Management Nugget No 16: “Know your deliverables”

“A completed project is the deliverable, not a completed project plan”

Explanation:

One thing that affects larger projects and particularly affects a number of project managers who tend to think about the organisation of a project rather than the project itself. Is that people lose sight of what actually constitutes a deliverable, and therefore you end up spending a lot of time actually delivering to the organisation of a client or company, when that is not a genuine deliverable,  1

The easiest way to see this in action is on project plans with particular reference to delivery dates. while the dates are important milestones, they are only important in respect to the information they provide to other parts of the project, for example a financial audit or arranging a training company or what ever, and unless they are backed up with solid logic and delivery foundations you are building a house of cards, be very very wary of people who want a delivery date based on a guess just so they can fill in a plan.

However the important part of this is to make sure that delivery capable people, such as developers, or business analysts do not spend excessive time doing this, such time is lost time to the real delivery of the project, if a PM needs such dates then they should be the person working them out not transferring this difficulty to someone else.

Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.

FootNotes
  1. A Genuine delivery is one that either saves/makes money for a company or materially effects its place in the market place[]

Acid Bath and Acid Sam

The “Acid bath” is a standard fitness set which consists of the following:

For standards these all have to be done on the concept2 range of equipment, and they are done at the end of a session.

My current pre session consists of

5 rounds ( not done for time) of:
3 chin ups
5 dips
15 Kettlebell Swings (@ 24kg for me)
250m Ski erg (steady pace)

Adult males are supposed to do it in 6 mins or less, ladies in 7 mins.

I can just do it under 6 minutes (5:52) and it’s significantly harder on the concept 2 stuff, than it is on the run of the mill gym equipment, as the week before this video, I managed a 5:25 with no worries and even a sip of water.

I will post regular attempts at trying to get this time down, just as a personal record.

Also I’m a little bit obsessed with something I’m going to call “Acid Sam”.

So Sam Bradley my awesome PT. Does kettlebells as his major thing with me, and it’s taught me to love them far more than normal weights. One of his challenges is to do 100 kettlebell swings (using a session weight of 24kg) in five minutes, currently I can comfortably do it in 10 mins and at a push can do it in 9.

However, this begs the terrible question if you can do the 100 kettlebell snatches in five minutes, and a reasonably good time to do the Acid bath is also 5 minutes, then theoretically you could do them both back to back in 10 minutes.

Extremely stupid, but awesome to have a good goal.

Corporate phrase: “Silo Guardian”

Explanation:

Someone who works in a massively provincial or localised way, resisting any form of globalisation or integration with other systems, such people have often been burnt by previously failed global projects or are just protecting a job, not necessarily evil and often quite talented, just resistant to any change. Sometimes called a “Smaug”

Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.

Why do a Role?

Why do you do a job role?

This is something that I had a pat answer for many years ago, it was a tripod of reasons I was once told by a contractor.

  1. You do it for money.
  2. You do it for the CV.
  3. You do it because you enjoy it.

You aim for all three of these. You settle for two and you leave at one.

While this logic worked when life was black and white, time and experience seemed to make it seem overly simple, but when you get right down to it, is it? You might have to amend the tripod legs a little bit to make them a bit more comprehensive, but it might still apply. So let’s go through them one by one 

“You do it for money”: Well what do we mean by “Money”, do we mean the market rate?, do we mean enough to retire early?.

Thankfully in the job market there is actually a good general definition for this kind of thing, it comes from a number of the big tech companies, and that is when you pay a resource, you must pay enough money so that they don’t have to think about money day to day, it might not be heaps and heaps, but it’s enough so that people are not distracted from their job by external money problems, doesn’t worry about holidays, does not become worried in the week before pay/invoice day, this will be a balancing act as such an amount is normally above the base market rate that HR and finance use, so as a manager if you are trying to achieve this with your staff members you will have a never ending battle.

“You do it for the CV”: This one is the one that needs firming up the most, because “good for your CV” defines a lot of things, are you at the beginning of your career and just want to bulk up your CV to make it useful, or are you thinking of moving into a specific region or market, I have found through 25 years of being in the corporations and particularly in corporate IT, that about five years is about as far ahead as you can think. Technology changes so much that it’s best not to get bogged down in one year, as you learn a lot of stuff that will die (even if that might show you are cutting edge), But thinking of more than five years and the whole world can change. So, go for that. Think of what this will do for you in the range of two to five years. Finally also think If you have to delete this role from your skill set will that be doable, Some skills actually prove to be toxic to your end CV, or removed for another reason e.g. you did some work for a Government agency. So if you’re going to take one of these on purely for the money, then can you afford to take it off afterwards? 

“You do it because you enjoy it.”, This one is the most subjective. It might seem like you enjoy something, but it might actually just mean the work itself. You might find it technically challenging or socially challenging, but do you genuinely enjoy it as a whole? are work politics toxic?, are there some days you enjoy far more than others, when some people are on holiday is the job much much more fun, on this I think you are going to have to go with an average, and if that is tricky, think of what you feel like when you come back to it from a weeks holiday, are you keen to get stuck in, or are your dreading one part such that it overshadows your whole work.

