The Friendly Peer

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The Advisor

Advices for the support tools

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The friendly peer should support the trainee during a simulation run. It’s an agent whose task it is to watch the trainee and point to committed errors. The trainee cannot decide the time and the kind of a given advice. The trainee also can’t activate or deactivate the friendly peer. The instructor decides if the friendly peer is available or not.

An advice of the friendly peer

In contrast to the advisor, the friendly peer can also react to complex situations because he is watching the course of the simulation run. How it works is shown by the following example:

Example: Observe the staff utilization

If a hired employee has nothing to do for more than 3 days, the friendly peer should tell it to the trainee.

It is up to the trainee to react to the advice or not.

When does the friendly peer react?

The friendly peer can react to a number of situations. However, he only gives the player advice if the situation he has observed really occurred. If none of these situations occur, the trainee gets no message from the friendly peer during the entire simulation run.

Advice

1. The author should not be used as a consultant: If the author is a consultant of his own documents, he will not find any errors. The review should always be carried out by independent consultants.
2. The author should correct his documents by himself After error-detection via reviews or tests, it is up to the author to correct these errors, because he knows his document and does not need a training period. Similarly, fewer errors occur in the document if the author performs the correction by himself.
3. Previous phases should not be forgotten: If previous phases are forgotten the following phase cannot be started correctly, because phases need a previous document. If this document is missing, the phase will fail.
4. Previous phases should be finished, before starting a new phase: It is important to the following phase, that the previous phase and thus emerged previous document has been finished more than 50% to enable an overlapping of the phases. If this is not the case, the initiated phase fails.
5. The previous phase should be reviewed before starting a new phase: To build on results of phases, it’s important to review these phases. After the review, the trainee knows that the result of this phase still has errors. These errors need to be corrected, in order to not adopt them in the next phase.
6. The previous phase should be corrected based on the review, before starting a new phase. After the review it is important to correct the located errors to avoid their adoption in following phases.
7. A new review is only possible after a successful correction of the previously conducted reviews: If just a review has been conducted, but not the correction, a renewed attempt is not successful. This attempt will end without result, but the employees have wasted a day of work. Thus, the review causes cost but not contribute to a better quality.
8. After testing a correction should be performed: Beside the review, a trainee also can make a test to find errors in documents. Those errors also have to be corrected in order to obtain a correct document.
9. The customer should be part of the specification and manual reviews: The customer knows best the requirements for the system. Therefore it’s a big advantage to let customers be a part of the reviews in the initial phases (specification, manual). The customer noticeably improves the outcome and costs nothing to the project manager.
10. With the manual should be already started in the initial phases: Since the preparation of the manual is also regarded as a review of the specification, it is useful to start with the manual already in the initial phases. In the review phases more errors are found, if already started with the preparation of the manual.
11. Employees should not be frequently changed: When it comes to frequent personnel changes, the training effort of new employees is extremely high. The new employees firstly have to be incorporated into the project to carry out project tasks.
12. The staff employment / utilization should be observed: Employees costs a lot of money, therefore it’s very important to the trainee to keep an eye on the staff employment. It is arguably one of the greatest responsibilities of a project manager to keep his employees busy, because idle times are counterproductive. Of course it is not always possible to employ the hired employees around the clock, but longer idle periods should be avoided.
13. In the phases, the employment should be observed: The trainee has to choose how many employees he intends to hire for the phases. If too many employees are hired in one phase, the amount of communication between them is enormous, however if too few employees are hired, the phase takes too long. Two employees require similarly long as three employees for a job. Three employees cost a lot more, but are only marginally more effective. A clear mistake of the project manager is when he decides to use more than three employees for a small project. For example, four employees for the same job need more time than two people, the reason of the above-mentioned communication overhead is.
14. Employees should not be prematurely removed from a phase: If employees needs more time in phases, it is not useful to deduct the employee of his activity. New employees who will continue the task require a training period before they can take over the task. Therefore it is better to divide in advance only the best people for the phases. Unfortunately, this is not always possible, but if the employee was not the best choice for this job, you should make this less qualified employees cease working.
15. The dismissal of employees should be carefully considered: Of course, employees are very expensive, but you should think through the discharge from the project very closely, especially if they are needed in later phases. In the QA model, the employee is no longer available after his dismissal for a period from 21 to 60 days.
16. Employees should be assigned to activities only because of their skills: The best available employee should be used for activities, otherwise unnecessary delays may occur.

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The Advisor

Advices for the support tools

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