The Integration Engineer
When it just has to work.

Just like synergy, a projects time-line is generally greater than the sum of its tasks.  Taking the time to complete tasks in a project together, there will need to be time between tasks.  Some of this time will just be spent updating people, and coordination of project participants.  There are also other needs, like water and bio-breaks.

Just like productivity during the day generally gives people a 15 minute break every 3 hrs or so.  When we plan our projects, we need to include not just the time that it takes to perform the collective tasks, but other activities that will be happening during the course of the project.

Odd errors can occur when you get data that doesn’t fit the format, but matches close enough not to fail outright.  This type of error can be really hard to unravel. Preventing these messy errors, it is a good practice to implement a validation process before processing the data.  Some integration technologies come with validation, if yours doesn’t you should pre-process inbound data for validation.

In addition to this, pre validation can be used as a way to catch and handle other errors early.  Leveraging pre-processing with validation and error handling can give you a one stop place to catch, and report or correct systemic problems.

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The accuracy of the timeline will only be as acurate as the accuracy of the least acurate task estimate.

The time estimate part of project planning is a tricky thing.  Generally there is some guessing involved.  To keep us from falling short a good practice is to pad estimates to account for the unforeseeable.  Project planners can’t just pad and pad.  There is pressure from the other side to keep your estimates accurate and keep your timeline short.  Time is money after all.

So how do we put enough time in the timeline to not fall short, and keep the timeline from getting too long and expensive?  Well that is a dance that takes some practice to learn.

Just remember, when you pad your estimate to your project leader or get and estimate from someone on your project, that padding is necessary, and you should discuss it openly.

Learn the basic tools.  Learn them first, and learn them well.  Sure, you can find some fancy XSLT tools or text editors.  And you can carry them around on a thumb drive and install them on all of you computers, workstations, laptops, and servers.  But sometime, some day, you will need to make a change, or fix a problem and you won’t have the fancy tool.  My experience says that this will also happen in the middle of the night when you are under pressure.  Knowing the basic tools like VI and Notepad, and any other tools that are a standard part of your systems will allow you to get your integration back up and running quickly and get you back to bed so you can go in and answer the questions about what happened with just that much more sleep.