Newmarket Hill (under construction)

Tag: Planning

  • Dancing in Public!

    It is (almost) always a good idea as part of a planning process to review and revise – flexible planning! English Heritage‘s MoRPHE planning process recognises this, which I like very much. But I have had problems trying to follow their product based planning, based on the PRINCE2 project planning methodology.

    English Heritage’s MoRPHE planning process is to identify outcomes, then to work backwards to discover what intermediate steps may be required to meet that end point. They use the term product to characterise each of the outcomes. Then the tasks are defined which are needed to generate these products. However, I have previously studied David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done‘ (GTD) methodology, which emphasises a more task orientated approach. His main focus is on the actions required to complete a task. In practice, at the initial stages of project planning, both are required. Both top-down and bottom-up. My study of the hermeneutic circle helped me with this. How can you know where you are going if you don’t know how you might get there?

    Knowledge of how you might get somewhere can help in deciding where you want to go – and – knowledge of where you want to go can help in deciding how you might get there. And so one performs a dance between the two – except this dance is rarely made explicit. It is this dance that I am performing right now – and – in public!

  • Excavation Planning

    Happier now! In my last post (pun not intended!) I realised I needed to read about Project Planning in general. As a result I realised I was trying to put my cart in front of the horse; I was trying to timetable an hypothetical end point of one year, and then working backwards towards how to get there, and getting lost along the way.

    Instead I tried brainstorming each of the outcomes I hope to achieve – one trench at a time – mini project stages in and of themselves – and each following on from the one before.

    And it seems to have worked – apart from the timescale part (I can deal with that later) – and so it is that I now have a provisional list of targets:

    1. Find NE corner of garden boundary wall (1x1m trench on corner & extend if required to max 2x2m)
    2. Find S boundary wall junction; including corner of farmyard & garden & possible gdn structure (1x1m trench on estimated junction & extend if required to 3x2m)
    3. Find SW corner of water tank on boundary wall (1x1m trench & extend if required to 2x2m)
    4. Find NW corner of water tank on boundary wall (1x1m trench & extend if required to 2x2m)
    5. Find SW corner of house on boundary wall (1x1m trench & extend if required to 2x2m)
    6. Find NW corner of house on boundary wall (1x1m trench & extend if required to 2x2m)
    7. Find internal house wall lines on W side of house (three 1x1m trenches increased to 1x3m if required)
    8. Find front door and front garden gate (two 2x1m trench enlarged to 3x1m if required)
    9. Find NE corner of house, including ‘wood-shed’ (2x1m trench enlarged to 3x1m if required)
    10. Find SE corner of ‘wood-shed’ & projection of E side of house, possible back-door & internal house wall (2x2m trench enlarged to 3x3m if required)
    11. Find door in internal wall (2x1m trench enlarged to 3x1m if required)
    12. Find fireplace (2x1m trench enlarged to 3x1m if required)
    13. Clear vegetation on mound of demolition rubble & look for chimney pots
    Newmarket Cottage Trench Plan; January 2013.
    Newmarket Cottage Trench Plan; January 2013. Base plan from ESRO.

    This only provisional – but I have to start somewhere.

  • Project Planning and a hurting head!

    My head hurts! I am new to the formal discipline of Project Planning. I am trying to understand English Heritage’s guidelines on how I might best plan my archaeological excavation. There is so much to get my head around, both regarding the details of Project Planning in general, and the details of my own particular project.

    My Newmarket Farm Excavation Proposal Document was relatively easily to write, because it did not have to go into the small details. It was based on the English Heritage MoRPHE (Management of Research Projects in the Historic Environment) planning guidance. I recently completed a distance learning familiarisation course on the use of MoRPHE, which enabled me to realise that what I had attained was just the tip of the iceberg. Now that the Project Proposal Document has generally been accepted by both Greg Chuter and Malcolm Emery, I need to write the Project Design Document, which is to detail all the stuff that I am not – yet – entirely sure how to do.

    So I sat down and started to learn the subject of Project Management. Oh yes, and I wrote this post.