crazymalc.co.nz - Home Page of Malcolm Trevena

The Project That Wasn't

6th December 2005
I work at the Pulao Elementary School in the afternoons. Some of you may have been wondering what I get up to in the mornings. Well, as of right now, the short answer is "Not Much". I usually end up writing stuff for this website, or surfing the internet or marking homework. I am looking at getting stuck into a couple of new projects when the new year starts.

For a while though, I was working on a large scale I.T. project in Dumangas. This is the story of what went wrong and what I learnt from the experience.

Malcolm, the I.T. geek
I used to work as an I.T. consultant when I was living in New Zealand. I initially ran my own company called Simple Software. A typical Simple Software project had a budget of $2,000 dollars. One of the problems with Simple Software though was that it didn't make any money. The staff made more than I did.

A local company called Enabling Technologies liked the work I did and made me an offer I couldn't refuse. The gave me some money and Simple Software merged with Enabling . I eventually became a shareholder in Enabling and worked on many large projects. A typical Enabling budget was around $200,000. A case study of one of the projects I was the lead on^* can be found here.

The Big Idea
I did a tour of the Municipal Chambers during one of my first few days in The Philippines. They showed me around all the departments. Agriculture, Law Enforcement, and so on. All the departments seemed very inefficient to me. Data was manually collated, documents were typed using a typewriter and statistics were gathered in an ad-hoc manner.

One of the things I am very good at is making complex things simple. It is both my blessing and my curse. I thought that I could use this skill to make one of the departments in the Municipal Chambers hum like a well-oiled machine. I mentioned this to the mayor and he was very keen on the idea.

It was soon decided that I would help the D.A. (Department of Agriculture^**) with a soil sample project. This soon morphed into a fully-fledged data management system. If you're interested to know exactly what I planned to do, then click here.

Tour of Duty
One thing that I learned from my I.T. days is that the more you know about the subject matter, the better your I.T. solution will be. With that in mind, I asked Eugene, one of the kind folks from the D.A., to show me around some of the rural areas of Dumangas.

First up, we visited a fishpond. The local farmers showed us how they fed their fish and what type of fish they grew. The particular farm that we visited also raised swine.

From there we moved to a nearby river community. Eugene managed to organize a boat to take us up the river in. While we were on the river, Eugene pointed out the many ways that the river was fished. These include:

We also saw some of the very basic houses that people lived in along the river.

Eugene also arranged for us to have lunch with a local family. As I got off the boat, I managed to half destroy the family's small bamboo wharf. Sheesh. What a fat bastard. I was very apologetic about it, but the family just laughed it off.

There were no power lines running to the house, so the family had to run all their electrical appliances off this big stack of batteries. The family takes the batteries into town every so often to get them recharged.

After lunch, we headed back into town.

Things go wrong
So, now I had got to the point where I knew what type of information was to be gathered and had had a first hand look at the agriculture industry. Game on!

The technicians at the D.A. visit all the farms in the region on a regular basis. I had designed some paper forms with the idea that the technicians could take these forms on their visits and they could gather the data. A good idea in theory.

I was happy with the forms and I needed to run them past some of the farm technicians. This proved to be a lot more difficult than it sounded. First of all, it was hard to actually arrange some time with them. It is very hard to tie a Filipino down to a particular time. "9 a.m." to a Filipino can mean anywhere from 9 a.m. to 9:30 a.m.

There is nothing actually "wrong" with this loose approach to time. If anything, I think the Filipino people have got a much better attitude to time than western folk do. When I was working in New Zealand I was very obsessed with time. I would worry that I was four minutes late to an appointment. Not at all good for the mental health.

One of the other problems was the technicians would often have unexpected urgent things that they needed to do. As a consequence, my request for time often got moved down the list. "Not right now Malcolm, maybe later."

Once again, all of this is fine. Stuff happens and things need to get reshuffled.

But it all got me thinking about previous projects that I had been involved in in New Zealand. The projects that tended to go well had a strong Project Sponsor. A strong Project Sponsor would typically be someone who worked for the client, had a strong understanding of how computers worked and could generate momentum where needed.

The D.A. had no such person.

So, I was faced with a decision. I could with struggle through the project by myself without a Project Sponsor or throw the towel in.

I threw the towel in.

I figured it just wasn't going to be worth the mental strain and anguish it would cause me. I've have had enough mental health problems in the past without risking it all again.

What does this all mean for the future?
I am very good at making computers dance for me. I can make them do very useful things for people. But, a) I just don't enjoy it anymore and b) it is not worth the mental strain, so I figure is time to give up on computers in the professional sense.

I still enjoy computers as a hobby. At the moment I am working on a program that will work out the ideal Pusoy hand given a random set of 13 cards. I also enjoy using computers to help me write and maintain my own web site.

I am really enjoying teaching at the moment, so I am going to stick with that.

The bottom line is that I am good at computers, but I enjoy teaching. So I'll go with the teaching!

^*That project won a national innovation award by the way. I just like showing off that something I designed won such a prestigious award. :)

There also a patent for the idea in the U.S. patents office. I think technically it is a patent pending or something like that. I get confused by all the legal mumbo-jumbo.

^**The Filipinos just love their acronyms. C.R. is comfort room, or toilet, for instance.

Questions? Comments? Try contacting me.
Wanna receive an email whenever this site gets updated? Click here.

(c) 2005 and 2006 Malcolm Trevena.
All the stuff on this site is written by me, Malcolm Trevena. Feel free to link to this page. Heck, you can even copy stuff from here if you want. Just make sure you sight me as a reference.