The Gantt

Every project needs a Gantt chart. It is essential. You can’t persuade any self-respecting middle-to-upper management cone-head to sign off on your project plan unless he sees the Gantt. He’ll tell you:
”Where’s the Gantt?”
And you’ll be like:
”Wtf, I just showed you the project schedule and…”
And he’ll just go:
“Where’s the Gantt?”
And you’ll try to explain:
”Look, there is no need for a Gantt chart – all the information you could cram into that chart is right…”
“So where’s the Gantt?” comes the reply.

So here’s the Gantt.



This needs some elaboration.

Familiarization (7.11-7.12)
As noted elsewhere, you inherit your baby project (roughly) 4% of the way through. Considering the fact you’re dealing with an 18 years long project, 4% is a lot. This means you’ll need to familiarize yourself with your baby.

Research (14.11-1.1)
In about a week, you will realize you haven’t the foggiest idea. You’ll read books, Google and call-up psychics. After two weeks you’ll give up.

Learning Basics (7.11-14.11)
In order to begin with the caretaking activities you will need to learn some basics. This includes (and is not limited to) feeding the baby, taking the baby for walks, keeping the baby clean and dry and keep the baby happy.

Caretaking Activities (14.11-?)
Apart from the developing stuff, you’ll actually need to maintain your baby. Have you ever worked on a project where you needed to maintain the data while actually developing system to manage the same data? We’ll it’s just like that.

Sleep (?)
What sleep?

Playing Your Favorite Board Game
I average 12 seconds a day. Which means I’ll finish a quick game of Go in about 450 days.

Household Tasks (daily)
The Baby Project is a perfect opportunity for your spouse to off-load some of the chores to you (this is an inherently bad idea – think Microsoft product support and India). At this time you have no choice but to pencil it in.

Teaching Basics (15.10-?)
A Baby requires you to teach it some of the basic skills of living in a civilized society. This includes (and is not limited to) eating, walking, talking, taking care of nature calls and to say “I’m really, really sorry” when he does something you don’t approve of.

Blogging (whenever)
This will fall under work-time (in case your boss is a cone-head, you will need to work at it at 1 am).