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.

No Works of Art Required

Out there, in a galaxy far, far away, Project Managers create schedules which are not only objects (works of art as I used to call them), but also are effortlessly stuck to with no deviations from baseline - no scope creep, no unforeseen impacts, no resource constraints, etc, etc.

Now back to reality!

I always used to appreciate the benefits of re-planning projects at pre-defined periods within projects (e.g. the end of a phase), but am now coming around to the concept of iterative scheduling. In a traditional project plan (i.e. the initial schedule on this project), major pieces of work are scoped out in detail and then performed in a predetermined sequence - typically work on stages does not commence until previous stages (sometimes with predecessor tasks) are complete. Iterative scheduling is characterised by less rigid planning and much smaller chunks of work. The key here however is that these chunks of work are only decided upon after previous chunks have been completed.

Javed Iqbal PMP states that "the technique is based on the fact that detailed, accurate planning can only be achieved for tasks that will occur in the near future". Furthermore, "since accurate information is not available for the tasks that will occur in the distant future, their planning will, by definition, be inaccurate".

So, no more works of art need be produced which would not look out of place in the Tate Modern Art Gallery!

First Experiment Done

First experiment is now done and dusted. The simulation has been updated to refine the functionality of one entity/object within the biological system in question.

Results are appreciably different from baseline, and in fact have been found to be statistically significant through use of an A-Test - calculates probability that variables within sample A are stochastically smaller than sample B.

It's now time to move on to design, implementation and simulation of experiment 2.

Time to Really Motor

With a little help from friends, I now have 2 viable clusters from which to work from. The Biology cluster has a Sun Grid Engine installed to automatically manage my experiments, and I've been given access to a script which will perform the same task on the external cluster. This is fantastic news.

First step is to repeat experiments previously performed by the PhD Student who I'm woking with, then it's on to designing code updates, implementing the updates and running new experiments.

It is now time to really motor with this project.

Yo-Yo Project Risk

Just as I thought things were beginning to go smoothly, the issue of server access reared its ugly head again. What can I say? This risk, which periodically manifests itself as an issue is like a Yo-Yo.

The time has come for me to upload the simulation code onto a server for hardcore experimentation. Talking the process through with the supervisory team, it transpires that although technically the server provided by my previous University is sufficient for experimentation, it will be overly cumbersome and fiddly to use. The scheduled updating of the hardware is not for a few weeks, and therefore I can either upload my code now and try my luck or wait for the upgrade.

Not again! I feel like last chance saloon, is quickly coming into view.

The third and final option is to try and gain access at my current University to servers back in Biology. Luckily, I know the Biology Sys Admin pretty well from my time on the masters degree, so will hopefully be able to facilitate such a request. People are very protective of server access at this University, so I'm hoping the power of the network, and indeed my people skills will pay off. As the saying goes, "it's not what you know, but, who you know".

Fingers crossed.

I Should be Shot

OK, I need to be retrained as a Project Manager. It's amazing how forgetful you become either in old age, or through lack of practice. Some say Project Management is as easy as 'riding a bike', I believe a more appropriate quote is 'use it or lose it' - I have definitely lost it today!

Quick test for you. Aside from mobilising a team and planning, what is one of the most important activities performed by a project manager during the early stages of an elaboration phase, i.e. after close of the initiation phase, sign-off of budget, contracts, PID, etc? I'd be forgiven for suggesting confirmation of requirements right? Well, in the spirit of planning, gaining domain knowledge by immersing myself in the scientific literature, and racing to begin implementation (i.e. actually writing code), I forgot this most basic of PM activities.

The progress meeting today started off fairly uneventful. I conveyed appreciation for all the time provided by the PhD student and PostDoc, sometimes at the drop of a hat, and also relayed briefly my progress and thoughts on next steps. It was at this point that I became aware that what I thought was THE project requirement, was in fact the icing on the cake requirement, and that in order to get there I had to progress through a couple of prerequisites first. I should be shot! It's amazing that bread and butter competencies that you live and breath everyday can be forgotten in a split second when you change careers - what a school buy error on my part.

This isn't earth shattering, however, it soon transpired that the total requirements will in all probability require longer to develop and test than remains on the project. A swift resetting of expectations was performed, and a certain degree of embarrassment was felt, but nothing too serious. I can feel another replan coming along - this is beginning to be my mantra!

