them about, and reattached them. He used a unique “space wrench” to loosen and tighten bolts with effortless skill. He snipped wires, reconnected wires, and connected a series of tubes. Mission Control hung on every word exchanged between the two astronauts high above earth. “Buzz, how do those slippers work?” Aldrin’s enthusiastic voice came back like music. “They’re great. Great! I don’t have any trouble positioning my body at all.” And so it went, a monumental achievement right at the end of the Gemini program. Project planners had reached all the way to the last inch with one crucial problem still unsolved, and the man named Aldrin had whipped it in spectacular fashion on the final flight. Project Gemini was

First, though, I had to find us a place. And I do mean I, because my husband promptly delegated the apartment-hunting project to me. This was ostensibly logical since, as the mother of a very young child, I had rearranged my work schedule as a writer to be “flexible” and “freelance”—I could put it on hold for days or weeks at a time. We also had a part-time nanny who could watch my son while I searched. But there was a deeper cultural logic at work, too: in Manhattan, the woman is in charge of finding a place for the family to live. She might also pay for it, or for half of it. But in heterosexual marriages, regardless of who does what, it’s usually the woman who finds the apartment.

Remember that these are the same project executors that we chose to execute the project—presumably because we believed we could trust them to make good decisions. They were probably trained, or at least hired, by the enterprise to make sure they had the right skills. So when the project is off schedule, is it natural to first suspect those project executors?

I sensed that this was a small part of what contributed to the passivity with regard to the Three Gorges Project in Fuling. The vast majority of the people would not be directly affected by the coming changes, and so they weren’t concerned. Despite having large sections of the city scheduled to be flooded within the next decade, it wasn’t really a community issue, because there wasn’t a community as one would generally define it. There were lots of small groups, and there was a great deal of patriotism, but like most patriotism anywhere in the world, this was spurred as much by fear and ignorance as by any true sense of a connection to the Motherland. And you could manipulate this fear and ignorance by telling people that the dam, even though it might destroy the river and the town, was of great importance to China.

delayed because of external commitments made to Wall Street or customers. Then you add a bunch of developers who use up all the time in the schedule, leaving no time for testing or operations deployment. And because no one is willing to slip the deployment date, everyone after Development has to take outrageous and unacceptable shortcuts to hit the date.

Oversimplifying outrageously, we state Brooks's Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. This then is the demythologizing of the man-month. The number of months of a project depends upon its sequential constraints. The maximum number of men depends upon the number of independent subtasks. From these two quantities one can derive schedules using fewer men and more months.

Pinned to the left-hand wall opposite the construction schedule was another butcher-block-size sheet almost identical in form, except this one, O’Sullivan said, was called a “submittal schedule.” It was also a checklist, but it didn’t specify construction tasks; it specified communication tasks. For the way the project managers dealt with the unexpected and the uncertain was by making sure the experts spoke to one another—on X date regarding Y process. The experts could make their individual judgments, but they had to do so as part of a team that took one another’s concerns into account, discussed unplanned developments, and agreed on the way forward. While no one could anticipate all the problems, they could foresee where and when they might occur. The checklist therefore detailed who had to talk to whom, by which date, and about what aspect of construction—who had to share (or “submit”) particular kinds of information before the next steps could proceed.

The plot is simple: First, you take an urgent date-driven project, where the shipment date cannot be delayed because of external commitments made to Wall Street or customers. Then you add a bunch of developers who use up all the time in the schedule, leaving no time for testing or operations deployment. And because no one is willing to slip the deployment date, everyone after Development has to take outrageous and unacceptable shortcuts to hit the date.

Write Our Your Goals It’s important to have project goals, but life and career goals are essential too. Set up a calendar, or use your journal to map out your work schedule for the next few weeks, or for your entire project if you know what that will be.

