Wednesday Wrinkles

I'm sitting here at my computer killing a bit of time before I officially call it an end to the day.  It was a busy one, but not too bad all in all.  I was productive, just not as productive as I would like to be, but I would still consider it a fairly good workday.  Things are moving, slowly and steadily, forward.  Not as fast as everyone would like but that is often the case.

One piece of feedback I continually give to my upper management is that they are responsible for assigning resources to projects, I just work with what I am given. If they expect a certain result, then they need to make sure they make it explicit and provide the proper resources, otherwise they are kind of floating out there based on my decisions and evaluations of what is necessary and what is unnecessary and I tend to be pretty ruthless about throwing things into the unnecessary bucket as far as work is concerned. 

A high percentage of our resources are consumed creating bureaucratic artifacts that are only done because someone, somewhere, thought it had to be done.  It is a waste of resources if it is not a business necessity that either is required by law or regulation or provides value add to the product for the customer.  Where at all possible that kind of BS short be ruthlessly driven from your systems and processes.

Outside of the working world I've had a pleasant enough day as well.  My nephew (who lives with me) is out with friends so I have had sweet and blessed privacy through the day.  He's usually not underfoot, but he is omnipresent.  It is good to have him out of my space for a while at least.  Simple privacy holds a high value to me.  I am not even doing anything that requires privacy - I just enjoy my own company and peace and solitude.

I am kind of hanging out waiting for a call from my friend Bob.  He has chemo today and asked me to give him a ride home after the treatment, since they won't let him take a cab.  I told him sure thing and now I am just waiting for that phone call, which should come in around 5:30 PM or so.  Since it is 4:30 PM now, I might run out and get a bite to eat while I am waiting for that phone call.

Here I An Still

So, tonight after work I turned off the TV, set a time, and dedicated an hour to reading.  I finished up a poetry book by Mary Oliver (who I always get confused with Jane Olivor) and then read a couple of pages in Josemaria Escriva's book "The Way".  For those who aren't familiar with him he was the founder of the Catholic Order of Opus Dei.  Both reads really helped me find the still point of the night. 

Today was a "come to Jesus" meeting at work, which was part of my stress load.  In our last block release I had two projects that I delayed because they were not ready for release. In my imagination I conjured a lot of sturm und drang for the meeting.  In fact though, it went very smoothly. I explained why I delayed the projects, the reasons for the delay, and the response from leadership was "okay, that makes sense".  I've got a good imagination and sometimes it gets away from me imagining negative scenarios. It is a trait I am aware of and that I try to counter with limited measures of success.

So, now that we are through the block release we just have to close on these two projects and then we can pivot over to the July block release.  I am sitting much better for the July block as the lead time is wider.  The last release had a very tight lead time - we know better, but periodically we can't avoid it and we suffer because of it.  Hopefully, there will be less suffering in this next block release.  Though, if you go back through this blog and read entries from years ago you'll find very similar entries.  It is a function of being a project management that you're always locked in battle with the inherent conflicts between resources and schedule.

Other than that, it was a nice day.  We've got a bit of rain coming in, but the afternoon was very pleasant, the bird tribe was very entertaining, and the day had it's bright spots.  Tonight is the latest episode of "The Expanse" so I am looking forward to watching it on DVR tomorrow.  I will probably save it for tomorrow night and then do my usual routine, which is to order pizza and enjoy the show.  Also, exciting of exciting - Archer comes back!  In you are not an Archer fan, or if you've never seen the show before, it comes with a high recommendation from me

On that note, I am going to wrap it up and call it a night.

At Years End

It's been a long and strange year.

I worked way too much. We had what amounted to being the perfect storm at work. We had three major projects, all on tight timelines, all with hard deadlines, all driven by external forces. I had the lead role on one of the projects and a key secondary role on another. Between the two of them but they ate much of the year.  The level of work stress was nearly unbearable. But, here it is the end of the year, the last of the projects is coming to a close, and it looks like I'm going to make it.

That workload had cascading affects into my personal life. One of the things that lives in the nature of what I do, project management, is that a lot of it is intellectual work. You spend a lot of time thinking about what is going on. You cannot turn off that level of thought, that depth, that complexity. Even when you're not working your brain keeps working. Sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously.

