Days passed. We (Ms Dixon and I) followed the plan. I wouldn’t say Ms Dixon was happy about it, but follow it she did. We began as per plan with Process 1 – Define Crime Chronology: while she was reviewing any electronic monitoring material, writing up, reviewing and resolving discrepancies, I was talking to all involved parties, writing up, reviewing and resolving discrepancies. In addition to my Process 1 tasks I had also been working on Process 2 – Find Motive task at the same time as I talked to different people about their movements on the crime night.
By the start of day 3 we were ready to collate the involved parties’ personal accounts of their movements with the electronic monitoring material.
Ms Dixon and I were back together in our “war room”…well, the room with the flip-charts and stuff: I don’t have much time for macho characterisation of analysis: talk of “war rooms” and “battle plans” all comes over as rather sad don’t you think? The only thing worse is “brown paper exercises” and “Lean Kaizen” activities. Or, more generally, the latest “methods” and “approaches” that promise like the mid-western medicine men of old to cure all with a little snake-oil and a lot of bamboozling.
Basically, you have to do analysis to do analysis and that means engaging the brain and thinking problems through. There are no short-cuts you haven’t worked out yourself, no “trust me, it just works” golden bullets that kill the need to think, to analyse.
Blindly following rituals like the Agile “morning huddles” where only pigs can speak (not chickens!) without understanding at a nuts and bolts level just how (if!) this ritual aids analysis is opening yourself up the modern medicine men and their bottles of coloured water. And make no mistake, roughly 5 to 10 years after the arrival of a new Method that promises to mysteriously cut project effort and budgets in half while delivering more success than any other Method, it will fade away to be replaced by a brand new Method with a new shaped bottle containing liquid that (curiously) has the same colour as the old method…face it: if you want to understand how components can be put together to solve problems you will have to analyse – and that means think! – what the problem is, what the components are and the best way to put them together to solve the problem.
Here endeth the rant.
Where was I? Oh yes, me and Ms D putting the products of our investigative analysis together…so process 1 was all about who was doing what where and when. That is
Problem: I need to know who is doing what, where and when.
Components: People, tasks, location, time.
Remember how I said in Scope Analysis (I) blog entry that “Analysis means decomposing a subject to its fundamental components and defining the relationship between those components “? Given that, I figured I should produce something that answered those questions for those components and the best way to me seemed to be a map of the building, showing who was in each room, when, what they were doing and where they went next. I was not following a method, see? Instead, I just thought about what needed to be done to do the analysis and then did it in order to do the analysis. I suppose some pedant will point out that is a method, but it does not rely on anyone telling anyone else what has to be done, using obtuse terms like “Kaizen”, paying licence fees, getting certified by some money-making institution or trusting that it will turn out all right in the end.
Anyway, I had drawn up my analysis and it looked like this:
By the start of day 3 we were ready to collate the involved parties’ personal accounts of their movements with the electronic monitoring material.
Ms Dixon and I were back together in our “war room”…well, the room with the flip-charts and stuff: I don’t have much time for macho characterisation of analysis: talk of “war rooms” and “battle plans” all comes over as rather sad don’t you think? The only thing worse is “brown paper exercises” and “Lean Kaizen” activities. Or, more generally, the latest “methods” and “approaches” that promise like the mid-western medicine men of old to cure all with a little snake-oil and a lot of bamboozling.
Basically, you have to do analysis to do analysis and that means engaging the brain and thinking problems through. There are no short-cuts you haven’t worked out yourself, no “trust me, it just works” golden bullets that kill the need to think, to analyse.
Blindly following rituals like the Agile “morning huddles” where only pigs can speak (not chickens!) without understanding at a nuts and bolts level just how (if!) this ritual aids analysis is opening yourself up the modern medicine men and their bottles of coloured water. And make no mistake, roughly 5 to 10 years after the arrival of a new Method that promises to mysteriously cut project effort and budgets in half while delivering more success than any other Method, it will fade away to be replaced by a brand new Method with a new shaped bottle containing liquid that (curiously) has the same colour as the old method…face it: if you want to understand how components can be put together to solve problems you will have to analyse – and that means think! – what the problem is, what the components are and the best way to put them together to solve the problem.
Here endeth the rant.
Where was I? Oh yes, me and Ms D putting the products of our investigative analysis together…so process 1 was all about who was doing what where and when. That is
Problem: I need to know who is doing what, where and when.
Components: People, tasks, location, time.
Remember how I said in Scope Analysis (I) blog entry that “Analysis means decomposing a subject to its fundamental components and defining the relationship between those components “? Given that, I figured I should produce something that answered those questions for those components and the best way to me seemed to be a map of the building, showing who was in each room, when, what they were doing and where they went next. I was not following a method, see? Instead, I just thought about what needed to be done to do the analysis and then did it in order to do the analysis. I suppose some pedant will point out that is a method, but it does not rely on anyone telling anyone else what has to be done, using obtuse terms like “Kaizen”, paying licence fees, getting certified by some money-making institution or trusting that it will turn out all right in the end.
Anyway, I had drawn up my analysis and it looked like this:
Ms Dixon spotted it and held it up. She twisted it around, squinted, brought it close to her face and held it arms’ length. Finally, she put it back down.
“Not the most readable of documents,” she said. “In fact, probably the most unreadable of documents.” She dropped it back on the table.
“Not the most readable of documents,” she said. “In fact, probably the most unreadable of documents.” She dropped it back on the table.
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