Tuesday 21 June 2011

How not to underestimate workload.

There's this half-joking rule for IT guys and programmers that goes:

If you have a job to do and need to find out how long it will take, do the following.
Estimate the length of time you will need to do the job. Now take that number and increase it to the next number of magnitude - minutes into hours, hours into days, days into weeks and so on.
Now you add three. That's how long it will take.

Maybe I should start to use this rule as a hard-and-steady rule for my work stuff - like getting the webpage overhauled (well, yes, that did go on hiatus for quite a while), the online shop running (I didn't realise how much Holy Saint Bureaucracius would need to be revered) or the Spinning Experiment all wrapped up.

Ah, the Spinning Experiment. Yes, the results have been found and the paper is in the processing; but I have one thing left to do with the data, and that is cleaning it up a little, translating some of the extra info into English and then packing it up nicely for everyone to download from the Forum webpage. And for that, I need to sort through the yarn cop photos.

I took at least three photos from each sample, and I will just upload one, the best one regarding light and contrast. So I need to pick out those that should be uploaded, resize them a bit and then pack them into a .zip file. And that's still left to do. Sometimes I'm really, really amazed at how much time that Experiment gobbled up... though I'd do it again, it has been totally worth it.

And sometime soon, you will get a note on this blog that the data is up...

2 comments:

Harma said...

Cool. I'm looking forward to that.

chimene said...

on the IT rule-of-thumb? my Dear Husband says it sounds pretty good, except for the 50% of the time when the project DOES only take the original estimated time, or less. And the real problem being, there is NO way to tell which way any given activity is going to go! Unless, of course, it is important that it not take very long. Perversity tends to the Maximum.