Synchronizing time over space
So as of 1905: time is relative and slows as the speed of light is approached. Calendars are a graphical representation of the passage of time based on the motion of the planets, segmenting time into days, weeks, months, and years. We now enter an age when for the first time in history precision in how we keep time becomes critical. With the advent of train travel over longer distances it became important for clocks in various cities to strike the hour at the same time. Also, if you are trying to coordinate the sharing of a single track between multiple trains, prior to the invention of radio communication, synchronized time is a matter of life and death.
As industrialization and urbanization accelerated in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s the standardization and synchronization of time over distance became an important challenge to engineers. The French genius Henri Poincare was a driving force in this area. The first attempts at synchronizing clocks in a large urban area occurred in Paris using pressurized steam to pneumatically blast clocks all over the city into some semblance of synchronicity. An elaborate system of tunnels and steam pipes was developed throughout the City. Later, as the telegraph expanded its reach, the much higher speed of an electrical signal was used to synchronize clocks over large areas.
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Introduction of the Julian calendar and the Gregorian correction
In 45 BC, Julius Caesar inaugurated the basic calendar we use today. However, his calendar was flawed in that it did not align precisely with the rotation of the planets. Over many years, this creates a misalignment between human seasonal celebrations and the weather. For instance, after many years of being off by a day or so, a misaligned calendar might cause a fall harvest celebration to be scheduled for the middle of the summer. Nearly 1,500 years after its debut, the Julian calendar required a 10 day correction.
Around 1,000 A.D. Ptolemy observed in a published article that the Julian calendar was off, but at this time and for hundreds of years to come, it was potentially life-threatening to question the validity of the calendar. In the 13th century, the western world’s view of the universe was dictated by the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church did not recognize that the earth circled the sun, and in order to work out a truly precise calendar, this bit of dogma would have to adjust to match reality. So it should be no surprise that in the 1300’s it was the outcaste, curmudgeonly, genius, monk with superhuman intellectual abilities and independence, Roger Bacon, in league with Pope Clement IV, who died too young, set the stage for the Gregorian correction of the 1500s. While history does not record the reasons behind Clement the IV’s interest in calendar reform it was his interest and advocacy which propelled Roger Bacon to document the failings of the Julian calendar. Shortly after Bacon’s work reached the Pope, the Pope died, leaving Bacon behind with plenty of knowledge but no power to do anything about it.
It is also important to our overall understanding of the evolution of calendars through history to bear in mind that the telescope was not invented until the 1600’s. It was the telescope and minds like Galileo and Copernicus that literally reoriented the universe. This reorientation of the universe leads to a better understanding of the motion of the planets and the place of the earth in the solar system.
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Humanity’s Historical Struggle to Grasp Time
In the developed world our lives are driven every day by calendars and clocks: What time is my flight, what day should we meet, how late can you work? In the world of scheduling and time-scaled planning, start dates, end dates, and durations is the order of the day. As far as we know we are the only creatures on earth who have a concept of passing time. But how many of us have stopped to consider where time and dates come from? Who invented the calendar? Is time really relative? Time does not seem especially relative on the critical path of a networked schedule!
A retrospective look at the humanity’s quest to understand dates and times may offer the reader a new perspective on the planning process and a broader understanding of the actual underpinnings of that thing we call a time-scaled plan.
“The calendar is intolerable to all wisdom, the horror of all astronomy, and a laughing-stock from a mathematician’s point of view” – Roger Bacon, 1267
Why was a Roman Catholic Monk raging against calendars in the mid 13th century? One might imagine an orderly, synchronized system of straight forward, almost mechanical precision, lurking just below the methodical appearance of calendars and clocks. However, as Holden Caulfield famously declared of his roommate, Stradlater, in Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye”: time is a secret slob. Oh sure it looks all put together on the surface, but just peel back the top layer and one will find a messy contrivance worthy of Rube Goldberg!
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Malcolm Gladwell talks Innovation at the PMI Global Congress
I recently presented a paper at the Project Management Institute, North American Global Congress. My paper was titled the Job Shop Scheduling Problem, Mathematical Complexity Theory, and Non-Polynomial Time Algorithms. As you can imagine, a rather narrow swath of the PMI congregants found my topic compelling enough to part with an hour of their time. I joked with my single digit audience that I should have put the word Agile in the title, and the room would have been full. Another presenter at the same conference was Malcolm Gladwell. His topic was broader in nature. As his name recognition, accomplishments, presentation skills, and writing were somewhat superior to my own, he enjoyed an audience approximately 1000 times larger than I did. Gladwell is a compelling thinker and speaker. He talked about organizational culture and the role it has historically played in innovation. Having read all of his books, most of his articles, and listened, more than once, to his hilarious appearances on The Moth Story hour, I was rife with anxious anticipation at the thought of seeing him speak live. I was not disappointed.
