Chevron Research and Technology Company

A Chevron Corporation Subsidiary
100 Chevron Way. Richmond. California
Phone (510)242-3000
Fax (510) 242-4647

Mail Address PO Box 1627,
Richmond.CA 94802-0627

Enrique LaRoche

Micro Services
7100 Outlook Avenue
Oakland, California 94605

Dear Enrique,

 January 2, 1992

Now that our work together is finished, I want to thank you for your excellent work, without which our project would not have come to such a successful conclusion. I especially appreciate your incredible dedication to the success of our project, which rivaled even my own desire to see this project succeed. Your dedication to the success of the whole project, not just to the parts we considered "your parts." has made its positive mark on the final product. You have been an outstanding team player, and you've applied your many talents to fill the gaps in weak areas of the project, especially in project management, user-friendly ideas, documentation, and communications. And somehow you've managed to successfully walk the tightrope of suggesting improvements to a programmer's programming style and to a project manager's management style, but staying on good terms with both.

A few words of explanation, for others who might read this letter:

Our project was to make a user-friendly PC version of an old model of fluid catalytic crackers, a process found in most oil refineries. The old model was written in Fortran and ran on VM on the company mainframe. It is a powerful and useful model, but the input /output was cumbersome and communications with the mainframe were unreliable. The input/output for the PC version was written in Clipper, with the guts of the model left in Fortran. The Fortran programming (and porting to the PC) was done by an in-house Chevron programmer. The Clipper was written by an outside contractor. I was in charge of the project, in consultation with a team of three other engineers.

Enrique was hired for about 2 weeks as a consultant in the early definition phase of the project. He was brought in for his knowledge of PC program security, and was a part of the team who determined that Clipper was the best language for the front end. An experienced programmer was hired to write the Clipper--we might have hired Enrique, but he was not available at the time. About 3 months into the project, we were in real trouble. The project was turning out to be much larger than either the programmer or we had expected. The number of bugs in the prototype was overwhelming to me and to the programmer. Communications with the programmer were breaking down. The disaster of having

Mr. Enrique LaRoche -2- January 2. 1992

to start over with a new programmer was a real possibility. At this point, we called Enrique back in for help. He assisted me in instituting some project management tools, such as change orders. He served as a liaison between the programmer and me, helping to translate what I wanted into how to do it in Clipper, and helping us both to home in" on the easiest and most user friendly ways to do things. He also helped to wrap up the program documentation, and took several chunks of the programming, particularly the parts having to do with switching between Clipper, Fortran, and other programs, off the hands of the original programmer.

From my perspective, I would estimate that Enrique's 8 to 16 hours per week doubled the efficiency of the programmer's 50 to 70 hours per week and was crucial to keeping the whole project on track. Not that he helped the programmer to code any faster, hut he helped the coding to go in the right direction. And I'm certain that the programmer appreciates his assistance as much as I do. The project promises to be a big success. The users love the user-friendliness, We are hoping for a 100% success in selling it to our eight domestic refineries, and are hoping to sell it to some overseas refiners, as well.

Sincerely yours

Bob Skocpol Lead Research Engineer

Chevron Research & Technology company

100 Chevron Way

Richmond, California 94802-0627

Phone: (510) 242-3898

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