The two prerequisite experiments were requested by the immunologist over in San Diego, therefore as long as these can be performed before the trip out there, I will have something to demo and feel as if I've earned my trip. As for the considerable reading around the subject area that I 'wrongly' perceived to be the requirement, well, that won't go to waste, but in fact can be recycled into 'Future Work' within the conclusion and discussion section of my project report.

Wow. This project is lining itself up to be quite a roller coaster ride. Still loving every minute though!

Code Walkthrough

I'm now nearly half-way through my summer placement. The reverse engineering of code is progressing, but not nearly quickly enough for my ambitious schedule. I have seen the early signs of slippage, and with the recent serendipitous invitation to San Diego necessitating a more aggressive delivery of outputs, I need to resolve this fast.

The quickest way to understand code that someone else has written is to perform a code walkthrough. I've been hesitant of approaching the PhD student for help as I appreciate he has his own demanding schedule right now, and a multitude of activities to juggle - commence doctoral thesis write-up, complete final experimentation, write Post Doc grant proposals, apply for Departmental extension money, write that elusive first journal article. Nevertheless, if I was to remain on track, I'd need a little help from a friend.

I think he could see the frustration brewing in my eyes and kindly agreed to help. The exercise was only intended to be an hour, but once the code walkthrough began, it was like opening Pandora's Box and a cascade of tricky code surfaced. Time flew by with animated discussions on why code was written in X way instead of Y way, and also referenced the underlying Biology involved with the system, and any abstractions/assumptions built in to the simulation due to lack of firm Biological understanding - the disease in question was first discovered in the mid-1800's and we still do not understand how it actually manifests itself in humans, so a little artistic licence in the simulation is surely acceptable! Two and a half hours later the walkthrough, which had then manifested itself into an impromptu demo of the simulation through the graphical user interface (GUI) was done.

My understanding had increased exponentially during the morning, and I must confess to feeling that I'm back on track with the schedule. The UML diagrams that I've generated as part of the reverse engineering process to understand the code were great to convey interactions, sequences and activities of code modules, but couldn't fully come to life until I'd received a little help. Implementation against schedule now seems much more promising.

Now it's time to design code amendments and actually start building an updated simulator.

Gift from the Gods

A requirement of the summer placement is that we return monthly progress reports to the Department of Biology's project executive committee (PEC) for the masters degree. The reports provide a way for the students to document progress, and raise concerns (both professional and pastoral) back to base.

I documented the saga regarding the provision of useable PC in my first monthly report. It appears that during the PEC review this was picked up and looked on favourably for partial reimbursement of expenses. The Department allocates a notional expense provision for each student on the course for the purpose of travel to their summer placement destination. As I engineered a summer placement within a different Department at the same University, my provision was not drawn down. Due to the exceptional circumstances surrounding my lack of access in a timely manner to useable hardware, Biology offered to partially reimburse the Apple MacBook.

What a very fortunate and unexpected turn of events.

Opportunity Knocks

The PhD student which I am assisting through this masters project has close contact with a subject matter expert (SME; an immunologist) located in a research institute over in San Diego. A most fortuitous turn of events occurred today, which I am glad to say I grabbed with both hands.

As previously stated, the PhD student has entered the end-game of his postgraduate research and will imminently commence writing up. He will be travelling to San Diego in late August to tie up loose ends on the project, put meat on the bones of a proposal for follow on research (a Post Doc), and in my opinion have a 'little' bit of a jolly to celebrate a job well done. I have been invited along to this final trip by my project supervisor, to show the SME the portion of the simulation that I have updated, and act as another pair of eyes and ears for discussions with the SME regarding future work. Although my PhD research will be modelling a different area of biology, I will nevertheless remain at this institution, and therefore will act as continuity should any transition period be required - a full-time research masters student is expected to arrive in the new academic year to develop the simulation further.

The trip is scheduled the week before my project report is due to be handed in. Should I accept the offer to travel to San Diego, a new project risk will arise regarding the timely submission of this report. Should I accept? I believe that I would be a fool not to, so this risk will therefore have to be managed through completing my project report 10 days earlier than the current deadline.