That is where the cascade begins. You start to shave off the corners of your life one tiny sliver at a time. You skip dinner here. You skip coffee there. You miss first this get together of your friends and then that one. Before you know it you're so show map resembles a small town more than an urban Metropolis. That's where I found myself about three quarters into the year. It wasn't a pleasant place to be.

Now, I'm in eternal optimist and I'm basically a happy person. Neither one of those core traits changes. Even through the tough times I'm a happy optimist. But that level of readjustment in social contacts does have its impacts and I felt them.

In addition to them this year had several other key social hits that took a toll. I won't enumerate them here mostly because of my rule about taking other peoples business onto the street. Don't do it.

So I'm kind of stumbling out of the year in a state of borderline exhaustion. But that optimist in me is looking forward to the coming year. Perfect storms only happen rarely so work wise the coming year should be far more graceful. I've spent the last week contemplating what different actions I'm going to take next year and I've got a good rough sketch of what I need to do. Wish me luck.

May all beings know happiness and be free from suffering.

Sent from my iPhone

Project Madness

So much for my resolution to get out here and post more!  I picked a bad time to return to trying and posting regularly. Things at work are extremely busy (even at this moment I am way behind the curve).  I've been working sixty plus hour weeks and it is taking it's toll.  I did manage to get some recovery done over the weekend by taking a pair of long naps (three or four hours) each day and making the effort to just simply relax.

It helped, but Monday is always a trying day and I ran out of motivation about six hours into the day. I've got about sixteen interrelated projects running right now, all in support of a much larger project.  No project in and of itself is that vexing, it is just the sheer volume.  One of the challenges we face is trying to hit a constantly moving target - as an organization we struggle to get requirements locked down and have to constantly redesign as we move.  It makes for agility, but as a company we're not appropriately staffed or managed for that level of agility.  It is primarily the fault of upper management, who is rather clueless on what is required to integrate software platforms.

Well, I must have needed that little vent.  Outside of work everything is going well enough - granted it is because there isn't a lot of "outside of work" right now. Each day I make some small headway in personal things, so it counts.

All of this has me contemplating retirement sooner rather than later.  I was just daydreaming of sitting on a porch somewhere in South Dakota and sipping a cold beer.  It would be nice to have control of my days again.  Of course, the way it works, once I get through the project madness and things fall back into some semblance of normality that urge to retire will recede somewhat.  Realistically speaking I'd like to keep working for a year or two more to build up my cash cushion for unexpected events.  Income wise, I could go now, and I do have a cash cushion. I'd just like for it to be a little more cushiony!

I keep thinking about starting a new blog, a little more focused then this one.  It's an idea that I have been toying with for a while.  I reckon I will keep toying with it.

Another Brick In The Wall

I'm still working on getting back into the habit of writing a little something here every day.  It's been busy at work, very busy, and we're in what amounts to be a very insane cycle and I'm worried about whether or not two of my projects are going to get configured in time.  One's my fault and the other one is just, I think, a bit too much work for the configuration specialist with all that is going on.  Otherwise though, my work mood is good and I'm actually going to pivot back over to my work computer and put another couple of bricks in the wall.

I went out to Holder's for dinner tonight - corned beef hash, two eggs over easy, hash browns and Swedish pancakes.  Very simple, very tasty.  Tonight, I think I am going to settle in and watch a movie and try to get to sleep early because I've got a meeting at the crack of dawn.  I am also going to make a call to the folks to check up on them.  My sister told me today that my step-dad took a tumble but that he was not injured, so I thought it would be a good idea to check up on them.  I tried calling them earlier in the day but there was no answer - but that appears to be because I call them while they were out for lunch.

So, This Is Tuesday

I thought I would start the morning writing an entry here as I work to get back into the habit of writing on a daily basis.  My work meeting schedule is pretty light today so I'm hoping for a productive day, all in all.

I had a good Sunday - breakfast at Denny's and then stopped to visit with Bob and Kai for a while. They were both doing well.  After that I circled home and spent a fairly lazy afternoon doing next to nothing.

