The Friendly Peer
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The friendly peer should support trainees during a simulation run. It is an agent, which is supervising trainees and pointing to committed errors. Trainees cannot decide the time and the kind of a given advice. Trainees also cannot 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 the friendly peer is watching the course of a simulation run. The following example shows how it works:
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 trainees to react to the advice or not.
When does the Friendly Peer react?
The friendly peer can react to a number of situations. However, the friendly peer only gives trainees advice if the situation he has observed really occurred. If none of these situations occur, the trainee gets no feedback from the friendly peer during the entire simulation run.
Advices
- The author should not be used as a consultant: If the author is deployed as a consultant of his own documents, he will not find any errors. The review should always be carried out by independent consultants.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 have been finished more than 50% to enable an overlapping of the phases. If this is not the case, the initiated phase fails.
- The previous phase should be reviewed before starting a new phase: To build on results of phases, it is important to review these phases. After the review, the trainee knows that the result of this phase still contains errors. These errors need to be corrected, in order to not adopt them into the next phase.
- 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.
- 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 a result, but the employees have wasted a day of work. Thus, the review causes costs but do not contribute to a better quality.
- 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.
- The customer should be part of the specification and manual reviews: The customer knows the requirements for the system. Therefore, it is 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.
- The manual should be already written 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.
Unles to frequent personnel changes, the training effort of new employees is extremely high. New employees have to be incorporated into the project to carry out project tasks.
- The staff employment / utilization should be observed: Employees cost a lot of money, therefore it is very important to trainees 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 all the time, but longer idle periods should be avoided.
- During phases, the employment should be observed: Trainees have to choose how many employees they intend 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 money, but are only marginally more effective. A clear mistake of the project manager is when he/she 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.
- Employees should not be prematurely removed from a phase: If employees need more time to fulfill their activities 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.
- 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.
- Employees should be assigned to activities only because of their skills: The best available employee should be used for this activity, otherwise unnecessary delays may occur.