I can see a re-planning exercise on the horizon!

Where did the past week go?

Meeting with project supervisor this morning, due to his diary commitments we didn't meet last week, so the last supervision was 27th May. Taking out the Bank Holiday weekend that's been 7 working days. I'm embarrassed to state that I'm not sure what I've actually accomplished. I've been working hard, indeed I am still adopting the 'professional' working day that I endured during my days as an IT Consultant - definitely not 9-5, but what have I done? A brief stock take is in order:

1) Installed iWorks on Macbook

2) Tangled myself up in knots with Pages'09 trying to import my previous project report from this Masters degree from an MS Word format - Pages'09 is good when starting from scratch, but fiddly to say the least when trying to 'butcher' an existing .doc file.

3) Looked at Java code

4) Stared at Java code

5) Tried to gain inspiration from Java code

6) Started to draw diagrams of Java code package structure - UML Package diagrams

7) Started to draw abstract biological entity inheritance hierarchy - UML inheritance class diagram

8) Started to draw abstract biological entity containment hierarchy - UML containment class diagram

9) Installed Endnote on Macbook

10) Lost the will to live when trying to use Endnote - not an intuitive system

11) Finally got somewhere with entry of citation references

12) Lost the will to live with inserting Endnote citation references into Pages'09

13) Finally managed to get Pages'09 and Endnote working together.

14) Took a fresh look at Java code

15) Started to draw interactions between entities - UML association class diagram

Hmm, on reflection, I have achieved quite a bit during the past week. I think the major discovery has been my unrealistic expectations of how long it actually takes to perform research. Naively, I thought the project would be relatively straight forward.

I believe a valuable lesson has been learnt this week, which I need to carry over into my PhD - research is not made up of a set of sequential activities that are easily represented in hourly/daily items within a project plan and/or Gantt chart - research is fluid, with peaks and troughs. Unlike managing a commercial software implementation of systems that are pre-packaged, research involves a lot of time invested upfront, with very little tangible outputs/artefacts until well into the project.

Hopefully once I gain a firm understanding of the code things will become more plain sailing and I will begin to see tangible results.

Now for the Hard Bit

OK, the raging fire that has been lack of systems has now been put out. I now have admin rights to the desktop and indeed have also gained a copy of Matlab, so will be able to analyse the results produced. With the project issues now under control, I am FINALLY able to get down to the nitty gritty of actually doing my project, yes, that's right, doing my project. The vast majority of the last 5 weeks has been spent project managing this project, but as I'm the sole member of my project team, my day job is to also perform the work - having been a PM for the last 5 years, this has come as quite a shock ;-)

So, a bit behind schedule, but recoverable nevertheless. Some major re-jigging of the project plan has been performed, along with a certain degree of resetting project sponsor expectations. I'm now happy to report that I'm able to make headway into the research.

First step is to reverse engineer the Java simulation that I have inherited from my predecessor. The simulation is very professionally put together, but as he has not yet written up and submitted his PhD, there are no design specifications available to aid my understanding. The immediate task is therefore to decipher the code and create a number of UML diagrams. I aim to create a number of class diagrams (inheritance, containment and association) along with sequence diagrams by the end of June.

In parallel with gaining an understanding of the code, there are a number of filler-type activities which need to be performed to ensure I gain the necessary understanding of tools and techniques before I commence my PhD in October. As I've recently purchased an Apple Macbook, one of these activities is to learn iWork Pages (as opposed to the ubiquitous MS Word on Windows systems), and the Endnote citation database software, which I am told will be extremely beneficial for writing my report (and papers during my PhD) - not an intuitive piece of software though - why, oh why, does it function this way? Now I know how my previous customers may have felt when their seniors bought COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) packages and we tried to change their business processes to fit the software........

That's It - I Give In

OK, that's it, I can't take being held hostage by IT support services anymore. The only pragmatic approach from now on is to circumvent the blockers and literally become self-sufficient.

On the weekend I decided to take control of my own destiny on the Masters degree project and bought myself a shiny new laptop. I opted for an Apple MacBook Pro, which should be meaty enough to tackle the Java simulations and indeed should have enough RAM to still be reasonably quick in 3 years time when I'll be nearing the end of my PhD.

