Again this year user presentations were about a third of the total, and the rest of the presentations were mostly by PTC or by other vendors. It is good to see PTC supporting the conference so thoroughly with people and other resources. But it might be worthwhile for the user community to pause and reflect and think a moment how to improve user participation.

I've mentioned that before. It's like a perpetual question, how to get more user presentations at user groups (all kinds of user groups, not at all just PTC/USER). And a good question, since it seem some of the most significant presentations come from users. Vendors can speak about tools, but users speak from the heart of the process, where the tools are applied and used, and problems and solutions emerge there that the vendors don't know and can't anticipate.

So how could users participate more? If you've never presented at a user group and are positive you never will, you're already a good resource on this issue, you represent the vast majority.

I'll make a suggestion: the user group could offer to provide editors for accepted presenters. An editor would be someone with writing and presentation skills and experience, but not necessarily any technical depth (like me, for example). The editor would work with the presenter over a 2 or 3 month period remotely to develop the presentation, and do basically the grunt work. The presenter would still add the real value.

Since public speaking is a major deterrent for most people, at the conference itself perhaps the user group could offer to provide speakers. The speaker would be someone who knows the presentation, and who does the main delivery, with the presenter beside them on the stage. Presenter would have to be on the stage, and perhaps occasionally correct or amplify the speaker, but the presenter wouldn't have to do the talking. Just because we know public speaking is a positive deterrent for most people (unless you're a vendor, in which case it comes with the job).

So there's one suggestion. If you have any kind of suggestion how to increase user participation at the conferences, send them in to PTC/USER (info@ptcuser.org is the general address). Even a small increase in user participation could be very valuable for everyone, and PTC as well.

Contents

- ProjectLink the Housewife

- Work Smarter with Pro/E

- Savannah Prologue


- ProjectLink the Housewife

Anton Greeff from South Africa added some depth to a ProjectLink talk with an introduction based on his own experience with different projects over the years. He mentioned the project management philosophies of the last 30 years (PERT, Critical Path, TQM, etc, and most recently Tipu Ake, which is based on the traditional wisdom of the original Maori inhabitants of New Zealand).

But then he pointed out that projects still come in late and over budget routinely. He thinks the reason is that Project Management assumes a General giving orders and pulling strings. While he thinks the requirement for a successful project is Project Execution, which
needs someone like a Housewife (or a Househusband, plenty of guys take on that role), asking how people are doing and checking that kids do wash behind their ears, less glamorous work but more vital.

Anton has recently taken up golf, and he finds a similarity between project managment and golf: knowing exactly how to hit the ball isn't enough, and it's your follow through that will really determine distance and success. So it's not just the original plan, it's the follow through that also matters for a project.

Traditional project management has a huge amount of communication, often handled by the project manager manually. So the manager tends to spend his days on phone and email, and can't make any other contribution. People miscommunicate ("Hey, I wasn't in the meeting, I didn't know"), or misunderstand ("Thought that was due next week"), or exaggerate ("80% complete now"), or use understatement ("A few small changes"), or just lie outright ("Didn't you get my email yesterday?!"). Anton has seen that all.

Anton identified three types of project communications: project task dissemination, project status monitoring, and change control (the biggest task).

And so where does ProjectLink fit in all this? Well, ProjectLink isn't the General, laying out the project in advance. Rather, ProjectLink is the Housewife/Househusband, monitoring the project execution as it proceeds. Not the glamorous role, but a very vital role we can all agree, and very important to the success of any project.

So ProjectLink folders make a place to store project data in one place (specs, plans, quotes, as well as CAD related). Team members get their tasks by automatic emails and personal pages. ProjectLink reminds team members of deadlines, and then reports missed deadlines (someone didn't mark their assigmment as complete by the set time). Since ProjectLink does depend on people reporting on their tasks, there is still room for exaggeration and outright lies. But miscommunication and misunderstanding can be substantially reduced.

Anton had a really constructive and positive approach to a missed deadline: go and speak to the guy and find the problem. This kind of constructive and personal approach is probably as important as any tool for a project to succeed.

Being workflow enabled, ProjectLink lets you drag and drop icons for different tasks to create a graphical workflow. Being Web based, Anton said it allows for access by any employee, supplier, or contractor. Although if your company has open access to Web sites within a firewall, letting people have HTTP access through the firewall may be a risk, since they could visit any Web site inside the firewall freely.

