my name is bala

Being in control of a project budget involves an ongoing comparison of the actual cost of work versus the allocated amount in the budget, and adjusting the project plan to respond to the variances. It is important to monitor, analyze, and report on the variances, or differences, between the actual amounts and budgeted amounts. Earned Value Management (EVM) is a tool to use for keeping track and taking control of your project. Simply put, EVM was developed to provide information on the money expended versus the work completed, and to provide a forecast for the project final cost and completion date (Zouncourides-Lull).

To be honest, I found EVM difficult to grasp at first. The key to my understanding came when I learned the difference in using the cumulative values represented in the project data as opposed to the instantaneous (month-to-month) metrics. Using a road construction project, I will try to analyze and highlight the difference between instantaneous versus cumulative metrics and how they reflect on the earned value of the road project. We will also try to forecast the estimated cost at completion.

(see list of key terms below)
(For the full excel breakdown of the road construction project, contact me.)

Month-to-Month

To get a quick view of performance, one can plot the planned value (PV), actual cost (AC), and earned value (EV). In this case, we see that this project is underperforming. The actual costs are higher than planned, and the value being earned is less than the amount expended. The instantaneous cost performance index (CPI) for the first four months was 0.85, 0.73, 0.79, and 0.69 respectively. This tells us that for each dollar spent, the project has earned less value, with the fourth month only producing 69 cents worth of value for every dollar. Other than for comparative analysis, using the instantaneous metric does give us the true benefit EVM, which lies in its ability to forecast based on current project performance.

Cumulative

The cumulative data, on the other hand, shows us trends in the performance of the project. The trend is still not a positive one, but from this cumulative data we can determine the estimate at completion (EAC) and the estimate to completion (ETC) which tells us how much more money it would actually take to complete the project. The difference between the budgeted cost (BAC), and the estimate at completion (EAC) will show us the variance at completion (VAC) which forecasts how much more costs this project will incur if performance trends do not improve. In this case, we see that this project will realize a 31.15% ($457,919.53) negative variance between budgeted and actual costs.

EVM also provides a metric that can aid a project manager in her efforts to correct the project trajectory in the form of the TCPI index (To Complete Performance Index) which is the percentage increase the project needs to realize in order to get back on track and hit the planned budgeted values. In this case, by the fourth month, the project team has to be 121% more efficient in order to meet the budgeted costs (BAC). At 40% into a 10 month long project, we notice a 76% (cumulative) cost performance index (CPI) which means that for every dollar spent so far on this project, only 76 cents of value has been realized.

Unfortunately for this project, it has been determined that once a project is 15% complete, the CPI does not improve (DOD, Hatfield, Stratton 2005).

The following are key terms in understanding the overall methodology:

PV = Planned Value
-This is the work I should do

EV = Earned Value
-The work I did do

AC = Actual Costs
-The actual cost of the work completed

CV = [Cost] Variance
-EV – AC

SV = [Schedule] Variance
-EV – PV

CPI = Cost Performance Index
-cost efficiency of work accomplished
-measures if you are on, ahead or under budget
-CPI = EV/AC

SPI = Schedule Performance Index
-scheduling efficiency
-measures if you are on, ahead or behind schedule
-SPI = EV/PV

BAC = Budgeted Cost at Completion
-total budgeted cost of the time-phased baseline
-[cumulative] PV for all of the work packages

ETC = Estimate To Complete
-what it will take to complete the remaining work.
-How much work is remaining in cost to complete project
-ETC = (BAC-EV)/CPI

EAC = Estimate at Completion
-forecasted amount of how much the project will cost at the end
-EAC = AC + ETC

TCPI = To Complete Performance Index
-How efficient you need to be in order to complete the project
-what it will take to complete the remaining work to meet BAC or EAC
-(BAC-EV)/(EAC-AC)

VAC = Variance at Completion
-indicates the actual – over or under – run cost at completion
-VAC = EAC – BAC

References

DOD. Department of Defense as cited by Tiffany, D (2012). Real Life EVM Experience Message to AD644 class.

