Recursion Project
3 Communications
3-5 Lessons Learned

3-5-1 Purpose
The purpose for this document is to record key lessons that have been learned during the course of this project. The intent is to use these lessons to streamline future projects. Many of the items on this log will come from the Issues Log. Filtering, however, should be used to restrict the content of this document to those issues significant learning occurred.

The purpose for this project is to demonstrate the use of the PMI methodology through a comprehensive set of project documents.

3-5-2 Copyright
Summer 2004, Irvine, California, USA, copyright by Robert E. Perrine, PMP. Offered as is, with no warranty regarding the accuracy or suitability of this material. Copyright reserved. You are, however free to copy and distribute these documents with the following restrictions.

  • You may not charge for use or distribution of this material.
  • Your usage of this material is conditioned upon your compliance with the PMI Code of Ethics.
  • All distributions must be made with the intent to further the collected wisdom of humanity.
  • You may not remove my name or my copyright notices from these documents.

3-5-3 Table of Contents
Recursion Project
3 Communications
3-5 Lessons Learned
3-5-1 Purpose
3-5-2 Copyright
3-5-3 Table of Contents
3-5-4 Lessons Learned Log

3-5-4 Lessons Learned Log
Category Subject Resource Activity Entered
Formatting Applying styles with consistency across a document set. Robert Perrine 04Jul2004 While is it difficult to transfer formatting precisely from one document to another, a work-around was found that saved time and frustration.
  1. Copy a “good” document – one that has the correct format.
  2. Verify that the copy of the “good” document is linked proper style template.
  3. Strip as much of the content as possible from the document until all that is left is one placeholder for each formatting style.
  4. Open the “bad” document – the one that will not properly format.
  5. Clip one section at a time from the bad document and paste it into the good document.
  6. Save after every paste because there is a high probability that MS Word will crash during one of these operations.
While this might seem obvious, it is much more effective than the “proper” solution defined by MS. The outline numbering required for this project just does not carry through properly when the new document is created from a blank document linked to the style template.

06Jul2004 By starting from a blank document I was able to create a new style template that seems to have resolved many of these issues. It is still not perfect and the MightSpecial Word processor still seems to have quite a few bugs. But it is better. So, in the future, I recommend starting with a blank word document and then generate the project template from there.

04Jul2004
I evaluated Adobe InDesign, Adobe PageMaker and Quark Express. While my evaluations were very brief, it does not appear that any of those products support the depth of outline numbering that is required for this document set. 06Jul2004
I finally concluded that the difficulties with the styles in MS Word outweighed the features it offered above Adobe InDesign. My most challenging two documents are “Recursion 2-5 Work Breakdown Structure” and “Recursion 3-3 Org Policy Project Archives”. I tried to get around some of the issues with MS Word by creating additional styles. But, even if style WBS1 was linked to “no-style” and Outline1 was linked to “nostyle” changes in one would unexpectedly update the other. The only thing they had in common was that both used the Outline Numbering feature. I concluded that forward progress was being impeded and even what I had already finished was not stable.

While Adobe InDesign does not include automatic outline numbering, it is an extremely stable product. I can make faster progress doing the numbering myself than I can with a tool that has automation but continually crashes.

12Jul2004