That trip was epic. Every day was an adventure. Bindi sat down for her formal schooling at a little table under the big trees by the river, with the kookaburras singing and the occasional lizard or snake cruising through camp. She had the best scientists from the University of Queensland around to answer her questions. I could tell Steve didn’t want it to end. We had been in bush camp for five weeks. Bindi, Robert, and I were now scheduled for a trip to Tasmania. Along with us would be their teacher, Emma (the kids called her “Miss Emma”), and Kate, her sister, who also worked at the zoo. It was a trip I had planned for a long time. Emma would celebrate her thirtieth birthday, and Kate would see her first snow. Steve and I would go our separate ways. He would leave Lakefield on Croc One and go directly to rendezvous with Philippe Cousteau for the filming of Ocean’s Deadliest. We tried to figure out how we could all be together for the shoot, but there just wasn’t enough room on the boat. Still, Steve came to me one morning while I was dressing Robert. “Why don’t you stay for two more days?” he said. “We could change your flight out. It would be worth it.” When I first met Steve, I made a deal with myself. Whenever Steve suggested a trip, activity, or project, I would go for it. I found it all too easy to come up with an excuse not to do something. “Oh, gee, Steve, I don’t feel like climbing that mountain, or fording that river,” I could have said. “I’m a bit tired, and it’s a bit cold, or it’s a bit hot and I’m a bit warm.” There always could be some reason. Instead I decided to be game for whatever Steve proposed. Inevitably, I found myself on the best adventures of my life. For some reason, this time I didn’t say yes. I fell silent. I thought about how it would work and the logistics of it all. A thousand concerns flitted through my mind. While I was mulling it over, I realized Steve had already walked off. It was the first time I hadn’t said, “Yeah, great, let’s go for it.” And I didn’t really know why.

A pair of glasses on which the temperature and chance of rain pops up or someone’s trying to schedule me for a project or a drink is not going to help with reveries about justice, meaning, and the beautiful deep marine blue of nearly every dusk.

Scheduling should be done several times each day, beginning the night before and continuing at additional times the next day. Prioritize your assignments, exams, and projects. The idea is to open your eyes every morning and know exactly what your goals are for the day.

My heart lurches as all the implications sink in. I’ve seen this movie before. The plot is simple: First, you take an urgent date-driven project, where the shipment date cannot be delayed because of external commitments made to Wall Street or customers. Then you add a bunch of developers who use up all the time in the schedule, leaving no time for testing or operations deployment. And because no one is willing to slip the deployment date, everyone after Development has to take outrageous and unacceptable shortcuts to hit the date.

Though time management seems a problem as old as time itself, the science of scheduling began in the machine shops of the industrial revolution. In 1874, Frederick Taylor, the son of a wealthy lawyer, turned down his acceptance at Harvard to become an apprentice machinist at Enterprise Hydraulic Works in Philadelphia. Four years later, he completed his apprenticeship and began working at the Midvale Steel Works, where he rose through the ranks from lathe operator to machine shop foreman and ultimately to chief engineer. In the process, he came to believe that the time of the machines (and people) he oversaw was not being used very well, leading him to develop a discipline he called “Scientific Management.” Taylor created a planning office, at the heart of which was a bulletin board displaying the shop’s schedule for all to see. The board depicted every machine in the shop, showing the task currently being carried out by that machine and all the tasks waiting for it. This practice would be built upon by Taylor’s colleague Henry Gantt, who in the 1910s developed the Gantt charts that would help organize many of the twentieth century’s most ambitious construction projects, from the Hoover Dam to the Interstate Highway System. A century later, Gantt charts still adorn the walls and screens of project managers at firms like Amazon, IKEA, and SpaceX.

Lately, she'd been waking up early every day, too excited to sleep. She was working on the biggest project she'd ever dared to undertake- transforming her family home into a destination cooking school. The work was nearing completion, and if everything went according to schedule, she would welcome the first guests of the Bella Vista Cooking School at harvest time. The big rambling mission-style hacienda, with its working apple orchard and kitchen gardens, was the perfect venue for the project. The place had long been just too much for just her and her grandfather, and Isabel's dreams had always been too big for her budget. She was passionate about cooking and in love with the idea of creating a place for other dreamers to come and learn the culinary arts.

about my No. 1 goal and decide which three things I’m going to do on this day to move closer toward reaching it. For example, at the time of this writing, my No. 1 goal is to deepen the love and intimacy in my marriage. Each morning I plan three things I can do to make sure that my wife feels loved, respected, and beautiful. When I get up, I put on a pot of coffee, and while it’s brewing, I do a series of stretches for about ten minutes—something I picked up from Dr. Oz. If you’ve lifted weights your whole life as I have, you get stiff. I realized that the only way I was going to incorporate more stretching into my life was to make it a routine. I had to figure out where in my schedule I could stick it in—and while the coffee’s brewing is as good a time as any. Once I’ve stretched and poured my cup, I sit in my comfy leather recliner, set my iPhone for thirty minutes (no more, no less), and read something positive and instructional. When the alarm sounds, I take my most important project and