Hatfield, M. Taking on Project Management Myths, Part 2. Retrieved from: http://blogs.pmi.org/blog/voices_on_project_management/2009/09/in-my-continuing-series-on.html

Stratton R. (2005). Not Your Father’s Earned Value. Reprint from Projects at Work: http://www.projectsatwork.com. Retrieved from: http://www.earnedschedule.com/Docs/Not%20Your%20Father’s%20Earned%20Value.PDF

Zouncourides-Lull, A. (2012). Lecture 5 – Project Cost Management – Control Costs. MET AD 644 Project Risk and Cost Management. 2012 Spring 01. Boston University

I cannot tell you how excited I was when I received the final revisions for the AfroApparel icon!

I promise I will post more about this soon, in the meantime, hang tight! Follow progress on AfroApparel.com

First of all, lets make it clear, this is what I believe – what being a Christian means to me.

I believe there was a man named Jesus, his mother was Mary, and he said he was God. He also said that he made all that we know and see.

Based on history, study, and a personal encounter, I believe he is who he says he is.
I subscribe to his teachings of love, peace, and joy. And I try each day to treat others as I would like to be treated.
I believe that if I stay true to his teachings, I will have an awesome life on this earth, and when time has passed, I will be with him – my creator.

Much more important than his teachings was his sacrifice. You see, there are laws of the universe that have been put in place. For example, what goes up, must come down, or, one day we will all die. Another law is that the consequence of sin, is death.

Sin is defined as “doing what I know is wrong” and “not doing what I know is right”.

If we are honest, we are all guilty of sin. The Bible [the book that God wrote] says that the consequence of sin is that we will be separated from God in a [real] place called hell – for eternity. Hell will not be pleasant at all.

So Jesus realizes that we will sin, and we will repeatedly do so, even if we have the best intentions. He then said: I will take upon myself the consequence of sin on your behalf… I’ll be honest, this part is mysterious to me, and I am still trying to figure it out. He says that if we have faith – in the sequence of events surrounding his life, his death, and his coming back to life – we will not suffer the consequence of sin.

This mystery is what causes me to continue to learn about, and seek after God. I do this by reading my Bible, by going to church, and meeting with other people who believe and are seeking as I do. I also do my best to practice what Jesus taught, with hopes that I can grow closer to him.

Listen, I know that I am not perfect, and I know that I am not always a good model of who Jesus is, I am genuinely trying to fix this.

So, yeah, this is what I believe.

What do you believe? Who do you believe in? Please email me at hello [at] dbala.com and lets talk about it, or leave a private comment below, and I’ll be sure to respond.

Thank you.

This video rocked my world, and reminded me why I build [applications]. Please take the time to watch.

Enjoy!

…nuff said!

Today, I asked for permission to use someone else’s image, and they said no…

I learned 2 things:

1.) It felt good to ask, although I was disappointed by the answer. If I had _wrongfully_ used their work (even for no personal gain), and they had stumbled upon it somehow, it would have caused some bad feelings, and then a sense of violation – and then anger. I’ve felt that before when my work was used without my permission, and I would not wish that upon anyone else.

2.) Getting a “NO” caused the original idea to morph in my mind, and now I am inspired with an even better idea.

During this whole process I stumbled upon Brand Africa and I cannot tell you how much respect I have for the group, check out their website and see some of the good work they are doing.

I hope they can use the t-shirt concept (above) to further their cause.

I was having a debate with some friends about how “becoming an expert at something requires focus and single-mindedness on the subject matter“. My position in the debate was that I want my sons (now 1 and 2.5 in age) to be “supremely excellent” at something (music, sports, academics… whatever). I drew some contention when I said that I will not allow my boys to engage in more than one activity at a time. If they want to play sports, then that means no music lessons, etc. My colleague mentioned that this will stifle the polymathic potential in my boys (a polymath is a person of wide-ranging knowledge or learning – like Einstein). The debate eventually fizzled, but I left feeling a little unjustified. Today it hit me; the point I was trying to convey (unsuccessfully) was the 10,000 hour rule, and how as a father, I will do my best to see my boys reach that mark.

