Jeff over at The Shape of Days has a nice little post up about scheduling. I was going to write him an email explaining my situation and personal experience with scheduling, but as I thought through what I was going to write, I figured it was going to be a bit lengthy. So why not post it here? Besides, you people need something to read. And by people I mean the 5 people who don’t visit this site from a Google Image search.

So here it goes:

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the english way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought Id something more to say

Pink Floyd - Time

I am an engineer, so I am use to having schedules. Some schedules are grounded in reality, while many are of the “I needed it yesterday” variety. Some have fixed dates because of some event or because funding will run out or because of politics.

I have no problem trying to project out a time when I can get my project out to bid and when I expect it to be complete. Specific dates? Not so much. More of, I hope to have it out to bid by Spring and completed by Winter. That will do for me.

When I was working in the Private Sector, I had all three constraints: time, money and politics, but by and large we were able to give vague dates. If we were ever dumb enough to give a specific date that was too far out in the future, we usually had our butts chewed out because inevitably, we would be unable to meet it.

I now work for a Municipality and I am up against the same constraints. Until two years ago, I approached my projects like I had in the Private Sector. But then the City Commission got sold a bag of magic beans and things have not been the same since.

Let me give some background first.

The Engineering Department is a service department for the City. If a private citizen has a drainage complaint or a traffic complaint, it gets routed to us. We have to investigate the matter and either contact the citizen or respond to the City Manager. Some times a Commissioner gets involved and either wants a study or wants an answer. Then there are the department meetings, budget meetings and public hearings that come along. They bring their own issues that need to be addressed. On top of that, other city departments use us as their engineer. This is great, as we have a great staff that I would put up against any private sector firm. Every 4 to 5 years, a Sales Tax is issued with a whole set of projects to be completed. Our department does the designs for alley paving projects, storm drainage projects, traffic projects and sewer projects. Sometimes we farm them out to consultants, but we try to do them in house. Also, one of my duties is to review the designs for all site work proposed in the City. So, what ever is asked of us, we do it. We are remarkably flexible and I feel we are the opposite of the typical government bureaucrat.

What does this have to do with schedules?

All the above represent unknown factors. I do not know if I will have 2 or 10 site plans to review each week. I do not know what the Commission will want information on before/after each Commission meeting. I do not know how many citizen complaints/concerns I will receive in a week. Since we live along a river with a flooding history, if three hurricanes come through in two months like they did in 2005, flood prevention/preparation may stop all regular activities for a short time.

In the late summer of 2005, a consultant rode into town with plans to save the City $5 million dollars. They did their study for free which, no surprise there, and found out that if we just did project planning, then we would be able to eliminate people and save money. Oh yeah, they wanted a yearlong contract to be the Project Managers for the City. Granted they did not know the first thing about running a city, much less an engineering department. It was a fiasco. They made everything a project. One project was to eliminate one position in our department. That was an actual project. They called us in to go over our projects. They did some typing into their laptop and bang! They had a schedule. One of the consultants asked if I could do such and such project in 6 months. Sure, I told him, it would take 6 months. No, he meant for me to be done 6 months from then. Oh, that made a big difference. I had no idea what would be happening in the next 6 months, so for me to commit to a single date 6 months down the road was far fetched.

That is how it went until everything we were working on was entered into the system. We did not have control over it, nor did we have much input. But now, my projects had actual completion dates that were set in stone. The Commission and the City Manager seemed to think that because a project had an end date, that it would be met.

Re-read my part about us being a service department.

Sure enough, after about 6 months, the consultants were seen as the frauds they were, but the new City Manager was forced by the Commission to make the system work.

I understand the need to plan projects and I see that careful planning will save money and resources for the city, but because we are not a private sector firm, we cannot turn work away. Airport, you want us do design that new runway? Sure. Recreation, you want us to survey all of your parks? Sure. Environmental Protection Division (EPD), you want me to map our system and comply with your cumbersome permit? We don’t have a choice do we?

And that is exactly what happened. Last summer we got a mandate from EPD that then consumed 6 months of my time to comply with. It was not optional; it had to be worked into my schedule. I still had to do my normal job, but with the added EPD stuff. My project deadlines suffered because of it. Did that mean that the City was not getting their moneys worth? Not in the least. I was still able to get the work done, just not by their schedule that was arbitrarily set.

In working through the issues, the lady who took over the project management position still did not understand what we had been trying to tell people for the past year. She still wanted to know, before I even began the project, when the project would bid and be constructed. That was almost impossible. I know that seems hard to grasp. After all, construction projects are planned out all the time. Yeah, but once again, re-read the part about us being a service department.

First, we had to survey the job. That had to be squeezed into the schedule of existing projects and mandates. Then we had to design the project. Again, working it into the schedule. Then a bid date had to be set, by Procurement. The bid date had to be set so that you could get on a Commission work session, twice a month, in order to get on the official night meeting, once a month. It was possible that your bid date would fall such that you had to wait an entire month before you could get Commission approval. She wanted all those dates before anything was started. How can you do that?

As I stated earlier, things come up. Last year it was the EPD mandate. The year before it was a sewer study ordered by a Commissioner. This year is was that the Sales Tax projects were forced back because the City had to get a bond due to cash flow problems. How can you plan for that?

So in short, planning projects is good, to the extent it is realistic. Setting final dates on yearlong and longer projects, in a department that is at the beck and call of citizens and the Commission, is a futile effort that produces meaningless dates. After all, what does it matter if the alley is paved in August as opposed to March? There are no deadlines on the funds and there is no health or safety problem. It is a big deal because the Commissioner wants to be able to show his constituents that he is getting things done. Even though, he had nothing to do with the project other than adding the alley to the list.

Here is a list of some of our projects.