Most people aren’t lucky enough to have a flexible schedule. I didn’t have one either for the first sixteen years of my corporate life. So I did the next best thing by going to bed early and getting up at 4:00 A.M. to do my creative side projects. One of those projects became the sketches for Dilbert. You might not think you’re an early-morning person. I didn’t think I was either. But once you get used to it, you might never want to go back. You can accomplish more by the time other people wake up than most people accomplish all day.

Project Status Strategy—Action to Take SPI is > 1.0. CPI is < 1.0 Value Analysis SPI is < 1.0. CPI is > 1.0 Crash SPI is < 1.0. CPI is < 1.0 Fast Track & Value Analysis SPI is > 1.0. CPI is > 1.0 Find Out Why and Analyze

Man’s inability to see the power of regression to the mean leaves him blind to the nature of the world around him. We are exposed to a lifetime schedule in which we are most often rewarded for punishing others, and punished for rewarding.

The primary concern of projects in the monitoring process is the progress, the milestones achieved, the factor of complying with the time schedule, the scope, compliance with laws, and that the project is within the allocated/mobilized budget(costs).

Another way to see the beastly aspect of schedules and rigid projections is to think in limit situations. Would you like to know with great precision the date of your death? Would you like to know who committed the crime before the beginning of the movie? Actually, wouldn’t it be better if the length of movies were kept a secret?

Examples of projects could include: Projects at work: Complete web-page design; Create slide deck for conference; Develop project schedule; Plan recruitment drive. Personal projects: Finish Spanish language course; Plan vacation; Buy new living room furniture; Find local volunteer opportunity. Side projects: Publish blog post; Launch crowdfunding campaign; Research best podcast microphone; Complete online course. If you are not already framing your work in terms of specific, concrete projects, making this shift will give you a powerful jump start to your productivity.

Think Motion. The perfect project timeline is only slightly less elusive than the Holy Grail. It takes some effort to figure it out, but once you do, you’ll have created a template that promotes success. You may not be the person tasked with creating timelines, but you can try to influence those who are. This is the kind of thing that most people just accept, but they shouldn’t. The right timing is as important as the right people. Always be wary of the “comfortable” timeline—it’s just a fact of life that a degree of pressure keeps things moving ahead with purpose. With too much time in the schedule, you’re just inviting more opinions, and more opportunities to have your ideas nibbled to death. Keep things in motion at all times.

So if a certain activity really matters to you—a creative project, say, though it could just as easily be nurturing a relationship, or activism in the service of some cause—the only way to be sure it will happen is to do some of it today, no matter how little, and no matter how many other genuinely big rocks may be begging for your attention. After years of trying and failing to make time for her illustration work, by taming her to-do list and shuffling her schedule, Abel saw that her only viable option was to claim time instead—to just start drawing, for an hour or two, every day, and to accept the consequences, even if those included neglecting other activities she sincerely valued. “If you don’t save a bit of your time for you, now, out of every week,” as she puts it, “there is no moment in the future when you’ll magically be done with everything and have loads of free time.

Top 10 ideas from No More Meltdowns: 1. Each day for several months, have your child imagine the sensations of anger and rehearse the calming strategy, such as: holding a squeeze ball, counting to 10, taking deep breaths, taking a walk and swinging on the swing set. He will be able to do the calming strategy without too much conscious effort (42) 2. Create a schedule of routines that involves visual reminders of their schedule to provide comfort in understanding what to expect next (40) 3. Praise their effort when they are working on a project or attempting a new activity. Those concentrating on their ability get frustrated more easily. In contrast, those attending their level of effort respond to frustration with more motivation and positive feelings. Praise their continued efforts rather than simply praise their current ability (28) 4. Avoid meltdowns by anticipating and preparing for triggering events. Use the Prevention Plan Form (20, 147) 5. Self-calming strategies: Getting a hug, swinging on the swing set, taking a walk, taking deep breaths, counting to 10, holding a favorite toy (a pup) and a squeeze ball. (42) When using humor, ask “Is it okay if I try to make you laugh to get your mind off of this?”(39) 6. Creating rules and consequences is an important starting point. Without rules and consequences, our lives would be chaotic (5) 7. Gradually expose your child to new foods by asking him first to just look at the foods. Next, ask him to smell them, taste them and eventually eat a small piece. Begin with sweet items (even candy) to allow your child to be open to trying new things. Exercise just prior to trying a new food can increase appetite (77, 78, 80) 8. A child’s passion can be the most effective distraction. Suggestions: Getting hugs, stuffed animals, favorite toys, books and looking out the window (38) 9. Give your child a sticker for each night he sleeps in his own bed. Most importantly, praise him so that he can take pride in his independence (143) 10. Set a time to do homework soon after school, before he gets too tired, and right after as snack, so he’s not hungry. Break down the homework into small steps and ask him to do one tiny part of it. Once started, he will likely be willing to do other parts as well (70) When children feel accepted and appreciated by us, they are more likely to listen to us (9)

