Thursday, December 6, 2012

I Fought The Math and the Math Won

I am home and probably in the most purely relaxed mode I have been in several months. We had some fast breaking project news today.  The project is comprised of three parts - one part was mine, another part I am now deeply involved with, and a third part I am peripherally involved with.

Last night, my part went live - and today, they finally bit the bullet and have pushed the other two parts back into the early part of 2013. Neither of them was ready to go - both of them have serious technical problems that come from not following good engineering processes. 

Once they announced the schedule slip, you could feel the audible sigh of relief from the assorted team members - the most important thing that the slip buys is time, precious time. With time, then we can make a good effort to get the other two parts of the project back on schedule.

So tonight, when I got home, for the first time in quite a long time I was able to just settle in and relax.  There is still plenty of drama moving out there on the family front, but only involves me on the edges and I can, mostly, set it aside and let them work it out.

The next challenge in the work environment is going to be to see if we can rapidly get organized to make the most out of the time that was bought.  My perception is that neither of the parts of the project that got delayed were seriously out of whack - just the lack of good process control meant that their were assumptions and mistakes made in the early parts of the project that could not be recovered from quickly enough in the later parts of the project.

So, I have a fairly simple plan tonight - I am going to take a deep breath, I am going to watch a little bit of TV, I am going to curl up with my book, and I am going to sleep tomorrow until I wake up.  I do have to go into the office tomorrow, but I am going to spend the day working on a pair of data retrieval issues from our normal operations.

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