An Attempt at Simplicity
That 's when things began to get interesting. The restraints of the operating
system. had to be properly understood and it took nearly two days of discussion
just to agree on the precise principles to be followed in order for the program
to operate satisfactorily. The information spectrum also had to be clarified
but a brief review soon showed that much of the material would simply not fall
neatly into any one ESA slot. Rather, subjects presented would cover several
ESA areas to a greater or lesser degree, thus necessitating the identification
of a primary theme and secondary themes in each case.
Systems people always seem to insist on being systematic - probably not a bad
idea when you come to think of it, so a simple three step approach was adopted.
I always like simple steps because it saves the embarrassment of having to explain
that I don't understand what I'm doing. Besides, who wants to waste time making
things unnecessarily complicated? (Please don't all shout at once.)
Figure 3
Figure 4: The practices of Time and Cost: project constraints [RMW 1985]
Anyway, Step One would be to do a run through all the material to list each
subject encountered (irrespective of ESA) , the intent being to define very precisely
the scope of each subject by identifying the various ideas presented. Hopefully,
these could be assembled or reassembled into a hierarchy which would resemble
the ESA body of knowledge breakdown structure.
Step Two would be to establish a coding for the hierarchy, with a corresponding
reference key.
Step Three would be to clean off all the old numbering from each transparency,
lecture note or reference abstract, renumber from 1 upwards, and start coding.
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Introduction
