Goodbye for now!

This will be the final post relating to my masters degree, so will act as an informal wrap-up post.

The trip to La Jolla was an amazing experience, which I feel privileged to have experienced as I'm fully cognisent that most masters students will not have the opportunity for such trips within a 12-month course, let alone a 4-month summer placement.

I have learned a great deal from this experience. The most important of which is that it doesn't matter who you are, or what you used to be - once you are a student, you are unfortunately at the bottom of the food chain, and therefore subject to the whims of administrators employed by The System.

I am a certified Project Management Professional, with industry honed experience of managing multi-million pound projects, but even I have had to concede that as a student I have no authority or power to overcome obstacles presented to me by The System. It's very unfortunate, but my experiences on this project have led me to believe that academic institutions have taken the worst (instead of the best) processes and procedures from the Public Sector and Private Business, and knitted them together for their staff to follow.

It's therefore disappointing that I have to conclude in my final post within this Blog that NO, a Masters Degree Project cannot be Project Managed, and that this is not due to the competence of the student, but directly due to the bureaucracy inherent in The System, and the inability to resolve issues in a timely manner.

I just hope that I don't encounter similar issues during my forthcoming PhD - and that's the subject of another Blog to be commenced in the near future. Goodbye for now!

After Action Review and The Triple Constraint

The agenda for the first day of the trip to La Jolla revolved around the results of my summer placement, and formed an informal After Action Review (AAR), which I'm used to from my days as a Project Manager. Essentially, a project in technical terms is defined as a "temporary endeavor to produce a unique product or service". The major aspect of a project is therefore to actually deliver to scope the product/service in which is was commissioned for, but over and above delivery of the end goal, the 'journey' taken within each project can be valuable in itself, and without documenting this journey, such knowledge is lost into the ether, with the risk that lessons learned will not be remembered, and problems encountered will be repeated in future projects.

The major discussion point from this project is that I was unable to complete on time to initial scope. The Project Management community frequently talk of the 'triple constraint' which essentially states that there are 4 key traits of a project - time, scope, cost and quality - and that the underlying driver is high quality. After the project is first scoped, costed and scheduled, any deviations to one of cost, time or scope will have a knock-on effect to the other two, thus a triple constraint. During this project I effectively lost 25% of my time due to external factors (poor processes and procedures within the Department in question). As the cost component was irrelevant (there was only me, and I could not recruit additional people to help as this was an individual masters project) I could either have carried on regardless with the full scope, but sacrificed quality, or I could reduce the scope and maintain quality. I opted for the latter and therefore removed the 3rd and final deliverable from project scope.

The external collaborator (key project stakeholder) was extremely pleased with the results obtained for deliverables 1 and 2, and agreed that removal of deliverable 3 was sensible given the time constraints. Furthermore, as my supervisor will be taking on another masters degree student in October (12-month full time research), that deliverable 3 should be incorporated into this new project.

Instead of documenting the After Action Review in the form of a more normal AAR document, I decided to integrate background, lessons learned and future work into a Handover Document for my supervisors next masters student. I do hope that this becomes useful to him in due course.

31 Degrees and Sunny

I've made it to La Jolla! It's 31 degrees celsius and sunny.

We had the first meeting with the external collaborator today at the Torrey Pines Institute of Molecular Studies to discuss findings from the In Silico experimentation performed throughout this project. Discussions were free flowing and positive and centred around 3 main areas:

1. Future Work for In Silico experimentation using the simulator
2. Potential journal papers resulting from the current set of experimental results and the future work
3. Potential avenues of funding to progress the work through postdoctoral research grants

I'm out in La Jolla for a week and this was the first day of work. There's an awful lot to cover throughout the rest of the week, in particular a number of quick(ish) updates required of the simulator and further experimentation, documenting of the future work discussions into a workplan and requirements document for the MSc student who will continue work on the simulator once I commence my PhD research on another biological system.

Having completed the report, the project is now entering the end game, and focus will soon turn to the After Action Review.

And Breath

Project report is done! I am now able to breath a huge sigh of relief.

The report has been updated to reflect the review comments, and has actually been turned into a far more rounded overview of the project, with a critical analysis of the results in relation to actual wet-lab findings from other labs.

Project activities are far from complete however as the next stage is to prepare an informal presentation for walkthrough with the external collaborator next week.

La jolla (San Diego) here we come.......

Review Comment Turnaround Time

Wow, what a super-speedy review that turned out to be - you could not ask for more out of a reviewer - in this case my supervisor. Turnaround was within a day, and I am now in receipt of 35 separate comments. These range from updates which will take mere seconds, to others which will take a day to complete.

It's now time to turnaround the review comments and resubmit a revised draft for final review. Lucky I'm ahead of schedule as this will take 2-3 days to plough through. I've been reassured that the current draft is actually acceptable for submission as it is, but the comments will hopefully turn the report from "acceptable", in to "pretty good".

I'm therefore intending to focus my efforts on 2 fronts over the week I have left before departing to San Diego: 1) updating the draft report, and 2) creating a short, informal slide show to guide my discussions with the Subject Matter Expert (SME) whilst out there.

Again, time to really motor. Actually, I don't think I've taken my foot off the gas yet!

Ahead of Schedule

Looks like working on parallel activities has paid off.

From the start, I have actively made notes and written draft sections of he report along side the design and implementation activities. I am therefore a full week ahead of schedule in the creation of a first full draft of my report.

The word limit is extremely tight (8,000 words), and with 150 years of history to the biological system in question, the reverse engineering of a simulator, and the implementation of 2 novel experiments, I can write a small tome. However, the policies and procedures for this report are set in stone by my department, therefore it would be foolish to deviate, as quite substantial penalties are imposed within the marking scheme for any word limit overruns.

The report has now been submitted into the review process (with my supervisor), who has offered to perform a speedy turnaround. No 'formal' review standards & procedures are in place like you would expect on Consulting engagements, so the Review Comments List (RCL) will be in the form of an annotated pdf document.

Second Experiment Done

Second experiment is now done and dusted as well. The simulation has been updated to remove an entity within the biological system in question. This removal has been introduced via a parameter-driven approach, therefore the initial code relating to the entity in question is still there, but is only called when the correct parameter flag is fed in to the simulator.

Again, results are appreciably different from baseline, and again have been found to be statistically significant through use of an A-Test.

As discussed previously, the remit set was for me to perform 3 updates to simulator functionality, however due to the issues encountered regarding hardware, there is simply not enough time to perform this last update and still generate a quality project report.

I have therefore gained agreement from my supervisor that the 2 sets of experiments performed will be sufficient for the project, and that writing up the project report is now the main priority. There is now 4 weeks until we depart for San Diego, and therefore 4 weeks for me to complete the project - again, I'm sure you all remember that the firm deadline for project report submission is 31st August, but with the week away in the US my actual deadline for finishing the report moved forward by a week.