I work with a small Group of about 12 other computernicks in my day job at World Wide
Widgets. This Group is part of a larger (maybe 35 people total) R&D Department located about
a mile away. That Department is one of several departments and plants that come under the
umbrella of the Materials Transformation Division of WWW. This larger Division entity
consists of seven locations around the world. We also have a number of outside customers that
we deal with, and these sites too are located all over the world.
Our Small Group (OSG) has interaction with and we do projects from time to time with all of
these locations. At any one time, OSG may have active projects with two internal and maybe
two more external customer sites. These projects can last anywhere from a couple of months to
several years, and at different times different members of OSG may have an active participation
with any one of these customers. We have due dates on projects with these customers that must
be met. We have to allocate the correct resources to these projects at the proper times.
Somehow we have to keep all of this stuff straight. There is really no difference between what
we are doing, and what a small dozen person business here in Spokane might do, except that we
maybe travel longer distances to get to the customer sites than the local cabinet maker might.
But that cabinet maker still has to plan how to use his people best, and to make sure that the right
people are available at the right times to do their parts of the job, and to make sure the customer
ultimately gets what he paid for, on time, in good shape.
So you have a rather complicated communications and scheduling problem. And that's one of
the reasons why my boss gets the big bucks, because up till now, he has had the charter to deal
with all this.
One way to deal with the problem of scheduling and resource allocation is to keep everybody in
meetings all day long, so that you can be real up to date on everything they are doing. Now, one
of my favorite activities of the work day is to go to a meeting. I really mean it. It is considered
quite politically correct to moan and groan about having to truck off to Another Darn Meeting,
but I truly love them. Which of course is why I rarely get asked to go to these things. The
problem with having lots of meetings is nobody would ever get anything done this way.
Some years ago we decided to put in a computer network in our department offices, with the
justification being that we could bolt in some groupware packages to make all these meetings
less necessary. While the email component of the network has paid off enormous benefits, we
never really found any groupware stuff that really did what we wanted. Part of that problem of
course is we don't know really what we want, but we hope to know it when we see it. We want
some way to let our technical people beaver away on their projects, but have the managers kept
fully abreast on what the techies are doing, and when they are going to do it.
There is a product on the market named Lotus Notes. I have always thought that it might be the
solution to whatever the problems are that we perceive to have, but when it first came out it was
horrible expensive, something like sixty thousand dollars for a license. It is much cheaper now,
but rumor has it that you need a staff of programmer types to configure the product for what you
want it to do, so you still end up paying for it. Some other parts of WWW have bought it and
some of them are having second thoughts because of the complexity of using it. I have no direct
experience with it, sad to say. It would probably make for an interesting article.
We are also using a product named Keyfile, which was described in this journal a couple of
months back by another author. We were given to believe that Keyfile can be more Noteslike
than Notes itself. Perhaps so, but we are presently only using it for its archival storage features.
We tried to create a home grown version of what in web newsgroup land is called a moderated
news group. We set up an email account for a project. Everybody who had anything to say
about the project copied their email to this account. Some one person (moi) was designated to
keep a living document together by updating this document with all that email, and keeping cross
references to everything, eliminating redundancies, cleaning up the language, in effect acting as
an editor. Even for a small project this becomes quite time consuming, and the idea was
abandoned after the one trial.
Since a large chunk of our Department consists of engineers, somebody decided to try to use
project management software. This at least could handle some of the scheduling problems that
we were having, and being electronic, if some part of the schedule slipped, or if some urgent
project appeared out of nowhere, that information could be added to the project management
database, everything could be recalculated, the Gantt charts could be regenerated, and you would
quickly get some idea of how the other projects would be affected, what the critical paths would
become, and therefore where to allocate your resources. The problem here is that these project
management programs were designed for construction projects full of sweaty hourly workers and
hauling in loads of concrete and rebar and other equipment, and we are a research and
development Group, consisting mostly of desk jocky nerd people and very little of concrete and
bolts, let alone sweat. And, these programs are mostly designed to be run by one person, who
may generate a PERT chart printout to let everybody else know how bad things really were once
a week or so, but it was not groupware by a long shot. The whole group did not get a shot at
using this stuff, only the person that had the responsibility of entering the data. We still do use
this tool at the beginning of a project, but we have found that keeping it all up during a project
has not paid off, at least for our kind of Group.
