Hello all,
When I finished my civil engineering studies and looked for a job, I was interviewed by an engineer who was running a personal business. We were chatting and the issue of deadlines came up. I told him I dislike the Greek engineering tradition of working weekends and nights to make the deadline. I believed that if you organize well you can deliver painlessly. This was his reply:
In theory that is correct. However, in my experience, delivering without working overnight is not possible.
My father—a civil engineer—laughed when I told him.
Fast forward fifteen years later. It dawned on me that, while I was a child, he had never—not once—been absent throughout the night. I had no memory of my father sleeping during the day following a project delivery. So I went and asked him.
Sure, he said. We never stayed overnight, and we never missed deadlines. We organized and finished on time. We were pretty much the only such civil engineering office around—everyone else was staying overnight, and they were refusing to believe that it can be avoided.
It sounds like a mass delusion, doesn’t it? And yet it’s pretty much what has been happening worldwide in software projects, albeit with different symptoms. Maybe not the overnight work, but projects are late and they exceed their budget. We do have the experience and the methods to avoid it. But we also have a bad tradition—that software projects are late and exceed their budget.
I wonder whether there is a parallel in logistics too. Maybe in project logistics? If you can illuminate me, hit reply!
Regards,
Antonis
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