“So what do we do? Anything. Something. So long as we just don't sit there. If we screw it up, start over. Try something else. If we wait until we've satisfied all the uncertainties, it may be too late."
[Lee Iacocca]The Big Apple:
On April 23rd, I boarded a flight from Los Angeles literally leaving a job site from FATPOT Technologies to report to a brand new position with Northrop Grumman in Brooklyn. There is very little in common between my life now and what I came from. With FATPOT, I was living in a relatively rural beach town and travelling on a schedule that could be called erratic or even borderline insane. Now, I find myself in a polar opposite world of the biggest city in the US and rarely even driving a car, much less flying somewhere. I have to say that I feel more at home in the big city. There is never a shortage of things to see and do. Any possible kind of food or entertainment is usually just a few train stops away. Having a more predictable schedule combined with being more physically active has made a huge difference. I've already lost 21lbs and will likely lose 20 to 30 more by Christmas. My family is currently down in Brazil visiting relatives, so I've had the freedom to really explore the city. I particularly enjoy walking around Times Square. The people watching alone is worth it, but the geek side is also fed with some pretty impressive technology on display.
The Big Job:
Part of why I haven't kept the blog up recently is my new job. For the past 9 years, New York city has been trying to completely overhaul its Emergency Communications infrastructure. They started with 9-1-1 services being spread across the five boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Long Island, Queens, and the Bronx. EMS, Fire, and Police all used antiquated systems that didn't talk and had their own share of autonomy that would be challenged by coming together. The intent was to consolidate everything and upgrade many of the systems to cutting edge technology. Originally, Hewlett Packard was brought on to manage the project. I'll avoid the easy target of questioning what the expected result of a consumer commodity company being in charge of a giant government project involving high levels of customization. The bottom line is that Phase one of the project did not go well and had huge schedule and budget overruns. In mild defense of HP, some of that was at the direction of the customer...but not all of it. As the project gained more and more negative press, the city created its own management office to provide better supervision and called it the Office of Citywide Emergency Communication. They replaced their previous independent oversight mechanism with NASA's Independent Verification & Validation office (yes, the space guys). Finally, they hired Northrop Grumman to serve as the System Integrator for the second phase of the program.
I have come on board as the Integration Manager with the principle goal of providing coordination, oversight, and final system integration and verification to all the individual projects that are bringing together New York's brand new 9-1-1 facility currently being constructed in the Bronx. Radio expansion, Network harmonization, Computer Aided Dispatch software replacement, Telecommunication Infrastructure build out, and over 50 different software interfaces to a host of other Public Safety related systems cross my radar every day. My challenge is to coordinate the dance that everyone must make in 2015 to ensure that every subsystem is correctly installed into the new facility, interconnected, and thoroughly tested to ensure that the first 9-1-1 call taken is executed flawlessly. There are occasional moments where I question my sanity on taking this on. Bust most days are head down through long hours enjoying the excitement of this challenge. System Integration is what Northrop Grumman does for a living and it has been my background now for well over a decade. I get to work each day with a great team of professionals and am learning from them all at the cyclic rate (Marine jargon for as fast as possible).
The Big Geek:
The past three months have had some huge adjustments. Diet and exercise have been a major improvement. I'm thoroughly enjoying the big city crowds and excitement. I spent almost two months with no furniture. And now I am on my second month of running my entire personal life on Linux. These are all some of the other factors on why I neglected the blog. I've finally reached a level of comfort to get back into full research mode. I have to say the addition of air conditioning to the apartment yesterday is probably the biggest one though. It's a bit tough to stay at the computer when your office feels like a sauna.
Linux adaption has been the big fight. Nearly two decades of always having a Windows machine available made me take some basic stuff for granted. Having to manually install drivers to watch DVDs or manually set the resolution on my second monitor have been the minor ones. Getting FitBit to work and opening my old Outlook .PST file have been major challenges that I have not really had solid victory on. FitBit simply has no support for Linux (unless you count Android) and I am stuck running Windows 7 in an Oracle VirtualBox until I get a new phone that supports Blue Tooth 4 devices. The .PST file has been even worse. I tried doing an import through Evolution and through readpst. After 36 hours of Linux actually bogging down so badly that it wouldn't respond, I had to kill the effort because I had more important things to do. Only about 60% to 70% of the mail got imported. The 9.3GB mail archive opened in seconds on my Windows machine at work. I may just have to look at the code on these projects to see if there isn't a more graceful and user friendly way to deal with large mail archives.
The Big TPM:
The great part about Northrop is that they really invest in their employees. I have access to an internal library of interactive training, the full Skillsoft library, and the program itself does regular internal training on basic project management process. I am looking forward to doing some writing about the importance of good requirements and test procedures that only a PM Geek could enjoy. More to come...
