The Lazy Moose - Part 02 of 03

When Laziness is a Virtue - Part 02 of 03

Target Audience: This series is pitched at developers interested in Object Oriented Design Patterns using the Moose framework in Perl.

For Earned Value Analysis, my data resides in two spreadsheets. The first one is 'Dashboard.xls' - an important-looking spreadsheet with a bevy of beautiful numbers housed in multicolored cells and even the solid gray bars have a blue overlay .. in short, everything calculated to impress the bosses. It is variously known as Gantt Chart or Bar Chart and is basically a schedule with workdays along the X-axis and project activities organized into packages along the Y-axis. So the gray bars tell about the time-lines for each activity under each work package and the blue overlay tells how much (%-age wise) has been accomplished out of the total in the gray. That piece of information (%-age complete) goes in the red column (H) and the spreadsheet automatically updates itself, blue bars and all - savvy?

(Making such a spreadsheet is an interesting story in itself involving utilization of the full date-time capabilities of MS-Excel and a neat little trick called Conditional Formatting - which has been pushed to the envelope. But that's another story for another day.)


That's all very well for time, (she says, slipping into a diaphanous negligee,) but where is the information upon costs? Sharp! There's one more spreadsheet that has those numbers, and for faint of heart it ain't.



Actually, all it is is my operators and how they have charged time to the project, on the basis of which I estimate costs. Samuel Jackson, for example, has been working his butt off whereas Morgan Freeman has been idly sitting on his.

If you're keeping up with me so far, super! On the other hand if not, don't let it bother you. Seppukku is an acceptable option. (Unless your designation says "Project Manager", in which case you ought to be ashamed!)

All you need to know is we're goin to be scraping numbers off these spreadsheets to generate other numbers that are interesting, insightful and irresistible.

Onward, into the code!

All code in this series may be downloaded from:
http://sites.google.com/site/sanjaybhatikar/codeunquote/designpatterns-1