The Cotton Leaf Curl Virus Project 1995/6
’The CLCV Project Browser’ was created to capture and encapsulate a major project ($US 10 million, 5 year) being conducted in the Agricultural Cotton Sector in Pakistan in the mid 1990’s – to address a significant problem of disease in the Cotton Crop – a principal element in the National Economy. Working with the Pakistan Agricultural Research Council (PARC), my initial assessment of the situation regarding projects in the Agricultural Sector in Pakistan over the preceding 15 years revealed what I regarded as a significant problem in the organisation, management and communication of projects e.g. where there had been a series of ‘Potato Projects’ over 15 years in various regions of Pakistan and variously funded by the likes of Norway, The Netherlands, The USA, Japan and Canada and where there was no accessible strategy or plan for this series of projects, there was a filing cabinet of project documentation which was significantly incomplete and it was apparent that there was certainly an opportunity to significantly improve the coordination and integration of these projects and an evolving information resource, including the lessons learnt, informing successive projects.
To capture this large project and its 11 academic and commercial R&D institutions and 36 sub projects; to create a visual and browsable model of the project; to call for, to collate and to make accessible all the documentation and the project activities and going forward to the scheduled conclusion of the ADB/PARC CLCV Project.
The challenges included introducing newly evolved IT in a developing country and to deliver a usable and useful tool – where word processing was the state-of-the-art and a telecoms infrastructure were not in place and such as email not yet available. Where I identified the opportunity to create a simple computer-based tool (albeit leading-edge technology ‘hot off the press’). Usable by the PARC and academic and the commercial R&D institutions involved in the projects.
It may be regarded today, some 20 years later, as a concept demonstrator of a simple ‘Good Enough Tech’ project modelling and project management mechanism and tool’ and as such provides a simple (re-usable) generic model and a simple tool for the modelling and management of projects.
The CLCV Project Browser was principally a visual, graphical, browser – created with the ‘NED Tool’ (network editor) which we wrote to enable the creation of simple, directed tree graphs as a means to represent Domains (Projects etc) according to a simple information model : Focus – Context – Instance (Parent – Grandparent – Child).
This screen shot shows the Main CLCV Project Browser and the Sub-Project Browser.
The ‘Context’ Node in the Main Browser is coloured red – visual feedback as selected (which would link to material – documents – explaining the context of the CLCV Project. SEE CLCV 1 and CLCV 2 series of screenshots.
The Sub-Project Browser (here for the Networking Sub Project) was a default generic browser with a default set of Nodes e.g. Plans, Methods, Results, Project Management.
This screen shows the sequence of browsers – From CLCV Project to TT&E (technology transfer and extension) Group of Sub Projects to the NWP Subproject and the default set of Nodes for information about sub projects.