A week ago the Pawdoc DP project started in earnest after 14 months of Scoping work. The Project Plan DESCRIPTION document and associated Project Plan CHART define a 5 month period of work in 10 separate sections. The Scoping work proved to be extremely valuable in ensuring as far as possible that the tasks in the plan are doable and of a fixed size. No doubt there will be hiccups but they should be self contained within a specific area and not affect the viability of the whole project.

It took rather longer than anticipated to get the m-Hance utility to a position where it can be used to export the PAWDOC files – though I guess such delays are typical in these kinds of transactions. First there was an issue around payment caused by the m-Hance accounting system not being able to cope with a non-company which could not be credit checked. I paid up front and the utility was released to me once the payment had gone through the bank transfer system. After that there followed a period of testing and some adjustment using the export facility WITHOUT deletion in Fish. At that point I finalised the Plan and the Schedule and started work. However, although it was believed that the utility was working as it should, there followed a frustrating week during which its operation to export WITH delete (needed so that I could check any remaining files) kept producing exception reports and the m-Hance support staff produced modified versions of the utility. There’s an obvious reminder here that nothing can be assumed until you try it out and verify it. Anyway, all is well now and the export WITH delete completed successfully late last night. I decided against re-planning to accommodate the delays in running it in the belief that I can make up the time in the course of the three weeks planned to check the output from the export.