ProjectLink can also encourage communication, with discussion forms and distribution lists tied to particular subjects.

Implementing any project, Anton had some wise advice, like, "choose your non-technical people wisely". Often it seems that the non-technical people will probably not have much to say, so doesn't really matter who they are. However once on the team even if they aren't major contributors, they can become major obstructions,

Probably the biggest single possible task Anton mentioned was to "formalize company standard operation procedures and processes". Could be a life work there. But he had a simple example, of a telecom company that hired him to find out why they were taking 3 weeks to do simple design changes. And he found they used a form that had to pass though 16 hands, and get 11 signatures. So don't try to simply replicate a paper process.

ProjectLink has different templates for different project types. As an example of a template idea, Anton used a support call to a help desk. Now that's a good idea for a sample process that every PTC customer can understand personally: the help desk. Perhaps the PTC help desk in particular, we must almost all have experience with that. So whether our experience is Pro/E, or CADDS, or Pro/Desktop, or PDMLink, or another PTC package, we can all relate to help desk process examples.

- Work Smarter with Pro/E

Ron Grabau gave this stimulating presentation. He had a flow of ideas how to work smarter (and not work harder). Seems HP has about 400 Pro/E users. There may be a few of them in Colorado, at a company HP acquired
several years ago, but the others are at HP in Houston, formerly Compaq.

Ron works on parts like a bezel, with 1000 to 2000 features, which can take an hour to regen. He doesn't understand people who say they don't have even a few minutes to fix a part problem, but who later end up spending days watching regens. Ron and another guy once had two bezels, very similar, 1000 to 1200 features each. The same change had to be incorporated in each one, and it took Ron 4 hours, and it took the other guy 4 days.

PTC has a good similar story about a large assembly at one customer, which took 2 entire days to regen. PTC went on-site, and without changing anything about the content of the assembly, simply cleaning it up and restructuring it, they reduced the regen time down to under an hour. So regen time doesn't have to be fixed, perhaps usually there's room for improvement.

Ron said the main key to working smarter is a set of company best practices, which are distributed to vendors too. It doesn't matter how many good ideas people have, if they aren't written down in a best practices document.

Many of Ron's suggestions echo the Motorola cell phone design process. The mechanical design of cell phones and workstations is different, but the Pro/E recommendations can be the same. Here are some of these shared Motorola/HP recommendations:

- keep reference control in mind at all times, know where your references for a new feature will lead

- never just take the default feature creation at the end of the model tree without questioning it. Insert all new features as early as possible in the model tree, keep moving the insert point up, to get references to early geometry

- leave drafts and rounds as late as possible (and do the big rounds before the smaller rounds)

- use Through Next where possible, so that extrusions will be more robust

- use Intent Surfaces for drafts, and Intent Chain for rounds, so that the underlying surfaces will be used, and not just the edges which can change in major ways

Then Ron had lots of other recommendations:

- define mapkeys to define and restore 3 or 4 temp. views (call them V1, V2, V3, V4). With one mapkey you define a particular temp. view. Move around anywhere, and with another mapkey you go back to that view (which includes orientation as well as zoom state). Definitely smarter than zoom in/zoom out/zoom in/zoom out etc. Four temp. views are probably enough to keep in mind. When you're ready to add another one, just define one of the existing views again (that's why they are
temporary, they constantly get redefined).

- establish visible markers in the model tree just by creating an
entity like a point, and giving it a name. The point is nothing (some people just let them pile up at the default coord. sys.), but the name in the model tree is everything. For example, put a marker, "Drafts & Rds", right at that point in the model tree where you start creating drafts and rounds.

- shelling is a big event in the life of a part. Before you shell
anything, take a look at it, clean it up if possible, get confident this is what you really want. After the shelling, you may not be able to go back quite as easily, you'll be making more decisions.

- use layers regularly just to group features. One particular goal here is to be able to suppress and resume groups of features easily. Suppressing is good for speed, when you don't need everything, which is usually the case. And selecting features to suppress by layers is more efficient than hunting them down in the model tree too. And regular regens all along let you catch and identify a particular regen problem early.

- if you have a feature (like a boss) on a layer, don't forget to add any later dependent features (like a hole) to that layer too. Otherwise you won't be able to suppress by layer, because a dependent feature would be left dangling.