 

So to me, it DOES seem the tripod, the old contractor way of working things out, still holds true in a more complex time and setting, But you need to think a little bit more about each leg before you make your decision.

For example, enjoyment might not be pure job enjoyment. It might be a case of you are there because a particular person is also there, who working for makes the whole thing fun, if you remove that person is it still fun, look at the company. Is this an enjoyable company to work for. work through each of your legs and try and find a job you genuinely find worth your time and energy.

Black fortress at Bad Moon Cafe, an unexpected Success

Blackstone fortress is a now slightly discontinued game by Games Workshop. It was basically half board game, half RPG in which you play a session, save your progress and then take that progress on with your now upgraded characters in the next session.

It had a couple of advantages over a lot of other board games, in that it was cooperative, you CAN play on your own and that it also had a tonne of expansions (See the pictures at the bottom), it also still has an awful lot of community support, both in terms of extra scenarios and extra support for characters, + third party 3d printed stuff etc, etc, etc.

So it was strange that something so popular and so beloved got cancelled.

As I had just got the first boxset this was a bit of a pain as a number of the expansions were more than a little rare and so would never get a reprint, however with the help of a couple of friends, we managed to get everything before the scalpers got us.

Then we settled down to the solid job of painting. Blackstone is famous for the quality and diversity of its models, We got the base box painted and then sat down for our first game. It was a bit steep on the old initial learning curve but we got the hang of it, however we’re mainly painters not gamers. So once we’d had one big session, we put it back in the box and got on with painting miniatures.

Then comes the move away from my office to the far more communal setting of Bad Moon Cafe, and with that comes people coming up to you and saying “Hello, my name is X. Can I join you?” It’s a very open and easy going place like that, that was how our little group started to grow, soon the option of playing actual games came up, not being hard bitten wargamers various less stressful games were mentioned, then Blackstone came up,

“you’ve got Blackstone!!? painted?. Let’s play that, I’ve always wanted to”.

So I bring the initial box, and a new person joins us starting that day, because for some reason its a game people want to play. now Blackstone is very much like 40K Rogue trader, in that while just the players can control it, and you can even play it totally on your own, it benefits from a bit of DM’ing to bring out the best in it.

Initially the guys had the normal battle with the rules, but one offer to do the DM role later and we are having a very, very high speed fun game.

Everyone was very enthusiastic, with multiple people coming up and checking/confirming what the game was, and could they join in future weeks (not a problem its easy for people to drop on and off with out causing issues with the campaign). 

Again why GW cancelled the damn thing I will never know. 

Anyway, here we are, and we’re going to do a long term game and report it here. and if there’s multiple people, or people get out of sync, we’re not gonna get over excited about it. We’re going to run multiple scenarios and report all here.

So a brief overview to those of you who have glared at Blackstone’s rules and wondered what was going on.

Basically is  a number of short scenario games.

They could be a small skirmish battle with a layout, or they could be a card challenge, or they could be just a series of dice rolls.

Each one of these encounters can take between 30 seconds and half an hour.

And you get rewards for completing these “encounters”. These come in 2 forms 1) Upgrades for your character. 2) Clues for a chance to fight the big boss(s).

Fight 4 big bosses and you get a chance to fight the biggest boss.

That’s basically the core idea. Each expansion added on to this makes it more and more involved and more and more complex, and can take the same characters all the way along, in the meantime they’re adding extra characters, extra diversity etc etc

A good fun game once you got the hang of it and perfect for a setting such as Bad Moon.

I would actually like to apologise to Bad Moon Cafe at this point. I booked our normal painting table with an option for playing Blackstone on it. Then didn’t do any painting, blocked line of sight with a huge painting box. Barely ordered any food and drink, occupied three tables, forgot to pay the gaming charge. Basically got in the way, then finished everything in a flurry and left exhausted.

Sorry, it’ll be cleaner next week If you let us back, however the pizza was great.

Campaign 1: Current progress 

  • Explorers: Janus Draik, Pious Vorne, Amallyn Shadowguide, UR-025
  • Upgrades: None (they have not been back to Precipice yet) 
  • ArcheoTech: 12 Points
  • Clues: 4 
  • Discovery Cards played: 5

 

A slight background for Blackstone 

As you can see above, there is a huge mixture of bolt-ons, add-ons and bits and bobs for Blackstone. There are several major expansions that introduce game changing rule differences. There are a myriad of smaller expansions which add extra characters and a few specialist challenges. Then there are tonnes of rule expansions + campaigns and such like, that came out in white dwarf, that were compiled into annuals, and then finally, there were all of the naughty little GW ways of getting you to spend more money, which is to bring out a rule in white dwarf that requires you to buy a box-set to get one miniature, we managed to get them all and then in addition there is one  company that did all of the 3d scenery, which fit Blackstone. This alone occupies about two large boxes. we have not painted all of these but we will get round to it. But as you can see, they will really add to the game.