Even with student discount Apple's cost an awful lot of money, but to be honest the laptop is priceless to me if it means I will be able to FINALLY get on and do some work. I've not been able to familiarise myself with Java, Java3D or Ruby in 3 weeks, so I am now in catch-up mode.

Game on!

Hit by a Bus

Yesterday I received login details to access the cluster, which is hosted by one of the universities that I have previously studied at. Connectivity from my current institution's network into this cluster has been established, so all is looking good on the processing power front.

Today however, another bombshell was dropped by IT support services within the Computer Science Dept at my current university. The saga of kit continues........ The 'locked down' desktop provided last week also has access restrictions imposed on the local disk (C: drive/hard disk). As such, although I've been able to install Java 3D and Mason simulation libraries within my roaming profile, I'm unable to run experimentation as I've nowhere to store the Gigabytes of data produced. Having spoken with support, it now transpires that they are becoming more helpful after a number of internal escalations were made over my previous issues, but unfortunately nothing can be done for another week (Tuesday 1st June) as the support analyst who 'built' my desktop is off on holiday and is the only one who knows the administrator password.

This reminds me of the 'being hit by a bus' metaphor which was persistently used by management within my previous employer. The IT Consultants were constantly reminded to document/comment their code and store copies on internal repositories so that if needed another Consultant could pick up and complete. The question always posed was "what would happen if you were accidentally run over by a bus?" Without comments in code, it would take another programmer a considerable period of time to get up to speed with what had been developed. Furthermore, without back-ups on internal storage, another programmer would literally have to start from scratch or wait until you had recovered before you could help.

I believe the IT support services team here have been metaphorically hit by a bus.

All-in-all, the inability of support services to provide access to kit has incurred a 4-week delay into my 16 week project. If this was an IT implementation that I managed in my previous life, I would have raised a change control to extend the project and also to request financial recompense commensurate with the delays they had introduced to the project. As this is a time-boxed student project I do not have that luxury, therefore through no fault of my own the schedule will need to be crashed in order to complete the planned activities, or indeed altered to reduce scope.

I'm beginning to think that a Masters degree project cannot be Project Managed - not through deficiencies of the student, but due to the inefficiencies inherent in administrative service teams supporting academics and the archaic policies and procedures that have been in place for decades without updates.

Death by Policy and Procedures

Just when I thought it was safe to come out of the woods - bang, archaic procedures have struck again.

This time around it relates to that most ubiquitous of items in a Computer Science Dept - a PC. It transpires that because I'm not staff (or as yet a PhD student), I am not entitled to use the staff network and thus literally had the PC that I was using taken off me. This has instead been replaced by a standalone PC with access to the physical network so that I can use the Internet, but no access to either the staff of student networks. In one fell swoop Sys Admin have taken away access to printers, file shares and indeed back-up routines. To top it all off, I have Admin rights on the XP boot, but virtual lockdown on the Linux boot - what use is this? I cannot even install custom Java libraries, which are essential for my research.

To state that I was annoyed when first presented with this situation is an understatement, but I must confess that the situation is becoming rather amusing. What will the Sys Admin team throw at me next?

I believe creativity is needed. The first step is to talk nicely to my old chums in the Biology Dept and get the necessary Java libraries installed on their PCs; although my summer placement is in Computer Science, it may be far more efficient to go back to Biology and squat in their PC labs. The second step may be to buy a laptop and side step all this nonsense entirely.

This University prides itself on being within the top 10 of the UK, and the Computer Science Dept within the top 5. Again I will ask the question - How is this acceptable?

1st Potential Show Stopper

Day 3 and I've already encountered my first potential show stopper, and what a peach of an issue this became. To set the scene a little, I'm a masters student in Computational Biology within the Biology Department of a leading 1994 Group UK University. My 4-month summer placement is in the Computer Science Department at the same institution. In order to perform the research required for my summer placement I need access to some hefty processing power.

It transpires that in order to get access to the server I need a staff account, which research postgraduates (PhD's, etc) are given as a matter of routine. Due to being on a taught postgraduate degree I am unable to gain such an account. The primary reason being that I will have access to 'exam' papers, which poses the risk that I may abuse this information, either personally or pass on to other students. At first impressions, the policy seems acceptable, right? But surely there must be a way around. Surely, this institution is not 'amateur' when designing software systems related policies and procedures. Afterall, this institution prizes itself on being one of the leading lights in small research intensive Universities. How naive I was.......