Judy Parsons: It surprised me because Jim was never that big of a drinker. But I think that was part of his inner dedication, like, I’m gonna give that up, and focus completely on this part. And he did! I was a little shocked the first time he didn’t get a margarita when he came home ’cause in Texas we drink a lot of margaritas. But he stuck to that. Jim Parsons: I wasn’t being so good at focusing myself during that time. I didn’t have any schedule I had to keep. It’s not that anything got out of hand, but I knew that there was work ahead, and I wanted to be ready for it. I wanted to get out of this limbo-ish haze that was going on, but I still didn’t have anything to work on since we were waiting on a new date to shoot the pilot. So it was kind of my own project I could give myself. My thinking was, I’ll still go out and see people, but I’m now going to do it completely sober. I started moving my schedule into more of a “Be up in time for the first hour of the Today show” type of thing as opposed to getting up at the end of Regis and Kelly. And I really liked how I felt once I stopped drinking and started setting a schedule. I kept moving the goalpost, so to speak. I had no intention of going nine years. Instead, I was like, I’m going to wait and see if we get picked up. If we get picked up, then I’ll have a drink! And then from there it was Wait and see if we got picked up for the back nine episodes. And then from there it was Do we get a second season? And then, Can we get Emmy nominations? It was always something to the point it became a little bit of a superstition.

How to Pass 10th & 12th Class from Nios Open school in gurugram, sohna, manesar To pass 10th and 12th class from an open school, you can follow these general steps: Choose a recognized open school: Research and identify a recognized open school or board in your country or region that offers the 10th and 12th class examinations. Some well-known open school boards include the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) in India and the Open Schooling System in many countries. Enroll in the open school: Contact the open school or board and inquire about the enrollment process. They will provide you with the necessary information and forms to complete the registration. Typically, you will need to submit personal details, educational history, and any required documentation. Understand the curriculum: Obtain the curriculum and syllabus provided by the open school for the 10th and 12th classes. Familiarize yourself with the subjects and topics that you will be studying. It’s important to understand the course requirements to plan your studies effectively. Self-study and prepare: Since open schools provide flexibility, you will primarily be responsible for self-studying. Create a study schedule and allocate sufficient time to each subject. Utilize textbooks, online resources, and study materials provided by the open school. Take advantage of any tutoring or coaching options available to you. Attend contact classes (if available): Some open schools offer optional contact classes or tutorials to provide additional support to students. These classes are conducted by experienced teachers who can clarify doubts and provide guidance. If such classes are available, consider attending them to enhance your understanding of the subjects. Complete assignments and practicals: Open schools often require students to complete assignments, projects, and practical examinations alongside the theoretical exams. Pay attention to the guidelines provided by the open school and complete these tasks within the given deadlines. Take the examinations: Open schools have their own examination schedules. Register for the exams as per the instructions provided by the open school. Adhere to the examination timetable and make sure to reach the examination center on time. Prepare well and give your best during the exams. Results and certification: After the completion of exams, the open school will announce the results within a specific timeframe. Once you pass the exams, you will receive a passing certificate or mark sheet from the open school board. This certificate is recognized and holds the same value as certificates obtained from traditional schools. Remember, the specific process may vary depending on the open school or board you choose. It is important to closely follow the guidelines and instructions provided by the open school throughout the process. Contact for Admission: For more information for admission & and guidance please contact us on +91 9716451127, 9560957631

