P to the Power of 7 .. What's that you say? It is a term born on a mining site during the very difficult commissioning phase of the Murrin Murrin Cobalt and Nickel mine, Western Australia. A place that had epic problems due to design faults, which eventually resulted in legal action.
Prior, Planning & Preparation Prevent a Piss Poor Performance ... is the long version of P7.
Crude in some respects, but remember this term was created on an isolated mine site which was a male dominated work place.
I designed the 'Painted Daisy' ring prior to Christmas 2012, made four samples and was very pleased with the design and excited to share it with Digital Beading magazine readers.
It was the Christmas school holidays, I was stressed it was hot, my boys were being their usual badly behaved, shouting, ever hungry, bored selves. The deadline for the delivery of my project was the end of January 2013. It was very hard to think, let alone have time to work uninterupted on the PC with both of my boys at home.
It was the Christmas school holidays, I was stressed it was hot, my boys were being their usual badly behaved, shouting, ever hungry, bored selves. The deadline for the delivery of my project was the end of January 2013. It was very hard to think, let alone have time to work uninterupted on the PC with both of my boys at home.
I thought to myself, this design is nice and quick (I can bead one up in just over an hour) so it will be no trouble to write up. I will leave it untill the last week of the school holidays before I begin the tutorial/pattern .. confidently I thought ..it will be ok.
Whilst I felt I had addressed and throught about the P7 I did not factor in any 'what if's' .. ie variables that are not within my control.
So .. what if..?
My boys return to school, and I start writing the tutorial with only days till the deadline, then discover that it is impossible to articulate parts of the design into a written and diagrammatical format.
What if I had to re-design the 'Painted Daisy' ring so that I could in fact articulate the design into a written and diagrammatical format.
What if I started writing up the tutorial, took a break and decided to clean up some software installations that I perceived to be not useful.
What if I deleted several programs only to discover that I had deleted the files that control the resolution for my oversised monitor, so that when viewing documents they were stretched across the monitor and impossible to work on..
What if it took all day to reinstall all the software that I deleted before I was able to use the PC again.
What if I took all the photographs of the steps to make the design, downloaded them, edited them, named them, inserted them into the document only to discover that I had created the sample with 12 units in the bezel rather than 13 units.
What if I had to make the sample again, and wait for the camera batteries to charge, photograph all the steps a second time, download the 2nd set of photographs, edit the new photograpahs and name the new photographs.
What if I was about to start the tutorial again with the new images and then got a phonecall from the school, saying my son was ill and needed to be taken home.
What if I started writing that project again stayed up really late two nights in a row, the second night until after midnight only to be woken up at 2am to clean up vomit, then woken up again 2 hours later with that same sick child that came home early from school that day.
So a timely note to self is, when you have the time well in advance to prepare something that has a deadline, use that time. You can use the P7 all you want but there will always be What If's.
Happy Beading..Mel
