Page 33 - Flathead Beacon // 2.10.16

TRANSACTIONS
WEEKLY BUSINESS BRIEFING
NEW BOXING GYM TO OPEN IN DOWNTOWN KALISPELL
Jesse Uhde, a local profes- sional boxer, is opening a new boxing and tness gym in the basement of the Loading Dock in downtown Kalispel.
Uhde plans to open Hard Knocks Boxing and Fitness on March 1 at 101 E. Center Street. The facility will feature boxing classes for all ages and abilities as well as personal training and tness programs.
The gym will be o ering schol-
arships for children ages 8-17. Criteria for awarding scholarships will be based on nancial need and desire to commit to the boxing program. Applicants should contact Uhde at [email protected].
Uhde, born and raised in Lakeside, became a professional boxer in 2012. He has since expanded to promoting and organizing local boxing events.
For more information about the gym, visit sites.google.com/site/ hardknocksboxingand tness.
Opening, moving or expanding a business in Northwest Montana? If you would like to be featured in “Transactions,” please email information to news@ atheadbeacon.com
Woodland Floral in Kalispell on Jan. 29, 2016. GREG LINDSTROM | FLATHEAD BEACON
those emergency “I have a funeral in an hour and no owers” calls come in. It’s a natural skill, she said.
“I was 10 when mom and dad bought this place,” Penny said.
In the few moment between answer- ing the phone or building orders, Fay, Penny, Jordan, and Taylor – favorite ower: circus roses and red tulips – lin- ger in the store’s o ce, discussing the impending birth of Taylor’s son and Jordan’s upcoming departure to the U.S. Air Force.
Having graduated from Flathead
High School last year and not having the patience or desire to stand still long enough to craft an arrangement, Jor- dan, whose favorite ower is the Ger- bera daisy, is running deliveries until she leaves for boot camp.
It’s been work, but it’s also familiar and comfortable.
“It’s been nice to be with family,” she said.
For more information on Woodland Floral, visit www.woodland oralkalis-
pell.com.
mpriddy@ atheadbeacon.com
BUSINESS IS PERSONAL MARK RIFFEY IS IT DONE YET?
WHEN I WAS YOUNG AND A BIT green at project management, I somehow managed to have responsibility for a number of big proj- ects. Some came in OK, some never seemed to get rolling properly, some were late, and some seemed to take on a life of their own. A latter group tended to include projects whose scope was a mov- ing target or had many unknowns.
The worst of these have a way of being the unknowns you never see com- ing, often gestated from a family tree of assumptions and incorrect or changed information.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said that decisions are made while dealing with “known unknowns and unknown unknowns.” Anyone with large project experience knows exactly what he meant.
Project Management Requires Discovery
The software business has a sketchy reputation for delivering projects on time, despite a lot of internally driven improve- ment over the last two decades. This rep- utation is sustained by the memory of failures of very large software projects.
Agile project management and related
methodologies have helped a great deal. Many of these methodologies can trace their roots back to Lean manufacturing/ management methods taught by Deming in Japan after World War II.
Success with these management strategies depends on early discovery of issues, challenges and changes in the information driving your decisions. This, combined with our human tendencies, is part of why the MVP (minimum viable product) construct works. The earlier the customer sees your work, the earlier you’ll nd out if you’re on track.
Usually, you get to decide how this dis- covery occurs: organically as the project work occurs, or in advance, thanks to dis- cussions of expectations, requirements and manufacturing options during the design phase.
Poorly managed projects are often started without su cient discovery and discussion. Even today, many projects are started and nished with very little advanced thought. No one would build an airliner as it rolls down the runway. While that sounds a bit ridiculous, this is exactly what happens.
The context of the design is critical as well. Work done in a vacuum, even with the best of intentions, often produces
incorrect assumptions thanks to the aforementioned unknown unknowns. The project’s scope is an known unknown and the unknown unknowns are often a simple matter of lack of experience with the environment where the completed project will be used.
When Will it be Done?
While you may not have an accurate answer to that question, better design will improve your ability to give an esti- mate that someone can actually trust.
Better Design? How?
The most common problem I see is not breaking things down into small enough pieces of work. Granularity is critical to the design and estimation of highly detailed/technical work. The volume of dependencies and unknowns in this type of work compounds the miscalculations and omissions resulting from a lack of detailed analysis, resulting in inaccurate estimates and missed expectations.
An estimate of days, weeks or months without a detailed breakdown of sub- tasks is symptomatic of the problem. I nd that estimates require subtasks no larger than two to four hours to create a design that’s thought out well-enough to
meet expectations, discover obstacles in advance, while producing a reasonable estimate.
But it’s Not Perfect!
Human nature also creeps into the equation: We like completing tasks.
It’s such a part of our us that people tend to focus on less important tasks simply because we can complete them before the end of the work day. We feel accomplished despite leaving big proj- ects untouched.
If you’ve ever written things on a checklist that you’ve already done so that you could check them o , then you know what I mean.
Rather than ght the xation on small projects that we can “download” and complete in a work period, feed it with subtasks of your big, important projects that conform to the need to complete something the same day.
Life has a way of being incredibly cre- ative when it comes to nding ways to delay a project’s completion. Build these project management tactics into your design, estimate and build work ow so that you can get better work done faster - even on big projects.
mri ey@ atheadbeacon.com
FEBRUARY 10, 2016 // FLATHEADBEACON.COM
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