As a team gets bigger, the number of links that need to be managed among members goes up at an accelerating, almost exponential rate.” In his handbook Leading Teams, Hackman reminds us of “Brook’s Law”: the adage that adding staff to speed up a behind-schedule project “has no better chance of working … than would a scheme to produce a baby quickly by assigning nine women to be pregnant for one month each … adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

Your Trusted Source for High-Quality GC Sheets in Dindigul When it comes to sourcing top-notch GC sheets in Dindigul, one name stands out prominently - Shree Sivabalaaji Steels. Renowned for its commitment to quality and excellence, this company has established itself as a reliable supplier of galvanized corrugated (GC) sheets, catering to various industries and construction needs. At Shree Sivabalaaji Steels, quality is the cornerstone of their operations. They understand the significance of using superior-grade materials for construction and industrial purposes. GC sheets offered by the company are manufactured using advanced technology, ensuring durability, strength, and resistance to environmental factors. This ensures that the sheets maintain their integrity over time, even in harsh conditions. Variety is another feather in Shree Sivabalaaji Steels' cap. The company provides a wide range of GC sheet options to meet the diverse needs of its customers. Whether you require sheets of different thicknesses, sizes, or coatings, they have it all. This extensive selection empowers customers to choose the perfect GC sheets that align with their project requirements. One of the factors that set Shree Sivabalaaji Steels apart is their unwavering commitment to customer satisfaction. Their team of experienced professionals is always ready to assist clients in selecting the right type of GC sheets based on their specific needs. Whether it's for roofing, wall cladding, or any other application, customers can rely on their expertise to make informed decisions. Time efficiency and punctuality are the driving forces behind Shree Sivabalaaji Steels' operations. They understand that in the construction industry, timely delivery is of the essence. The company has implemented streamlined processes to ensure that customers receive their GC sheet orders on schedule, minimizing project delays and interruptions. Environmental consciousness is a key aspect of Shree Sivabalaaji Steels' philosophy. They recognize their responsibility towards sustainable practices and offer GC sheets that are manufactured using eco-friendly processes. This not only reflects their commitment to the environment but also resonates with customers who prioritize green building materials. Competitive pricing is yet another advantage that customers enjoy when partnering with Shree Sivabalaaji Steels. Despite offering high-quality GC sheets, the company maintains a pricing strategy that remains accessible and competitive. This affordability, coupled with the quality of their products, makes them a preferred choice among contractors, builders, and industries. In conclusion, for those seeking top-grade GC sheets in Dindigul, Shree Sivabalaaji Steels emerges as a reliable and customer-centric option. With their focus on quality, variety, expertise, punctuality, sustainability, and affordability, they have rightfully earned their reputation as a go-to supplier for GC sheets in the region. When you choose Shree Sivabalaaji Steels, you're not just purchasing construction materials; you're investing in a partnership that prioritizes your project's success.

Having fun is important, if only because it’s easier to demand more of ourselves when we’re giving more to ourselves. According to procrastination expert Neil Fiore, people who schedule playtime are more likely to tackle unappealing projects than people who never let themselves enjoy guilt-free fun until after their work is finished.

We like to think that we’re not ruled by schedules, that we can throw off the chains of habit at any time—but most people are creatures of routine. They’re comforted by the knowledge of what comes next. They need it to plan their lives and their projects.

John was never stressed. He completed important work ahead of schedule yet somehow found time for side projects.

Within each project, what are the three tasks that must be completed? What is fixed on my schedule? This would be a weekly review session, weekly planning session, exercise, and regular breaks. Structure is critical to success. I worked for years without a proven structure and my productivity suffered as a result. When identifying blocks or obstacles in your weekly schedule, consider these questions: What distractions regularly pull me away from my work? What is the #1 habit that delivers 80% of my results?

What project am I delaying right now? Why am I delaying this? What is the #1 task that, if completed, will impact my career in the long-term? What inescapable/unavoidable events or appointments are built into my schedule? Your daily review can be done quickly, and during this session, write down the #1 task for tomorrow. It’s highly recommended to know this before you go to bed rather than waking up and making that decision. Your brain will begin working on the problem even as you’re sleeping. What you go to bed with is what you wake up with.

the present moment. What can you get done today, tomorrow, or next week that will bring you that much closer to your final destination? See if you can project a bit and schedule just the first three steps on your list into your planning system. The rest will come later. Then go for it! Move ahead each day with the vision of that goal in mind and keep pressing forward.