Monday was typical work chaos. I didn't really accomplish anything, but I did manage to go to a couple of meetings, listen in on a couple of teleconference and keep the email flood down to a small rush.  Monday evening I spent watching the latest episode of "Fear the Walking Dead" and reading articles on Flipboard, then a call with TR, and finally curling up in bed to read "Central Station", a new SciFi novel I've been working my way through. 

I got a good night sleep and woke up this morning with a head stuffed from allergies.  I am going to try and hammer my way through the email backlog (which is sitting at about 40 or so) and work some on the conversion reports I'm overdue on.  The main thing I want to say at the end of the day is that I was able to get my arms firmly around the projects I've got rolling.

We've got a pretty powerful weakness in our approach to work.  Basically, at a very high level, a project has certain key steps.  Discovery, Requirements, Coding, Systems Test, User Test, Deployment. 

Our main customer can not seem to get the requirements portion down and so more often than not we go into coding with our customers still working on figuring out exactly what it is they want to do.  Previously our upper management did a bad job of getting requirements locked down.  We're still struggling in that area - because of the internal politics of corporations, we just can't get to requirements lock.  The new management is doing a better job, but there is still a lot of way to go there.

The Return

Well, when I set this aside for a while due to being incredibly busy in my personal and professional life I never imagined it would be a year plus before I came back.  Welcome back me!

Most of the craziness was in my professional life.  I had seven major projects coordinating the work between four different vendors and it pretty much ate all my free time.  By the time I reached the end of the day I was simply exhausted.  A whole ton of personal stuff got set aside and I am still just recovering from it, trying to work my way back to some resemblance of a rhythm or routine.

I am looking forward to getting back into the habit of writing here regularly!  Today has been a pretty quiet day.  I'm already a quarter into the new year and I have a much more reasonable four or five major projects, which is closer to my capacity (and still have a life).

I even managed to get out of town and go down to LA over the weekend for a sort of mini-vacation.

Chaos, Ascending

So, there we are at work, lined up for a go live in about two weeks on a fairly major project.  The check boxes are being checked off, the final pieces of the puzzle are being moved into place - and - as I expected, at the last possible minute there is a hard curve ball flying in from the pitchers mound.  In order to coordinate with another group who has a project hitting the same technical space our management decides to advance the project a week. Suddenly, the available time to get everything lined up disappears.  We have just a little under a week to get all the pieces into place.  Fortunately, it is possible.  Difficult, but possible. The plane, on final approach, starts to shake from turbulence and there is a strong and unexpected crosswind...and I, I...

Feel exuberant.  I saw it coming.  Not this particular bit of madness but something of this nature so I held a bit in reserve.  I made sure that our top speed was being measured with my hand on the reins so that when this pony needed that extra bit of get up and go, it was there. I let go of the reins and barring an unforeseen accident we will cross the finish line with all things in good order.  Still, I do get tired of the madness and the stress associated with the sudden change has made folks, well, a bit testy.

Our functional project manager, who is otherwise doing a good job, is bouncing off the walls due to his own stress levels.  This is his first major project for the Evil Corporation so I am sure he wants to do well and that has got him spinning in all kinds of circles.  Our trusty project engineer, whom I had my own clashes with earlier in this project, is feeling pinned against the wall. The functional project manager had the same conversation I had with him - about who is in charge. That there simply just reflects the eternal battle against bureaucracy.  He is a good guy, he is just a little too deep into the bureaucracy.

The next seven days or so are going to be highly chaotic as we try to slide across the finish line. I am going to try and stay tight, stay focused, and keep a good sense of humor. It is always a bit of a struggle, since the stress will be flowing freely in all directions.  Fortunately, I am confident that we are ready to go, even if we are going into Chaos, Ascending.

Somewhere Normal

Somewhere along the line my personal blog became my work venting blog. I guess that is bound to happen sometimes. With the recent decisions at work to transfer us out from underneath the evil director I’m hoping to return to some semblance of order in the work world. We seem to be moving in that direction, though we have a lot of territory to cover. For several years what I would call the project control mechanism was broken.

