Right off the bat, I want to let everyone out there in cyber land know that I have good clean teeth.
But on to matters of more import.
Time is a relative thing, but no matter how relative our sensations of the passage of time, things take time to get done. I do not know how to emphasize this enough to some of the knuckleheads that I have to work with. It has come to my attention, yet again that people managing projects think that the work we do magically takes no time. It takes time to convert files from what we use and print from, to what they can view and print out. It takes time to convert paper scaled maps to be ready for viewing on the web. Sometimes it take an inordinate amount of time to change the color of some text. The file sizes that we use are ginormous because the density of data associated with our tasks at hand are typically rather, err..., well..., dense.
Sometimes we run up against actual physical production time limits. Say some one wants 200 copies of 14 graphics. We have a printer that can spit color pages out at a rate of 11 per minute. After we get the file into the printer, that comes out to about 4 hours 15 minutes of physical printing time (if we don't slow things down went changing toner, toner refuse bins, paper, fusers, etc...) with no complications at all. Typically, the job requires some sort o presentation of those graphics in a format more orderly than loose sheets of paper, so let's say that the graphics need to be inserted into a larger text document and then spiral bound. It takes around 20 minutes per binding. So after the graphics have been printed we are still looking at an additional 4 hours and 40 minutes of collating and binding time. Just for production alone, we are at 8 hrs and 55 min, more than one full work day. Typically, each graphic takes about 15 minutes to open and get stored into the printer for final production, so that adds another 3 1/2 hours to just the production time. These are constant time sinks. Actual graphic edits take varying amounts of time on top of this 11 1/2 hours of production time for something as simple as a 200 copies of a report with 14 color pages.
Every time I explain this to a PM, they are always surprised at the actual amount of time it takes to finish things off in production, even after they have been finished pre-production. Sadly, this has been explained multiple times to a handful of PM's (I'm looking your direction, Asshat!)
Oh, well, enough of my ranting. My week is almost done.
