Work by Remote

Dr. Hank: You have developed great expertise in Project Management. How did you get interested in this field?

Terry: My love of projects began in high school when I launched a small rocket loaded with guppies. That project earned national press coverage and motivated me to study aerospace engineering. During a summer internship at NASA, I devoured all the project and program management books in their library. This ignited my passion for Project Management and systems thinking, which considers how all the elements of large and complex systems work together to accomplish the big picture goal.

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In the vernacular, there’s a saying that goes, maraming namatay sa akala. It means that it’s not always wise to assume that a person has understood what you mean, or has gotten your message.

This did in me today.

Early on, I emailed my one team about interlinking. By this I meant that we link other pages of the site or other relevant information in the site to every relevant entry. I even included in that email, examples of interlinking, and some how to’s.

At first, I didn’t even think the samples and how to’s were necessary, thinking that I was dealing with a team who knew about this stuff already.

As I would check their reports, I found out that many of them got it. So I assumed that everyone understood it, too.

I was dead wrong!

All the while I thought this team member got what I meant by interlinking. Then just by a hunch, I checked on the links in her entries, and there I found out that she was not interlinking at all!

I panicked and so checked the outputs of other team members. Good thing, they were doing it correctly. Only one was doing it incorrectly. I called her attention to it, and my fears were confirmed. So now, she would be editing her entries, and we’d be wasting precious time doing rework.

Lessons learned:

• do not assume anything especially when you’re communicating with your team through emails and chat
• make a follow through when communication is virtual in nature
• monitor constantly, not regularly, of how your team is making progress
• I also notice that when you slacken your monitoring, they also slacken their focus

I was again testing the usability of one of my website projects today and thought how else the site can be improved.

I know a LOT has yet to be done, but the issues on usability is to me the most urgent one. After all it’s what users see. They don’t see the codes or the back-end system that makes the website work.

NZHerald online has good tips for website usability. After I’ve read its top tips, though some of them I already know, still I found good insights there.

Here are the questions that the tips addressed.

1. I’ve a lot of information to put on to my site. How can I organise it so visitors find what they are after?

2. How can I make my website easier for users to find their way around, more intuitive?

3. What are the key elements any website should have?

4. How can I ensure visitors don’t get “lost” on my site? What should I leave out?

5. What’s the best way to manage links? Any tips on making online forms?

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Quality is top on my list. Because of this, I’m highly critical of things. I want everything to be in order, services given on time, and information as complete as possible.

Thus, it irked me to see incomplete information on websites or even typographical errors. I cringe when I see glaring grammatical errors on them.

For me, attention to details is the first step to putting quality on my work. The same principle I want to see applied to my teammates’ work.

Oftentimes, I don’t see it, and I get frustrated.

One of our website projects is a conference directory, so all the more we need to put in correct information: date of the conference, venue and location, contact details, and official event website. Only these four basic info and they can’t give them?

Why can’t my teammates get it?

That is the order of business for me every day. I juggle from creative work to technical work. I do the creative stuff first in the morning, and then the technical ones in the afternoon.

For a while that arrangement worked well for me. Until my creativity got affected somehow, which in turn affected my technical work output.

Why so? Simply because these two seldom mix.

Creativity requires time. It doesn’t follow any schedule or a task list. I have to summon my muse before I can produce something creative. In my case, before my muse comes to me, I have to do one or all of the following (depends really on the muse):

1. stare into space for a long time, sometimes daydream
2. clean up my desk
3. clean up my wallet
4. read a book
5. listen to music
6. surf the Net
7. have coffee
8. eat
9. look out the window
10. the list could go on and on

What’s disconcerting sometimes is that no matter how I entice the muse to come, she won’t. So, I do the rigodon again and I entice her some more because there are deadlines to meet.

Funny, though because at times when the deadline is staring right at me, I just babble and doodle, and in the middle of all that my muse looks on, reacts, and gets to work. But there are really times that she doesn’t appear at all!

The technical side is easier, though. This is not to belittle the work of technical people, but I find it easier because it’s an exact science. I don’t need to call in my muse to be able to work on it. It’s more of a thinking exercise than an emotional one. So I just gather my brain cells and get down to work. =)

Now, to keep my sanity, I have to do each task on alternate days. That’s what I have been doing for the past month, and I like it so far.

It all boils down really to time and task management. If you want to turn in a good job at every step you need to have a schedule and follow it diligently (I don’t want to say, ‘to the letter’ because diversions sometimes are good, too).