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.