Project Management

Visitor number 1 left on Monday to go to Cordoba, planning on coming back briefly for a couple of hours on Friday to collect his stuff and go on to Buenos Aires. Visitor number two was due to arrive on Thursday and stay till Friday morning. Visitor number three was due to arrive on Friday morning and stay till Saturday.
What actually happened…
Visitor number 1 returned a day early, on Thursday, nearly went on to Buenos Aires, decided not to go on to Buenos Aires, almost cancelled his ticket to Buenos Aires, and then went to Buenos Aires. This was really somebody else’s fault who probably needed to be shot, except that shooting people may turn out to be a career limiting move in our line of work.
Visitor number 2 sent us a message to say that he wasn’t coming on Thursday night. He didn’t share the bit about deciding to come for breakfast on Friday instead. Luckily we were all up and more or less decent when he arrived bright and early for coffee.
Visitor number 3 was caught up in a bus strike but she did manage to make it through on Friday afternoon and stayed till Saturday as planned… (German, no stereotyping but….)

Joni swiftly got the measure of V3, they’re old friends. He fetched his little blue shoes from his room and presented them to her with the instruction “sadalls” (sandals) which she correctly understood as a request to put them on him. He followed this up with the instruction “paga” (plaza), and led her out of the door over the road to push him on the swings.

I was left pondering how amazing it is that a child of not quite two can conceive and communicate an action plan in just two nouns correctly interpreted and put into action by his chosen junior executive, but at 18 if he decided to go into business, he would mostly likely spend the following three years at college learning about vision statements, buzz-words, flow diagrams and Smart targets, and yet he would almost definitely come out less effective at project management than he is at the moment.

As for us, the next software project might be a little hotel booking system in order to manage our diverse and unpredictable guests.

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