The 10,000 hour rule was made famous by Malcom Gladwell in his book “Outliers”. Gladwell repeatedly mentions the “10,000-Hour Rule”, claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours.

The rule was originally based on a study by Anders Ericsson. Gladwell (via Ericsson) claims that greatness requires enormous time, and the key to success in any field, is simply a matter of practicing a specific task that can be accomplished with 20 hours of work a week, for 10 years (reaching the 10,000-Hour mark). Gladwell refers to Bill Gates as an example of this: “Gates met the 10,000-Hour Rule when he gained access to a high school computer in 1968 at the age of 13, and spent 10,000 hours programming on it.”

I went to the actual study by Ericsson, and I found it really interesting… here are some excerpts:

Not magic, or genetics, or superiority – but practice and training:

When experts exhibit their superior performance in public their behavior looks so effortless and natural that we are tempted to attribute it to special talents. Although a certain amount of knowledge and training seems necessary, the role of acquired skill for the highest levels of achievement has traditionally been minimized. However, when scientists began measuring the experts’ supposedly superior powers of speed, memory and intelligence with psychometric tests, no general superiority was found –the demonstrated superiority was domain specific. For example, the superiority of the chess experts’ memory was constrained to regular chess positions and did not generalize to other types of materials. Not even IQ could distinguish the best among chess players nor the most successful and creative among artists and scientists.

New Patterns from memory:

In their influential theory of expertise, Chase and Simon proposed that experts with extended experience acquire a larger number of more complex patterns and use these new patterns to store knowledge about which actions should be taken in similar situations.

According to this influential theory, expert performance is viewed as an extreme case of skill acquisition…

Extended experience:

Among investigators of expertise, it has generally been assumed that the performance of experts improved as a direct function of increases in their knowledge through training and extended experience.

In summary:

In a recent review, Ericsson and Lehmann found that (1) measures of general basic capacities do not predict success in a domain, (2) the superior performance of experts is often very domain specific and transfer outside their narrow area of expertise is surprisingly limited and (3) systematic differences between experts and less proficient individuals nearly always reflect attributes acquired by the experts during their lengthy training.

I want my boys to be supremely awesome! But I don’t want to be an over-bearing or fanatical father. I guess the challenge is to help them discover their passion and then guide and enable them to get to at-least 10,000 hours of engagement in that passion.

How we do all of this will take cooperation and coordination between my wife and I. But ultimately we need to be on the same page, and this post is my first attempt to doing so.

What do you think? Any advice? cries of outrage?

when I began working at CIM, my manager asked us to read and take the Strengths Finder book and subsequent evaluation.

That was a year ago, and I recently just stumbled on my results, and all I could say is “hmmm…”

When I took this evaluation, I answered the questions in the mindset of “NOT who I am now” but “what I would like to be.”

And this is Daniel Bala Peterson’s Top Five Clifton StrengthsFinder Themes

Includer
People who are especially talented in the Includer theme are accepting of others. They show awareness of those who feel left out, and make an effort to include them.

Activator
People who are especially talented in the Activator theme can make things happen by turning thoughts into action. They are often impatient.

Arranger
People who are especially talented in the Arranger theme can organize, but they also have a flexibility that complements this ability. They like to figure out how all of the pieces and resources can be arranged for maximum productivity.

Positivity
People who are especially talented in the Positivity theme have an enthusiasm that is contagious. They are upbeat and can get others excited about what they are going to do.

Responsibility
People who are especially talented in the Responsibility theme take psychological ownership of what they say they will do. They are committed to stable values such as honesty and loyalty.

It is pretty crazy how I am actually morphing into that person that I wanted to be. My first year job review would agree, and so would my manager and colleagues… I think… I hope.

What have I learned?

1. Project who you want to be, act like it, and talk like it.

2. Take self evaluations, and [often] check back and review, and ask for feedback.

*this is a technical post, so you might not care.

After many many many moons of frustration, I’ve been FINALLY able to get my Adobe AIR 2.5 application to trigger installed clients, causing them to auto update. I am writing this post, so that it is crawled by web bots, and hopefully it helps someone else solve a similar problem.