Each of the feudal baronies in our kingdom was once again pursuing their own goals and their own systems to attain those goals. We found that in several cases the company is at varying degrees of implementation of duplicate systems. I suspect it will take us a couple of years to get them under control.

The first step, the first challenge facing our new management is going to be to put into place a process to control the creation of technical projects. Once they have control of the faucet they can then control the flow. It’s going to be fun.

I’m getting ready for vacation at work right now. I’m trying to knock off the things that have to be done in the intervening week. I made good progress in that direction today and I expect to make a little more progress tomorrow. I should be in good condition when I come home tomorrow night. Then it’s just a question of easing into the vacation.

I am looking forward to going back to South Dakota, I’m looking forward to visiting family, I’m looking forward to seeing the old country and I’m looking forward to moving outside of the world I’ve been moving in. One of the great things about travel of any sort is that it reminds you that there’s an entire world out there that you are part of. That is a wonderful feeling.

I think I’m going to keep this entry simple tonight. I’m in a good mood, I have lots of work to do, but I’m not feeling that crushing stress that came from the unpredictability of the evil director. I’ve got a lot in front of me but like anything it can be divided and conquered with a little bit of work and a little bit of imagination.

 

I went to bed last night with the intention of reading some more of the serpent of Venice but I only managed to knock off a couple of pages. Tonight I’m hoping to do a little bit more than a couple of pages. I love a good book and I count myself a great Christopher Moore fan.

 

 

I Am...The Law

Like the song says, "busting rocks in the hot sun, I fought the law and the law won". Except in this case to quote Judge Dredd, "I am the law!"

Last week at work I thought that perhaps, finally, I have found the dragon to big to slay. After a couple of months of dancing around and trying to find a place of compromise I sought out a final ruling on the question of who ran the program. I was pleased to learn this afternoon and then see it in writing that my team ran our projects.

In that great battle between creativity and innovation versus bureaucracy and conservatism we won a tiny battle, a simple battle, the battle to determine the parts of a project. In some ways it's kind of tragic that we actually had to fight it. But corporations have a tendency toward stagnation so it's the constant pressure of creative destruction that keeps them moving forward.

I'm actually looking forward to the next conversation with my friend the project engineer because I sincerely believe he did not expect to lose. Now of course all I have to do is deliver and prove that how we work is the best approach. Either way I am kind of just relieved that that particular struggle is over for now. Let me switch gears real quick.

Three days of work ahead of me and then it's off to South Dakota for a weeks vacation and a nice visit with the folks. I'm going to spend a couple nights at the ranch and then I've got a room in a Holiday Inn Express in town, close to the assisted-living apartment where my parents now live. I didn't see any real value in driving back and forth to the ranch every day. My nephew is staying there of course and I look forward to seeing him but we live on different schedules. He is very much a night person and I am very much a day person so even if I stayed at the ranch we would probably barely cross each other's paths.

He is going to meet me in Rapid City on Friday and we're probably going to spend the night there. Get a good dinner somewhere and see the new X-Men movie. However it unfolds I am definitely looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to the conversation with TR tonight like I do every night. And I think on that note I'll wrap it up here.

The Wall Approaches At Full Speed

Corporate politics. It is its own breed of stupidity. I slammed against it pretty hard this week at work. I ranted about it in an earlier entry so let me just cannot catch you up on the way of the world. Earlier in the week I had the conflict with the project engineer over who controlled the project, how it was supposed to be run, and who needed awareness/approval. We had what amounts to being a sincere difference of opinion. 

The organization within the company that he works for is very bureaucratic. Typical of bureaucratic organizations they think their way is the only way. We skirted around it multiple times in the project life so far. He gave, I gave, and we kept going forward. Then I realized that unless we settled that it would be a never ending struggle that would rise up every time, every project. 

So I suggested we have a meeting with the key project people, my manager and his manager. 
I suggested the meeting so we could talk it out, resolve our differences, and keep going forward. Instead, for unknown reasons, he decided to escalate by forwarding the email that was asking for clarity to multiple people on his side of the fence. I talked with him briefly today trying to get a little information out of him and he intimated that he had inadvertently touched off a firestorm on his side of the fence and that he had a meeting scheduled with his manager and the impression he gave me was that his manager was not happy. High above us, at another level, at the level of vice presidents and directors there is an ongoing internal struggle about which model works better. 

