Lucas Schib's Blog

Of crystal balls in project management

2020-10-15T16:11:16.993000Z

The other day I spoke with a high ranking line manager about a very sudden assignment change in my project. Only two weeks earlier I had received the commitment for the assignment and now the person in question was about to be reassigned to another project endangering mine, though I was offered another engineer in exchange. In response to my question whether I have to expect another sudden assignment change impacting continuity, he said „I have no crystal ball, so I cannot tell".

Crystal ball? I ask you! Even in the wizarding world of Harry Potter the use of crystal balls is considered „obscure magic". Sure, we Muggles have no crystal balls, but we have plans, schedules and commitments.

Maybe it is just me, but I am seeing a tendency that organisations are loosing the ability to plan and schedule. With rising popularity of agile development, people seem to believe that planing and scheduling is no longer necessary. I believe that they are horribly wrong.

You have a goal, a plan is your „how" to achieving this goal. Your schedule is the „when" to the „how". It is making a vision reality in a reliable way. What can be so wrong or worse, obsolete, about that?

„We don’t plan, because reality turns out differently anyway" a technical project manager once told me. (The development project he was in charge of failed miserably) His blind spot was proper risk management. Risks are what brings our plans off course (assuming a good plan, that is), so if there were crystal balls, you’d be better advised to use them to identify the risks and avoid them in the best possible way.

In the end, I got the commitment for the new assignment to stay aboard as long as the project required to fulfil the plan.

Does your organisation also tend to „underrate" planning, scheduling and risk management?

Team communication power with spinach

2017-09-21T17:36:55.501000Z

I have seen several trends with a Japanese label on it rolling over to Europe and North America, some of which I am sceptical about, like the latest which is probably pecha kucha, a quick presentation style in TED style.

Ever so often, the Japanese word is taken and transformed into something the Japanese wouldn't recognise anymore.

But here I would like to suggest a Japanese concept for better communication that actually makes sense: hourensou (hoːɾeɴsoː).

The word means "spinach", and is short for

houkoku: to report

renraku: to reach out to

soudan: to seek advice

Put into action, one application would be

report, timely and accurately

reach out to stakeholders regularly

seek advice of peers, supervisor and experts

There are many applications for hourensou, you can adjust it to the needs of your team.

Just give it a try, and live by example.

Surprising things when visiting the US

2017-01-15T20:38:16.937000Z

Imperial units

Coming from Germany, units like miles, gallons, and pounds do not resonate in me as kilometers, liters and kilograms do. I have never walked a "mile", drunk a "gallon" or gained/lost a "pound", so I don't know what that feels like.

I have walked many kilometers, drunk many liters and gained/lost many kilograms, so I sure know what that feels like. The worst is probably speed, as in "Miles per Hour". When I go 40 mp/h, my inner situational awareness is at 40 km/h.

One empirical unit in the examples here is far larger than it's metric counterpart. Could it somehow be, that this is linked to the infamous obesity problem in the US? Used to it or not, gaining 3 pounds rather than 3 kilograms is probably less drastic psychologically, than it actually is...

Tipping system

I purposely call this a system, as it is extremely systematic how with virtually any bill, the tipping is part of the process. You are offered options of how many percent you want to tipp. Having lived in Japan for almost a decade, I "want" to tipp 0%, and having grown up in Germany and having received tipp there myself, my inner definition of "tipp" is a little extra money, which a customer grants directly to service personnel to express their recognition of particularly good service. Being polite to the customer is the pre-condition, going beyond the line of duty is what is worth the tipp. But in the US, the service is mostly neither particularly good (being polite to the customer seems to be tipp worth)

nor does the tipp go directly to the service personnel, if you pay tipp by credit card. I even suspect, that there is a "management cut" on tipps received, which may explain why suggested tipp percentages in an expensive restaurant are considerably higher than in a normal restaurant. This, by my definition, bypassses the entire purpose of tipping, because you want to give the gratuity directly, as in solely, to an individual who did a good job, rather than financing the management, which cannot be judged by one meal alone and supposedly is already included in the price for the meal anyway. I would tipp the management, if I had a means of gauging whether an establishment is particularly well managed.

