Friday, November 1, 2013

The Start to Finish conundrum

Numerous project management discussions and fora and seminars, and all participants love to ask for examples for a Start to Finish (S2F) scenario. They love to put the presenter in a spot, and most of the times they succeed. The most usual response to their request is met with a belligerent grin followed by an expression which conveys bonhomie - which might have been or might have not been present till this point in the time continuum. Mutual comraderie apart, the response also never fails to acknowledge the shared common confusion which the questioner is trying to announce, but the presenter suo moto offers an explanation that one would rather use a 'Finish to Start' relationship - thus ducking the need to present an example.

History repeats itself, and will do so again. So when this cadent flummoxed moment presents itself again, be ready to claim it.
Our presumptuous nature makes us think about these task relationships with respect to time. We interpret a Finish to Start (F2S) relationship, as the task which has to be done 'first' must finish so that the next step can start. Nothing wrong with that, but as soon as the same bourgeois logic attempts to explain a S2F relationship, it looks like child Krishna asserting his innocence to his mother with butter all over his face.

The logic to consider is: which activity is the driver and which activity is the driven one. As soon as 'le temp' is left out of the logic, the conundrum fails to manifest.
Best examples would be tasks for which start dates have been fixed - like birthdays, weddings etc. One would work backwards from the target date - and using the S2F relationship for antecedent tasks.

Monday, June 17, 2013

Android phone, Google calendar and the sync with outlook desktop client calendar

It did take me some time to decide what I wanted to do, because managing official engagements on the outlook desktop client with my personal calendar on Google, was making a juggler out of me.

With the Android phone coming into the equation it was clear that Google calendar had to be my primary calendar. Any engagements that I was picking adding from Gmail into my G-cal were available on my Phone automatically. So now the question was how to get the official engagements from the Outlook desktop client to update my Google calendar?
At least at that point in time, a Google Calendar Sync tool was available from the Google website. WHat it did was it picked up my engagements from the Outlook calendar and added it to my Google calendar. And I was able to see a merged view on my Google calendar. Perfect!

Even though the G-cal sync tool is not available from the Google website, but the good news is that is you have the installer, it still works! ;-)

So, for people who are still looking to use it while it works, here is the installer.
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-1-phq5QjftR2lGUkFiNEYtSTQ&usp=sharing

Cheers!