In trying to find a solution, I googled: “Adobe AIR application not autoupdating”, “Adobe AIR application not auto updating”, “Adobe AIR HTML JS application fails to update”, “Adobe AIR 2.5 auto install”, “Adobe AIR updater framework not working fails to update” and so on.

I’ve cautiously upgraded this app through the different AIR framework versions, starting at 1.0 to 1.5 to 2.0 and then to 2.5.

oh… if you don’t know what Adobe AIR is, then this post is not for you. You can check it out here: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/

debug steps:

0. Read countless numbers of blog and forum posts and documentation.

1.Verify that the application is indeed making a call to retrieve the update descriptor xml. I used a program called Little Snitch: http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html to explicitly identify the network call. This showed the call being made. I had initially used tcpdump to inspect traffic, and little snitch confirmed my finding.

2. Inspect and trace the currentState property of runtime.air.update.ApplicationUpdaterUI this document was very helpful: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/air/reference/html/air/update/ApplicationUpdater.html but as you can see, it is seriously out of date. If there is an updated version for the 2.5 framework, I have difficulty finding it.

[the fix:]
I did yet another google search, in the same vain as those listed above, but this time it came up with this article: Update AIR 2 or earlier to AIR 2.5 Application Updater framework. I had seen this one before, but for some reason, I missed this sentence:

The application descriptor file schema for applications that use AIR 2.5 is not compatible with earlier versions of the Application Updater framework.

[and this was the root of my problem!]

Specifically:

The version element is replaced with a new field, versionNumber. This field must contain one to three dot-separated numbers; no non-numeric characters are allowed.

At the end of the day, the solution was that I needed to:

replace: <version>4.0.1</version> with: <versionNumber>4.0.1</versionNumber>

[ridiculous right? I understand why they are doing this, but it is still ridiculous that such a trivial change caused me so much grief!]

I would also advice you to exercise caution and map out the different upgrade paths, the last thing you need are clients gone dark.

I found this update referenced in the release notes for 2.5: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/868/cpsid_86822.html and I would highly recommend that if you are having update issues, read the section on: Application versioning changes

[suggestion for Adobe]
1. They need to update their documentation highlighting the differences in between framework versions, specifically: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/air/reference/html/air/update/ApplicationUpdater.html

as of this writing, the documentation is lacking. Please Adobe, help us out!

If you are having issues and you need another set of eyes, send me a note, I’d be glad to help.

In doing some research for a paper, I stumbled across this post by William Geoffrey Shotts. I thought it was pretty profound and decided to re-blog it. The funny thing is that there is a lot of truth to this caricaturization!

Enjoy.

In the Beginning was The Plan
And then came The Assumptions
and The Assumptions were without Form
And The Plan was completely without Substance.
And The Darkness was upon The Face of The Workers.
And they spoke amongst themselves, saying
“It is a Crock of Shit, and it stinketh.”
And The Workers went unto their Supervisors and sayeth,
“It is a Pail of Dung and none may abide in the odor thereof.”
And The Supervisors went unto their Managers and sayeth unto them
“It is a Container of Excrement and it is very strong,
such that none may abide by it.”
And The Managers went unto their Directors and sayeth,
“It is a Vessel of Fertilizer, and none may abide its strength.”
And The Directors spoke amongst themselves, saying one to another,
“It contains that which aids Plant Growth, and it is very strong.”
And The Directors went unto The Vice Presidents and sayeth unto them,
“It promotes growth and is very Powerful.”
And The Vice Presidents went unto The President and sayeth unto him,
“This New Plan will Actively promote the growth and efficiency
of this Company, and these areas in particular.”
And The President looked upon The Plan
and saw that it was good, and The Plan became Policy.
And this is how “SHIT HAPPENS!”

originally posted at: http://www.gshotts.com/HUMOR/inthebeginning.htm

image attribution:
retrieved from http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiousexpeditions/1335968674/
title: The bugs propose a plan…
Illustration from the Czech children’s book, Naměsíc a ještě dál.
Illustrated by Otokar Stafl, 1931