Back in 2009, the CalTrans District 11 Drainage Design and Deliverable Processes were essentially a Typing Pentagram: disparate "islands of automation" connected by typing:
I was impressed with people in the trailer, but the CalTrans designers were VERY risk averse.
The Green Sheets were spreadsheets that calculated Q=cia for each inlet. The file consisted of a tab for each inlet. The rainfall data table was copied to each worksheet. There were a bunch of bad habits that needed cleaning up.
"Hey, don't modify the spreadsheet. That was created years ago by some consultant."
"Well, I'm that consultant here now."
I moved the Project Data to a project tab and made the structure worksheets refer back to that sheet, so that all rainfall data was automatically the same on each tab in the file. Simple Best Practices stuff.
From the Greensheets, we'd type in the data into Haestad's FlowMaster. Oh, no, you di int! No typing twice! I automated the process of getting gutter flow and capture information by producing Flowmaster-equivalent reports (I called this outcome "Fauxmaster", my second bypass of using Flowmaster (see FlowMonster - Hydraulic Wheel for the first instance.)
Ultimately to automatically connect the points of the Typing Pentagram, I coded a tool that would take an InRoads Storm&Sanitary model and feed the various deliverables with automatically with a button push.
I turned the typing pentagram into this:
CalTrans didn't use Storm&Sanitary, so the process was not adopted there. A couple of years later, I was talking to Drainage Engineer Nick Roberts, at Kimley-Horn, who told me this story:
I was asking the District 11 Drainage Chief what he used for Flow Calcs. He said "Well, we have this spreadsheet, that - we don't like it - that some consultant used. We plan to have an intern eventually make it better, but it's the best we have and it's what we use."
It was the spreadsheet I revised.
The Green Sheet story is fairly typical of how productivity is lost when simple improvements to bad processes don't get moved forward.
Internal Communication and Coordination is perhaps the biggest hurdle to running smoothly.
- Yammer, Teams, and other Stream-of-Thought platforms lack escalation and prioritization functions.
- Sharepoint is so hard to use that it essentially becomes an out-of-date low-functionality filing system.
- (I'm hoping Joomla will provide some capabilities I don't have in the above...)
The original Typing Pentagram story is here: http://civilxlr8.com/SnS_d11.htm