Sample Quarterly Review Summary Successes Maintained peak-performance habits Stabilized the company and team Raised funds for next phase of growth Upgraded company-wide marketing Launched leadership development program Failures Worked too much, felt worn out Failed to follow-up on marketing project on time Missed language learning goals in Portuguese Extended two project deadlines unnecessarily Didn’t spend sufficient time with family and friends Insights Perfectionism is a big development opportunity Reading should be scheduled into the day The mind needs to be trained as much as the body Weekly reviews must result in new weekly commitments I want to become world-class at peak performance Actions Determine what are the non-negotiables in my life Increase output with a color-coded master calendar Bring the joy/be more intentional Hire a virtual assistant Create a weekly accountability checklist

Agile project management approaches are characterized by change expectancy, iterative development, phased deployments, collaboration, people focus, customer focus, timeboxing, detailed near-term schedules, frequent feedback loops, and constant risk management. DevOps and DevSecOps practices are an extension of agile approaches, include a new set of tools, technologies, and approaches, rely on a culture of collaboration, and are characterized by integrating the infrastructure operations and/or security quality into the entire systems development life cycle.

Even in his short service time he’d noticed how brass-heavy the agency was becoming, how expensive civilian consultants were brought in to advise on everything, how essential equipment projects had fallen behind schedule and grown massive cost overruns.

These teams started with a provisional plan, the “sheet music.” Film crews had a detailed daily schedule. The SWAT team outlined a plan for each mission—which specified, for example, who would cover the exits of a house, where snipers would be stationed, and when officers would bust down the door. But when things didn’t go as expected, because people understood one another’s roles so well and how their roles fit together, teams were adept at revising their plan on the spot.

star,” saving thirty-two hours a month. We worked with Rebecca on a follow-up Meeting Reset program for sixty Asana marketing employees, which resulted in each employee saving an average of five hours per month. Canceling meetings had the biggest impact (37 percent of total minutes saved). But the combined impact of scheduling meetings less often, making them shorter, and relying more on written communication and less on presentations and conversations was even bigger (63 percent of total minutes saved).

Time pressure was most destructive when people felt they were “on a treadmill” because their schedules were packed with fragmented and unimportant tasks, unnecessary meetings, and constantly shifting plans. The resulting frustration, anxiety, and inability to concentrate on their work undermined creativity. In contrast, time pressure didn’t undermine creativity when people felt their team was on an important mission and members had long stretches to focus on essential solo work.

Long-term planning. At the beginning of a semester, online course, or research project, block out your schedule to set up a studying regimen. You can do this easily with a free online calendar program from virtually all Internet providers or with a paper calendar or whiteboard.

Dealing with waste shouldn't complicate your projects. We Dump It offers reliable dumpster rental services, with various sizes and flexible schedules to fit your needs. We deliver and pick up promptly, ensuring your project continues without interruption. As a local business, we value the trust our community places in us and strive to provide top-notch, transparent service. For hassle-free waste disposal, choose We Dump It and keep your focus on what matters most. Contact us today!

The property owner, contractors, subcontractors, investors, the lender, project stakeholders, the architect, as well as project managers are each individually able to stay updated on the progress of the home-build through the Schedule of Values. Inasmuchas the Schedule of Values relates to billable work performed - and to tasks completed - during each draw period in the project. As each phase of the home build is completed - i.e.: as one draw period progresses to the next draw period - the project's Schedule of Values is updated. The updating of the S.O.V. in subsequent draw periods is directly relatable to forthcoming draw requests. For each new draw request, line items in the Schedule of Values - as per project progression in each draw period - are revised.

Big Foot Dumpsters & Removal, operated by Big Foot Moving & Storage, Inc., provides reliable roll-off dumpster rentals and junk removal services. We offer various dumpster sizes and utilize specialized hook trucks to navigate tight spaces, ensuring efficient waste disposal. With our team of professional movers, we deliver personalized solutions and flexible scheduling to meet the needs of any project, from small clean-ups to large construction jobs.

