Everyone has read "The Mythical Man-Month", haven't they? It proposed paying
attention to how long things actually take, so as to inform future project
estimates, among other ideas that largely are as useful today as they were
when this book was written, some twenty-plus years ago. A lot has changed,
but we have not.

Of course, one of my favorite misadventures was a former peer, a DBA who
worked two eighty hour weeks to meet a deadline. During the project audit,
he was told that his work went over budget by about eighty hours of labor...
And the auditors did not understand his question, how much those eighty
extra hours of unpaid overtime cost the company. In retrospect, they
probably cost the company more than they realized.

At the opposite end was the project manager who was shocked when another
former peer asked for the work order for the twelve hours he was asked to
contribute toward that project. Said project manager replied to said peer,
"You're not going to bill your time against my project, are you? If you do,
I'll go over budget!" I thought that this was why we audited projects, to
project managers could learn to manage projects better, by having their
projects reviewed.

Greg Stigers

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