The Joys of Project Management
I'm taking a graduate level project management course this semester. There are a few things so far that may directly apply to my job and would allow for some improvements in how we manage projects, but the political implications of doing so would be...interesting.
The textbooks used for this class really need to give better examples however. I understand the point is that we should focus on the process, and not the actual project, it is still kind of silly.
A tutorial for Microsoft Project 2007 suggests a small CPA firm I work for wants to network its 5 computers with a budget of 50,000 dollars, and a time limit of 6 months. I actually laughed out loud when I read this.
First of all, the book has a copyright date of 2009. This isn't an old book. There are no small businesses who are not networked at this point. Even at minimum, every small business in America has some haphazard network connecting all their machines to a cable modem or something to get out on the Internet.
The whole thing could be done in literally hours cowboy style, and if done properly with structured cabling (as opposed to holes bashed in walls and random patch cables run room to room), documentation, backups, etc , it wouldn't take more than a few days.
So yes, it's all about the project management process, but they really could have chosen a project that has more realistic costs and timeline. This isn't doing any of the non-technical people in the class any favors.
Trying to prevent lab users from forgetting their USB jump drives
One of the things I do at work is manage some university computer labs. Our student workers keep an eye on things, and noticed an increasing number of people were walking away leaving their USB jump drives still plugged into the computer. (It seems like most students call them a "USB" now, which to me is the same thing as calling a firewire hard drive a "firewire," but I digress...)
Anyway, I Googled around a bit, and wrote some VBscript code to add to our logout script to try to detect USB drives. It works pretty well, since we've had a huge reduction of lost drives piling up in our lost and found drawer since the script was put in place.
Set FSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set Drives = FSO.Drives
strMessage = "Please unplug your USB Drive!" & vbcr & vbcr & "Please unplug your USB Drive!" & vbcr & vbcr & "Please unplug your USB Drive!" _
& vbcr & vbcr & "DO NOT FORGET!"
For Each DiskDrive In Drives
If DiskDrive.DriveType = "1" Then
If DiskDrive.IsReady = "True" Then
strMbox = MsgBox(strMessage ,48,"Unplug USB Drive")
End If
End If
Next