The sheer number of sequels and reboots doesn’t leave much room for big-budget movies with out-there ideas. In 1999, there were fewer than a half-dozen major-studio-released sequels—an almost unthinkably low number decades later, when release schedules often include more than thirty sequels or reboots per year. And no matter what kind of movie a director wants to make, studios are rarely interested in eking out modest sums on smaller, smarter projects—a model that made many of the films of 1999 possible.

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Becoming aware of her presence in the doorway, the men looked up. Westcliff rose from his half-seated position on the desk. “My lord,” Daisy said, “if I might have a word with you?” Although she spoke calmly, something in her expression must have alerted him. He didn’t waste a second in coming to her. “Yes, Daisy?” “It’s about my sister,” she whispered. “It seems her labor has started.” She had never seen the earl look so utterly taken aback. “It’s too early,” he said. “Apparently the baby doesn’t think so.” “But…this is off-schedule.” The earl seemed genuinely baffled that his child would have failed to consult the calendar before arriving. “Not necessarily,” Daisy replied reasonably. “It’s possible the doctor misjudged the date of the baby’s birth. Ultimately it’s only a matter of guesswork.” Westcliff scowled. “I expected far more accuracy than this! It’s nearly a month before the projected…” A new thought occurred to him, and he turned skull-white. “Is the baby premature?” Although Daisy had entertained a few private concerns about that, she shook her head immediately. “Some women show more than others, some less. And my sister is very slender. I’m sure the baby is fine.” She gave him a reassuring smile. “Lillian has had pains for the past four or five hours, and now they’re coming every ten minutes or so, which Annabelle says—” “She’s been in labor for hours and no one told me?” Westcliff demanded in outrage. “Well, it’s not technically labor unless the intervals between the pains are regular, and she said she didn’t want to bother you until—” Westcliff let out a curse that startled Daisy. He turned to point a commanding but unsteady finger at Simon Hunt. “Doctor,” he barked, and took off at a dead run. Simon Hunt appeared unsurprised by Westcliff’s primitive behavior. “Poor fellow,” he said with a slight smile, reaching over the desk to slide a pen back into its holder.

A representative customer, customer's representative, and/or knowledgeable user is involved on a continuing basis; involvement includes observation of periodic demonstrations of working, deliverable software at the ends of iterative development cycles that produce increments of working deliverable software (i.e., on a daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis). In addition, a representative customer, customer's representative, or knowledgeable user provides guidance for further product development based on demonstrations of working deliverable software and the constraints on project scope (schedule, budget, and resources).

Take your mission and yourself very seriously. Stick to your schedule and keep time. Cut expenditure of time and money from non-core activities and redirect to those that give more value to the pursuit of your purpose. Never embark on your work or a project without a plan, even if it’s just a mental plan. Use the old carpenter’s rule – “Measure twice and cut once.” Do not leave room for substandard results.

MGM produced an occasional nonstar feature, although these were rare and usually had some obvious hook to draw audiences. A good example of this type of feature was The Fire Brigade, a 1926 project scheduled for a twenty-eight-day shoot and budgeted at $249,556. The picture starred May McAvoy, a “featured player” at MGM, and was directed by William Nigh. The second-class status of the project was obvious from the budget, with only $60,000 going for director, cast, story, and continuity. But the attractions in The Fire Brigade were spectacle, special effects, and fiery destruction rather than star and director. The budget allowed $25,000 for photographic effects and another $66,000 for sets, a relatively high figure since many of the sets for the picture had to be not only built and “dressed” but destroyed as well.

He was willing to make real sacrifices to build real relationships. Sometimes we need to put aside projects and schedules for the sake of people. Like Jesus, we need to be interruptible.

The plot is simple: First, you take an urgent date-driven project, where the shipment date cannot be delayed because of external commitments made to Wall Street or customers. Then you add a bunch of developers who use up all the time in the schedule, leaving no time for testing or operations deployment. And because no one is willing to slip the deployment date, everyone after Development has to take outrageous and unacceptable shortcuts to hit the date. The results are never pretty. Usually, the software product is so unstable and unusable that even the people who were screaming for it end up saying that it’s not worth shipping. And it’s always IT Operations who still has to stay up all night, rebooting servers hourly to compensate for crappy code, doing whatever heroics are required to hide from the rest of the world just how bad things really are.

your blank schedule will fill up first with the big rocks, the nonnegotiable events, projects, and tasks that have specific timeframes.