Malcolm started with the statement: “We place such a premium on being first.” The entire patent system is predicated on the notion of being first and reaping huge rewards. But followers and borrowers, not leaders and inventors, are the ones who lead the way.
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Innovation
We call NetPoint innovative. But as my Philosophy professors would chant from morning to night, “Define your terms.” Just what the hell is innovation anyway? Webster’s says it is, “The introduction of something new.” Most likely this is not the narrowest of definitions to be found in Webster’s. You hear the term everywhere, but who can define it? How can we, “drive innovation in the organization” if we don’t know what it is? Maybe it’s like pornography; you know it when you see it. The subject of innovation has been brought to my mind, particularly with the recent loss of Steve Jobs.
In Cambridge, at the MTA Kendall/ MIT station, there is a plaza with engraved paving stones featuring technology icons. Steve’s paving stone became a memoriam with candles, flowers and… apples. Although most often described as a visionary, Jobs was most certainly, by Webster’s definition, an innovator. What were his innovations? Were they simply the creation of the new? Novelty? Style? UI? Do innovations have to be adopted and successful, in order to be innovations? Walking past the MIT bookstore at the same MTA station, I saw a banner in the window featuring the phrase “inventional wisdom”, a phrase MIT has adopted as a part of their sesquicentennial celebration this year. At first I thought the word inventional was an unsuccessful attempt by MIT at innovating on the English language, further research revealed only my own abundant ignorance. Yes Tim, inventional is a word in the dictionary. Read More
Project management as a fulcrum and lever
Archimedes famously said “give me a lever, a place to stand, and I will move the world.” Although since 2008 the idea of leverage has lost some of its appeal, at least in the financial sector, the original concept is still true and sound. Is there a scheme of thought or accumulated knowledge base which stands to offer our endeavors greater leverage than Project Management?
I once had the opportunity to listen to a speech by Greg Ballesteros, the then President of the Project Management Institute. Greg was discussing the impact of project management globally; in business, government, and humanitarian efforts. It struck me while I listened to his speech that project management is perhaps our best opportunity to accelerate the progress of mankind. Greg’s speech made me realize that the discipline of project management yields better results, not just in business, but in life. As a matter of fact, our firm has trademarked the phrase, “life is a project”, and this phrase gets to the heart of my passion for project management.
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Interactive graphical project planning, why it matters
Ever been in a project meeting where everyone is talking past each other, pointing fingers, evading accountability? If not, then you haven’t been in a project planning meeting.
Talk is cheap. Wait, no, it’s not; talk is really expensive. The cost of everyone sitting around the table spins up faster than a taxi meter in Manhattan. Talk is ephemeral, imprecise, and inconclusive. As Ludwig Wittgenstein famously intoned “You learned the concept ‘pain’ when you learned language”. He also said “What can be shown, cannot be said.”, and “A picture is a fact.”
The interpersonal dynamic of the project planning session completely changes when a time-scaled, interactive model of the projects displayed on the wall for all to see. Interdependencies, activity durations, and resource allocations are all plainly shown. Issues of accountability and responsibility are no longer vague concepts for debate, they are a picture. And not a still shot, but a dynamic motion picture, reflecting the impact of suggested changes in the project plan in real time. Read More
The Genesis of visualized collaborative planning
The daily cost to run construction sites can amass to tens of thousands of dollars. That is why businesses in the construction industry require such strict enforcement of schedules. A day over could literally cost clients and/or vendors thousands of dollars. In the construction industry, a critical path schedule is one of the fundamental documents. When a discrepancy arises about who is responsible for a negative impact on the schedule, experts perform forensic schedule analysis Experts testify on matters that would be difficult to translate to the laymen. Often they would have to hire graphic artist to illustrate the schedule impact being described by the experts testimony. This was costly, extremely time consuming, and not mathematically grounded. Thus, the Genesis of Netpoint.
Schedules are created to serve as communication tools and to allow projects to be managed proactively. But scheduling is an ineffective process when only the scheduler can comprehend the result. NetPoint transforms scheduling into an engaging and interactive planning-centric experience. The resulting plan is a unique visual tool that can be understood by the entire project team, regardless of their level of expertise. In addition, NetPoint can toggle between Critical path method ( CPM) and Graphical path method ( GPM) , so the transition is easy for experienced CPM schedulers. Read More