The OSG is not the only such organization with these problems in the world. Not only is
Spokane full of a lot of little businesses about our size, but Western Washington is home to one
of the largest organizations in the world that has to deal with these same concerns. I speak of
course of the Evil Empire of Redmond. Whatever problems we may have, they have to the
power of. The good news is, they have the resources to deal with the problem, and much as I
think of hurling when I have to use one of their applications, they just might have come up with
something that will finally release the power of the Lan, something that might truly be called
groupware, without the need for a staff of groupetts to make it work.
Their solution to this problem is called Team Manager. You can get the full sales treatment for
this thing on their web site (it should be called www.eer.com but its not). It is interesting that the
introduction to their sales blurb gushes about how useful this product would be for those
companies considering downsizing their employee staff soon. Gag! But even for those of us that
still have full time jobs for another month or so, it does appear to have some significant uses.
It is truly groupware. The bosses get a different version of the package than do the troglodytes of
course, with more privileges and features. But everybody can look at the data, customize the
data, and get an idea of how any of the group's projects are going, and more specifically, what
you are scheduled to do, when you are scheduled to be done doing it, and where you are in the
whole big picture. The data input for this product is from your current email system, and the
database runs on your existing lan. It gives you one stop shopping for consolidating all the
scheduling information for a series of projects that a group might be working on. Of course, it
integrates wonderfully with other EER products like Project Manager and Schedule+. Of course,
being Version 1.0, it does not integrate real well with anybody else's stuff yet. Or perhaps the
EER thinks that there is nobody else worth integrating with......
The good news for the likes of me, guys in the trenches, is that you do have some idea of what
your boss thinks you ought to be doing this day or this week, which is sometimes different than
what he told you last week that you should be doing this week. The world is dynamic, problems
arise, and priorities change. For a pre dementia candidate like myself, I like having something
written down that I can refer to, rather than to rely solely on my parity filled poor grey cells.
If I have a problem with this product, it is that everything seems to roll down hill in a rather
impersonal way. According to the sales blurb, the Big Boss uses his copy of Project Manager to
generate a project schedule, and dumps this on his submanagers. They then parcel out individual
tasks to their direct reports, and finally the Lowly Programmer opens up his schedule book and
finds Big Brother telling him that he is expected to rewrite the corporate budget process, and the
due date is noon today. As our Lowly Programmer toils through his assigned tasks, he keep his
local PIM scheduler (one written by the EER of course) up to date, and this information gets sent
back up the river to the middle managers and finally to the Big Boss.
This fond impersonal way of running a person's life probably works just fine on the EER
campus. Given that your organization has a somewhat more personable way of handing out task
assignments (and Our Small Group certainly does!) This package can probably be configured to
be less of a robocop and more of a true scheduler and planner product. Regretfully, as of now I
cannot speak from direct use of the product. But I am not aware of anything else on the market
that seems to have the true groupware features, without the overhead support requirements, that
this product seems to contain.
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Afterwords
Since I wrote this article, we never did buy the product. Part of the problem was Microsoft was
uninterested in providing hooks for this product to other forms of email systems. In our case, we
use Novel Groupwise, which the EE of course had no interest at all in supporting.
Secondly, Microsoft appears to have pulled the plug on this product, for whatever the reason. It
is too bad. I think it would have solved a lot of problems.
We have now gone to a "roll your own" sort of system, where we are using Access databases to
keep track of the stuff that we think is vital to our organization. Everybody can get to this from
their workstations, and to some extent it is customized towards what we want.
But in cases like this, I really think a commercial product would be the better choice.