Consolidate What’s Been Learned While it is true that you learn the most in the midst of a project, the lessons are not generally coherent. Any individual can have a great insight but may not have the time to pass it on. A process might be flawed, but you don’t have time to fix it under the current schedule. Sitting down afterward is a way of consolidating all that you’ve learned—before you forget it. Postmortems are a rare opportunity to do analysis that simply wasn’t possible in the heat of the project. Teach Others Who Weren’t There Even if everyone involved in a production understands what it taught them, the postmortem is a great way of passing on the positive and negative lessons to other people who were not on the project. So much of what we do is not obvious—the result of hard-won experience. Then again, some of what we do doesn’t really make sense. The postmortem provides a forum for others to learn or challenge the logic behind certain decisions. Don

You can predict with nearly 90 percent accuracy which projects will fail—months or years in advance. And now back to our premise. The predictor of success or failure was whether people could hold five specific crucial conversations. For example, could they speak up if they thought the scope and schedule were unrealistic? Or did they go silent when a cross-functional team member began sloughing off? Or even more tricky—what should they do when an executive failed to provide leadership for the effort?

The phrase “conflict of interest” barely begins to describe Tom Lanphier’s rabidly partisan approach to advising one of the most powerful congressional allies of the American military-industrial complex. Yet he was in good company. Air force intelligence was crammed with highly competitive analysts who believed they were in a zero-sum game not only with the Russians but also with the army and the navy. If they could make the missile-gap theory stick, America would have to respond with a crash ICBM program of its own. The dominance of the Strategic Air Command in the U.S. military hierarchy would be complete—and Convair would profit mightily. It is hardly surprising that the information Lanphier fed to Symington and Symington to every politician and columnist who would listen was authoritative, alarming, and completely, disastrously wrong. Symington’s “on the record” projection of Soviet nuclear strength, given to Senate hearings on the missile gap in late 1959, was that by 1962 they would have three thousand ICBMs. The actual number was four. Symington’s was a wild guess, an extrapolation based on extrapolations by air force generals who believed it was only responsible to take Khrushchev at his word when, for example, he told journalists in Moscow that a single Soviet factory was producing 250 rockets a year, complete with warheads. Symington knew what he was doing. He wanted to be president and believed rightly that missile-gap scaremongering had helped the Democrats pick up nearly fifty seats in Congress in the 1958 midterm elections. But everyone was at it. The 1958 National Intelligence Estimate had forecast one hundred Soviet ICBMs by 1960 and five hundred by 1962. In January 1960 Allen Dulles, who should have known better because he did know better, told Eisenhower that even though the U-2 had shown no evidence of mass missile production, the Russians could still somehow conjure up two hundred of them in eighteen months. On the political left a former congressional aide called Frank Gibney wrote a baseless five-thousand-word cover story for Harper’s magazine accusing the administration of giving the Soviets a six-to-one lead in ICBMs. (Gibney also recommended putting “a system of really massive retaliation” on the moon.) On the right, Vice President Nixon quietly let friends and pundits know that he felt his own boss didn’t quite get the threat. And in the middle, Joe Alsop wrote a devastating series of columns syndicated to hundreds of newspapers in which he calculated that the Soviets would have 150 ICBMs in ten months flat and suggested that by not matching them warhead for warhead the president was playing Russian roulette with the national future. Alsop, who lived well but expensively in a substantial house in Georgetown, was the Larry King of his day—dapper, superbly well connected, and indefatigable in the pursuit of a good story. His series ran in the last week of January 1960. Khrushchev read it in translation and resolved to steal the thunder of the missile-gap lobby, which was threatening to land him with an arms race that would bankrupt Communism. Before the four-power summit, which was now scheduled for Paris in mid-May, he would offer to dismantle his entire ICBM stockpile. No one needed to know how big or small it was; they just needed to know that he was serious about disarmament. He revealed his plan to the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at a secret meeting in the Kremlin on

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One of the main ways men project their pride is through self-pity. Men with this kind of pride see their lives as perpetually too hard and their schedules too busy, and they feel as though bad breaks happen to them too

One of the main ways men project their pride is through self-pity. Men with this kind of pride see their lives as perpetually too hard and their schedules too busy, and they feel as though bad breaks happen to them too often.