- leave patterns to the end. A hole pattern is usually not a key
feature. You can mark the hole locations with points, that's fine (sometimes people leave points for holes in the finished model, if the mfg. engineer knows what to do with those points---like using crosses for holes in a drawing).

- always good to dimension when appropriate to the default datum planes, which are at the beginning of the part history and as stable as you can get. But don't be like the guy who took this advice literally, and dimensioned absolutely everything to the default datums.

- even if you have the same draft all over, don't do all that draft in one step. Because if you have problems with the draft later, you may not have a clue where to look for the source of the problem. While if you apply the draft to particular areas, one area at a time, whenever one of those drafts fails you'll know to look just in that area of the model.

- what if you create a boss, draft it, add rounds, then pattern it? Well, you've just broken every rule in Ron's book, because he is firm that drafts and rounds need to come as late as possible, only then.

That last example illustrates a good point, that building a quality model that regens as quickly as possible, and that is easy to understand and to fix, definitely does take more time. But the choice is pretty clear: either spend that extra time creating the model, or else spend a good deal more time watching regens and trying to understand and fix problems later. Even days more time.

- Savannah Prologue

There's a whole world outside Orlando. Like the Everglades, where the animals and plants change with the ecological zones, every foot, from sea level up to 7 ft. (the highest point, dozens of miles inland). Or Key West, the islands out at the end of an ocean highway, many miles driving over the water and the other islands in the chain.

On this trip I decided to head north along the coast, into Georgia, up to the north end of the Georgia coast, to Savannah. About 250 miles from Orlando, enough to make you feel you have travelled.

And Savannah turned out to be entirely different from any town in Florida. It's an old sea port, almost 300 years old now, the first major port in the South. And it's still a working port today, with real ocean cargo ships passing up and down the river. Plus some spectacular yachts. When I was there a 4 masted schooner was visiting from Curacao, masts over 80 ft. tall.

Savannah itself was carefully sited on the top of a row of bluffs, overlooking the river and the port. Probably mostly just to catch the breezes, the location is good for that.

The city was laid out by James Oglethorpe, the first British governor. And he had a really ingenious and creative city plan. The city streets were laid out in a square grid pattern. But every two blocks, they dedicated one block of land as a city park. And those one block parks are placed in the middle of the intersections, so traffic takes a route around each park.

The result is that everywhere you walk in the downtown area, you're just one block away from a park, there's a park at every other corner. There are over twenty of these one block parks, spaced two blocks apart, and they can be very different. Some have many trees, some a few trees. Some more bushes, some more lawns. Some a fountain or two, some statues, some flowers. Some are more circular in layout, others more rectangular. Some have ferns, one has a gazebo, another has a children's play area and a basketball court. Each one has a sign with its name.

Most of the buildings around are still residential, older brick and stucco and some wood buildings, typically two or three story townhouses, probably mostly 19th century. There are stores and offices and businesses, enough to keep the downtown area alive, it's not just an articifially preserved tourist trap. Things like abandoned bathtubs out in back yards, planted with flowers, show an individual touch.

All this area could have been redeveloped years ago, with condos and hotels and whatnot. But in the 1950's, a group of seven local women organized to stop the destruction of one older landmark, a vegetable and fish market. They failed there, but out of their action there developed a Historic Savannah Foundation, which by this time now has bought up hundreds of older properties, and then sold them to interested people with covenants to restore and repair them. That explains why now we have a living older community in Savannah. And this Foundation helped develop an interest in historic preservation all around the US.

To walk through downtown Savannah, and visit every single square, takes perhaps a couple of hours, stopping and looking along the way, enjoying the variety of the architecture. It's a neat excursion, and you won't find anything like it in Florida, even in the amusement parks.

If you go to Savannah, it's worth stopping at Jekyll Island on the south Georgia coast. Over 100 years ago it was an island of exclusive vacation homes, and somebody has calculated that the familes which vacationed back then on Jekyll Island controlled one-sixth of the world's wealth at that time. Since they included J.P. Morgan, perhaps that was true.

Today the place is not so high-society at all, there's even a Days Inn for the rest of us. But it has a long wide beach on the ocean, and dense forests inland, with a tropical feeling. If you walk on one of the overgrown paths through the forests, you feel closed in on all sides, vegetation everywhere, definitely an intruder in that world. Vines climb up to the tops of the trees, and vines descend from the tops down to the ground. The vines almost own the place, inside those forests. And yet you're only steps away from the dunes and the wide open beach, lots of contrasts.