[BBLISA] pre-comment on tonight's meeting ("Fragile Ops")

[Bill Bogstad]

I'm hoping that Patrick Cable's talk tonight will provide the
magic bullet (or at least a hint) on how to deal with "customer" expectations
in the face of wildly varying errors in time estimates for tasks.

I see one of the core issues is that in many environments where I have worked
much of my day involved figuring out how to do something which I might
not have to
do again for months or even years.   Providing accurate time estimates
to customer's
under these circumstances seems virtually impossible.   Made more
difficult was that
5 minute tasks sometimes turned into 5 days and vice versa.

I'll close with a couple of paragraphs from a book I just read.   The
excerpt is about triaging the email of a boss, but it reminds of how
life sometimes felt in those environments.

Bill Bogstad

====

Ivan had developed a personal metaphor for this first task (after
coffee)  of the day.   It was like opening one's door to find that an
overnight delivery service had left a large pile of boxes on one's
porch, all marked "miscellaneous".  In reality, they were all marked
urgent, in Ivan's view they might as well be labeled miscellaneous.

Each box contained one of the following:

live, venomous, agitated snakes on the verge of escape;
quiescent venomous snakes;
nonvenomous garden snakes;
dead snakes;
or things that looked like snakes but weren't, such as large, sluggish worms.

It was Ivan's morning duty to open each box, identify, the species,
vigor, mood, and fang-count of the writhing things inside, and sort
them by genuine urgency.

===