The Project

This isn't me. I'm not a real project manager. But I'm one of those guys who will do anything if asked nicely enough, if there is a real need. And in this case, there was a real need. I'd been working as teacher for a couple years on an aviation program here, writing curriculum and training rooms full of software engineers on the latest technology so they could finish their projects and we could deliver the software that was so far behind schedule. My concern was not at the program level; it was to understand the concepts of the hardware and the software and the methods we were using to get the entire system to work, so that my students (the engineers) could do their jobs correctly. But when the cost and schedule were were blown out of the water and upper management was getting nervous and suddenly the "overhead' of training no longer seemed quite so necessary, I was asked to become a Verification Lead for a specific aspect of the program: the test hardware

Let's say you want to build a box. Nothing fancy. Just a box you can use around the house. To hold stuff. You know what a box is, right? Sure you do. It's square. Or rectangular. It's got sides, a bottom, maybe a top. You can put papers in it, or books, or fresh fruit, or even kittens. You can move it around, stack it here or there. So let's say you are a Project Manager, and your project is to build a box to put stuff in. That shouldn't be difficult, right? Easy-peasy. What's the first thing you need to do? Right. Define what the thing is for .  Because that will tell you how the thing needs to be built. How it is supposed to perform. How much stuff it will hold. What size it should be. What kinds of materials are best suited for the thing. Those are called the Requirements.  Sometimes the Requirements Specification. Don't worry if you aren't sure what those are yet. We'll get into the details later. For now, just remember that they are

It was the sight of the little box with the flashing lights and the tiny silver switches that turned Fred into a raving lunatic. We had all known that he was something special during freshman year, when he strolled into the Science Department with the Hewlett-Packard 65 programmable calculator strapped to his side, his long hippy-hair flowing down the back of his neck, his thick glasses amplifying those brown cow eyes, carrying that beat-up copy of Popular Electronics magazine and spouting nonsense about building our own computer. We weren't idiots; we knew that computers were huge, monstrous machines which filled entire rooms and required Doctorates to understand and operate. We'd grown up watching the video feeds from Mission Control down in Houston, seen all the cabinets full of equipment necessary to fly those spacemen to the moon. High School freshmen do not build computers. This we knew with complete confidence. But Fred was not a typical freshmen. There was and al