Apparently, there are only two grades of accounts: staff and student; with full access for staff, and virtually no access for students - as you'd expect. What took me completely by surprise however is that there was no ability to make one-off deviations, or indeed look at requirements on a case-by-case basis. To put it mildly, the System Administrators were very unhelpful; their boss although very sympathetic, was constrained by policy and procedures; and the head of systems security within the Registry was ..... (words can't describe).

To cut a long story short; without access to the meaty server, I am unable to complete my research project; if I do not complete my research project, I am unable to complete my Masters degree; without passing my Masters degree, I am unable to progress onto the PhD programme. This was politely but firmly pointed out to the System Adminstration team, who it must be said showed complete disregard for my predicament. Ouch!

For a brief moment, I had the awful realisation that my future was indeed in jeopardy, and my decision to quit IT Consulting was an ill-informed choice. Luck was on my side however, coming from a most surreal saviour. My supervisor here on my summer placement, appreciating that you need to pick and choose battles decided to accept the utter nonsense that was being spewed at this institution, and seek help from his previous academic employer, to which I am also an alumni of. Fortunately, this University is both a lot more pragmatic, and indeed a lot more caring of students (even those not currently studying there) and has agreed to provide remote access to their server(s) in order that I may carry out research.

I am very grateful to the generosity of my previous academic institution for bailing me out. The question still remains however for my current institution: How is this acceptable?

In my previous employment, I managed software implementations at a number of organizations, including those within the public sector: both Central Government Departments and indeed NHS Foundations trusts; I have never encountered such an archaic set of policies or procedures, or indeed a systemic culture of being a 'jobs worth'. Words are unable to describe the disappointment that I feel for the University in which I am currently studying, and more to the point will shortly research for PhD.

So, first show stopper mitigated; I hope the project runs smoothly from now on.

Scope & High-Level Plan

Following the kick-off meeting, my supervisor's PhD student was given the task of providing an in depth overview of the project and set my expectations on scope.

In a nut shell, my 4-month project will be to take a computer simulation of a complex biological system developed by the PhD student and ammend to provide additional functionality. This new functionality will be utilised to experiment in silico with a view to hypothesis generation for actual in vivo experiments. These wet-lab experiments will be performed by scientists who are collaborating with the wider project team.

I was at the PhD student's disposal for the whole day and became bombarded with as much information and knowledge as time (and coffee) permitted. Having studied Biochemistry for my first degree many years ago, I am absolutely amazed at the level of biological system knowledge the PhD student (in Computer Science) has gained throughout the past 2.5 years of his research.

Once we had effectively performed a 'brain dump', I was left with a list of key journal papers to digest. This was with a view to gaining the necessary domain knowledge which would facilitate progression to requirements gathering and analysis.

An initial high-level plan was created using a number of generic phases from IT Project Management - Initiation, Elaboration, Implementation, Testing and Deployment. The plan provided 1 month to gain a firm understanding of the domain (subject matter) and familiarise myself with the new programming languages (Java, Ruby and Matlab) and tools (e.g. Eclipse IDE); 2 months to develop the custom code, unit test, system test, and user acceptance test; and 1 month to write up the project report - 8,000 words in the format of an extended academic paper.

Two observations immediately spring to mind: 1) there is virtually no slack in this plan, therefore any slippage will incur reduction in scope or quality; and 2) rolling-wave planning will be performed where the low-level activities are planned and introduced into the schedule incrementally throughout the project.

The kick-off meeting

Following the completion of exams and a mountain of coursework, it was time to finally commence the much awaited summer placement.

The placement formally began today with the project kick-off meeting. As could be expected, this consisted of meeting the project team (my project supervisor, one of his Post-Docs, and one of his PhD research students), along with an overview of why the project is necessary and a high-level overview of the scope.

Initial views are that the project will be both enjoyable and challenging, in particular due to the tight timescales - 4 months in total, so the full project lifecycle from initiation to closure will need to be squeezed to ensure adequate time for actual development of the software product.