It's almost like running a kitchen again

[janewilliams20]

Only instead of a one-day cooking event with half-a-dozen helpers, it's a three-week project of three developers.

It wasn't us who decided what needed to be done by the deadline, or who set that deadline. It was us who said "yes, as long as nothing else interrupts us, and we mean nothing, we can do this. And it was two of us who then sat down and worked out the detailed  timetable for how to do it, late Monday night. Lots of dependencies and having one resource bottle-necking others, and since neither of us are project managers, we used Excel, not Project, But really, it's no harder than working out that you have to chop the onions before you cook them, and that you can't serve the geese and the honeyed parsnips in the same course, because they won't both fit in the oven.

So far, it's working. I'm rather glad I left more contingency time in there than the "real" project manager wanted, because interruptions did happen, and some jobs are taking a little longer than anticipated, When part 1 of a job is "write the spec", and you can't sensibly estimate the time to code it until you have that spec, these things happen. I was meant to have a fairly slack day today anyway, due to dependencies that couldn't be worked round, but in fact got a lot futher ahead on one of the "can do it anytime" tasks than I'd anticipated, and can pick up some of the load from one of the others as a result. I'd originally pencilled myself in for a couple of evenings working late to do big data uploads when the users are off-line, but in fact I think I've got the code tuned to the point where I can run it during the day. I'll do a bit more of my own "any time" job tonight, get it ready for the next input on Tuesday/Wednesday, then probably do the pick-up job Sunday ready to get back to my own work on Monday. No, I don't have to do that, but we've got so little built-in contingency, I'd rather be ahead of the game.

This is a challenge, but it's a challenge we can do, and we're going to have a lot of fun doing it. It's a great little team, with a nice range of semi-overlapping. skills.

 By the way, if there's anyone in the Stevenage area who can code MySQL, or ColdFusion, or Flash, and wants a short-term job in the next few weeks, get in touch? If we can lessen the pressure by throwing more resources at the problem, we will.