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Monday, October 5, 2009

Pregnancy Evaluation from a PMP

So there has been something that has bothered me a lot about this whole pregnancy thing. It took me a while to figure out what it was, but I think I have figured it out. When we first found out we were pregnant I said that I was going to apply PMP principals and project manage this pregnancy. That being the case, here is my PMP analysis. In order to keep this reasable I am not including each of the 45 knowledge areas.

So the question is, how would pregnancy be evaluated as a project at work?

Customers:
  • Primary: Mary and Myself
  • Secondary: Grandparents and other relatives (sorry Grandparents, you are secondary customers in this project)

Preliminary Scope Statement: The scope of this project is to conceive (completed), and take through delivery a healthy baby.

Activity Definition: (In this order)

  • Conceive
  • Gestation
  • Name selection for boy or girl
  • Prepare for baby
  • Deliver baby

Cost estimating:

  • conception - N/A (this could be evaluated in may different ways, but it would all be grey accounting)
  • gestation - crib, clothing, diapers, car seats, etc
  • delivery - hospital fees
  • steady state going forward plan - day care, food, insurance, school, college

Quality planning - defined by parental genetics, diet, excercise

HR Planning - this started about 5 years ago

Communications planning - cell phones, facebook

Direct and Manage project execution - activities have been seperated and assigned to Mark/Mary/Grandparents/Aunts/etc based off of specialized skill sets and available bandwidth.

Information distribution - birth announcements

Scope control - done, no additional children were conceived while growing the original one

Cost control - mostly done, costs for the baby have stayed in control where as costs to keep the host happy have surpassed the original budget.

Manage project team - done, with the team staying happy > 80% of the time

Performance Reporting - status updates have been provided to secondary customers and friends as needed through various communication channels

Contract administration - identification of insurance/benefits planning

Close project - coming up in next 2/3 weeks

Communication closure - will arrive as a birth announcement after offical close of project

Project analysis - The project has effecitvly been managed, and we are moving into the final stages of execution. Going forward we have many lessons learned that we should apply in similar future projects.

Primarily, the act of carring a developing baby from conception to delivery is a highly inefficient task that uses far too many valuable resources. While growing the baby, Mary was not able to excercise in her normal fashion, required more sleep, could not eat sushi, could not drink. In addition the fact that the baby grows inside her stomach results in limited mobility and general uncomfrotablemess. In any normal business scenario that requires a high degree of manual labor from highly specialized employees, with varying ranges of comfort would be further evaluated. The work of growing the baby can only be done by Mary with limited support from myself.

All of these factors combined lends me to the proposal that future similar endeavors should be outsourced to lower cost employees. The fact of the matter is taking a highly efficient and productive team member, and imposing strict limits on food consumption, beverage consumption and excercise seems to be a terrible use of valuable company resources. Outsourcing the manual labor to lower cost providers should be evaluated as long as there is no loss of headcount on the current team.

2 comments:

emily and danny said...

this is unbelievably hilarious! awesome, mark!

Kristin said...

that is awesome...i am gonna tell chuck to give it a read~ he will understand the PM stuff even more than it do~ nice entry!