Starters and Entrées

Having majored at French in high school, I happened to know that "Entrée" has the same meaning as "Starter" in English, so having starters and entrées on the menu is irritating to me. What is the difference?!

Given the size of portions in the US in general, I found that a starter is something of an appetizer by my inner German standards and Entrée the main course. So usually an Entrée alone in the US is usually more than enough for me to get full, whereas in Germany I would just be getting started...

About learning Japanese

2016-12-13T14:13:01.326000Z

I have already been asked this question many times, so I was also prompted to give it some more thorough thought: “Is Japanese difficult to learn?".

To quote my first Japanese teacher at the Technical University of Munich (TUM): “Japanese is difficult to learn, yes. But not more difficult than other foreign languages". Learning a foreign language is always difficult. You should never believe ads, which recently pop up ever so often in social media claiming that “you can learn any language in 14 days". To be proficient enough to actually be able to have a meaningful conversation, the effort is more in the order of magnitude of months to years, depending on your effort and motivation.

Whether learning Japanese is difficult for you depends upon what your native language is. As I am a German native speaker, let me take German as the base language as example.

Basically one can say that there are 3 major aspects of learning Japanese:

Grammar & Vocabulary
Writing systems
Context

These are not phases that start after each other, but rather aspects that run in parallel. The following graphic shows my subjective opinion on when each aspect starts to become relevant during learning Japanese.

At first you start out learning vocabulary and simple grammar. Once you memorised a good handful of words, phrases and a bit of grammar, you will start learning the writing system and, especially while learning the Kanji, notice how learning vocabulary and Kanji goes hand in hand, supplementing each other. This means, that if you know a word already, memorising the matching Kanji is easier and vice versa.

Once you have a stable base of vocabulary, grammar, and Kanji, you will become more fluent in speaking, understand more of what is said to you directly and in conversations you are listening to. This is the point when you start learning the meaning of the context.

Context is a concept which may be familiar to linguists, but is usually never a topic in language schools. The context is something which a society as a whole has an informal agreement upon, loosely known as common sense. I blogged about context already here.

The English expression “this goes without saying" is a nice example. It is used to express that something is common sense, but the speaker feels it is necessary to stress it by speaking it out anyway.

This is what context is about. In daily communication, there are many things which do not need to be said, and yet everyone understands.

A simple example for context in Japanese vs. English would be the following phrase:

I will have coffee.

コーヒーにします。

Note that in Japanese, the “I" is omitted, and yet the sentence is perfectly valid and understandable.

Now, Germans have the urge to say “I" due to the fact that German is a very precise language that requires to speak out almost everything, so Germans learning Japanese often end up saying

私はコーヒにします。

By Japanese grammar, this is not wrong, however it emphasizes the “I" to the extent of saying something along the lines of

I don’t know about you, but I will have coffee.

Once you get the hang of context, you will stop adding the “I" to every sentence.

I have noticed that becoming more aware of the context increased my situational awareness of a conversation significantly. I observe and listen more carefully to better understand what my wife, colleagues and clients are saying.

Relying on the precision of my native language, I need less attention to the context. In Japanese, I need less attention to precision of language, but more attention to the context of the conversation.

It is this last aspect, in my opinion that is the most difficult to learn, because it comes with experience, and in language this means, reading, listening, talking to and watching native speakers. There are many languages that rely a lot on context as well, such as Chinese. For speakers of such languages, of course, understanding context will be the easy part.

Ultimately, the only meaningful purpose for learning a foreign language is to communicate with other people. This is the only genuine motivation for learning a new language, if you wish to ever be proficient. So paying close attention to the conversation and its context is surely a good thing to learn any language, no matter whether it is context or word driven.

Pima Air & Space Museum, Tucson

2016-12-11T03:32:55.890000Z

http://www.pimaair.org

Eintritt: 15,50 $

Last admission: 3pm, close at 5pm