RE: The last minute crunch

[John Posada <JPosada -at- book -dot- com>]

What do I do those gazillion hours?  Things like last minute comments and
requests from developers, "Say Sam, I just thought of this....."  Each one
is small, but they all add up. They do know what they can ask me and when.
For example, I won't usually redesign the entire book 30 seconds before
it's due. Also, there's a bunch of back-end testing and processing I have
to do to my html files. Actually, I could do those earlier in the cycle.
=============================

Sam..I went for a cup of coffee and started thinking.

The elements you described below are not the reason...they are the symptoms
of not being involved earlier in the cycles.

You should be asking yourself...WHY are so many things coming to you at the
end? Why don't you know earlier? Following is what I use to get warnings:

- Their status reports that I can review to tell me what my developers are
working on.
- Change requests to warn me of what may be coming down the line.
- Work requests that come from business owners telling of features that need
to be created.
- QA deployment notices that alert me of something being deployed in QA that
will be in Prod in 2-3 weeks.
- Drop in on project review meetings, hopefully invited, ask to attend if
not.
- A shared directory of folders where developers place their
files...maintain a copy local and on period basis, do a comparison between
the online and local folders to see what's changed. I use an application
that compares two directories side by side.
- Access the VSS directories and once a week do a search for anything
changed in the last 7 days.
- Nose around the printer to see what's being printed.

John Posada
Information Hunter-Gatherer
Special Projects; Information Technology
Barnes&Noble.com
NY: 212-414-6656 


-----Original Message-----
From: Samuel Choy [mailto:schoy -at- us -dot- ibm -dot- com]
Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2003 2:18 PM
To: John Posada; TECHWR-L
Subject: RE: The last minute crunch


John Posada

Well, of the gazillion hours, what do you spend the majority of them on?
Use
that as a guideline to know if you had everything up to control to that
point.


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