This week has been a really busy week (seems like they've all been really busy recently, I guess that's the joy of projects work). I have had the most incredible time in Cologne, Germany. I'll be sharing a few more posts on this a bit later I'm sure, but here's a quick summary for you.I first met up with one of my friends and spent the weekend exploring and then this week we have been training users on our software and then getting feedback from them.
My quote today focuses on the importance of time. When I was looking through my diary to find a quote, I saw this one and immediately thought of the Cologne Dom (which is the background of the picture above). The construction of this beautiful building started in 1248 and was halted in 1473 and once the work had restarted in the 19th century it was finally completed in 1880. For those who are too lazy to calculate, I'll summarise for you - from start to finish, this Cathedral took 632 years to build! That is an incredibly long time, can you just imagine the number of generations that helped to create and build this masterpiece? And can you imagine the project management of something this huge?!
I then started thinking about this in more depth and thought about how applicable this has been to me and my team in the course of our project. As we don't all meet in person very often, we have sometimes had to be very creative in terms of our time usage (such as having meetings and performing tests in parallel) in order to maximise the time we spend together and get the most benefit out of it. In some cases we have succeeded in managing our time creatively. In other cases, we have not been particularly creative in managing our time together, but hopefully we have learnt from it and can improve it at our next face-to-face meetings. I think the biggest learning from this trip is that as a project team, we need to insist that users have their days completely dedicated to performing the User Acceptance Tests and ideally we want the users to sit in the same office as us so that we can assist and clarify information when needed. If users sit in their own offices, there is a high probability that they will be distracted from testing with other plant issues that inevitably crop up and need urgent attention.
Feel free to share any suggestions for using time creatively below, I'd love to hear them!
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