So, I have to go to HH next week again. As you all now from my various rantings, I work on a detector which is more or less broken, together with colleagues, some of which I don't think that they are, let's say, competent...
We will install the detector next week after some repairs and after some changes (which won't help, because they did not remove the origin of the failures but only will weaken the symptoms, if at all). As it seems, I am one of the very few who actually know how to do things I have to go there.
Just right now I got the schedule. A 6 page PDF, generated by MS Project. And a textfile with a list of manpower associated with the tasks. I got it twice. The sender sent it again, because in the first version he forgot the subject. Opening the PDF, you get a fancy Gantt-Chart, which shows which tasks follows which and how long it does take. Unfortunately nobody in management has any idea what these charts normally are used for and complain that Project does stupid things when they have a person with 500% workload working 24 hours on 5 different tasks in parallel. So they leave out the association of tasks with people and do an extra list in their favourite text-editor, there nothing turns red or changes the timeline...
My tasks (which not only I will do, but also two to three others...) will be: after 6 hours of driving to HH, be at some meetings around lunchtime probably, remove very sensitive equipment around midnight. Then on the next day at 1500 start a 24h shift installing the very sensitive detector again. Third day: around midnight cable everything up on the sensitive inside, cable up the outside, test everything, remove cables again. Fourth day, around 8 am, cable up the outside.
Just to get me right here: I don't complain about working at odd hours (although I will stay at a friend's house, who will be very delighted about this schedule...), I don't complain about working a lot of hours once in a while. What I just want to say is: nobody seems to have taken any care about organising this. It's just the naive way of this follows that. No thinking about if it makes sense to have people doing stuff under pressure, no way of possible error. If something goes wrong, this schedule is gone. There are no buffers, no checkpoints, nothing. I would expect that people who reach management start buying a book about project management and at least get some ideas... But we are physicist. We can do everthing, we don't need to learn...