On our side of the fence we have a very fluid model where the project manager is able to determine the approach that is proper to the project and has a tremendous amount of leeway to determine the process steps, the various milestones, and the reviews. The Corporation has recently stood up in independent organization under a new vice president and directors in order to increase efficiencies in the delivery of key software and technology services where speed and innovation triumph over the rigid bureaucracy. This represents a loss of power on the part of the rigid bureaucracy and the rigid bureaucracy, typical of creatures of their nature, is responding by trying to tighten their grip. 

This project engineer is caught in that cycle. Bureaucracies do not like people to rock the boat. They tend, if at all possible, to crush them. That crushing mechanism has swung into action. The only question is who's going to get crushed when it finally stops. Because the project engineer was basically brought up inside the bureaucracy moving outside of his box is a frightening experience I think. Because I could give a flying rat's ass about the bureaucracy banging into it, bouncing off of it, going around it, even getting battered by are things that I'm used. I'm always amused at how the bureaucracy wins until such time as it gets in the way and then everybody looks the other way while something gets cowboy through the cracks. 

I'm curious as to how all this is going to work out. I suspect that the end of the day there be a compromise at the levels above us. I just hope that my project engineer friend survives. I do feel sorry because I caused him stress, because I caused my own management stress, I'd rather move much smoothly through the waters. However there is a particular type of bureaucrat that this organization within our Corporation seems to grow. 

These are the people who have the mindless obedience to the machine. It takes place in a sort of passive aggressive way. Even when pushed outside of the box they just try to climb back in and pull the cover down. It's crazy to me. I think that any project in order to be successful must be organic. By organic I mean that the methodology, the style, the scope, the tools and the process must be tailored to the project. Whereas the bureaucracy believes the project must be tailored to the process. 

I think were my friend the project engineer makes his logical mistake is in thinking that the procedural direction, the templates, the processes of his bureaucracy must be adhered to as if they bore the weight of law. When in fact if you read the actual processes they give a tremendous latitude to the project management. It is down that opening that I've driven many a project to success. Of course every now and then I crashed into the wall at full speed.

Thoughts on Conflict

I have a complex relationship with conflict.  I don't like it, I don't want to do it - but I sometimes, personally and professionally, find it necessary.  Today, at work, I crashed into some unresolved issues and they rose to conflict.  I apologized profusely because I did not want to go there, but I found myself there.  Let me run through the scenario.

At work we are split into multiple groups.  As different groups we all have different processes. Our IT Support group is very process and procedure driven.  They have all kinds of process maps that they must follow, all kind of matrices they must adhere too.  We have a project engineer who comes from this group and insists on processes that I don't think are necessary, that our group, in general, does not follow.  For the most part, on the project we've been working, we tend to be able to find middle ground - many of the steps in their process documents run in parallel with the steps in our processes. We use a very general, very broad process milestone approach, which is very flexible and our project managers have a lot of latitude to determine which steps we do and don't do.

Their process requires a certain set of review meetings with their upper management - these meetings are required, they are not optional for them on their projects.  On our side of the fence, we have similar meetings (reviews, approvals, etc.), though we structure them differently and time them differently.  According to their processes "you must do A, B, C" in sequence.  According to our processes you must do A. B, and C - but the sequence timing is up to the project manager and the project team to determine what is the best approach (our approach is more organic and fluid).

Because they are so process driven they become fixated on their process and, at times, their bureaucracy means they are driving very hard to check the boxes - whether those check boxes add any value or not.  We've been hung up over a series of meetings that my management tells me we do not have to do (and I agree) and the project engineer keeps insisting we have to do them.

So, today, we are in a meeting the new project manager and the project engineer starts going over how we have to have these meetings and these are the slides we have to have and we need to schedule them immediately.  I gave him a brush back and said "wait until we have the new PM up to speed", but he kept going.  My temper got the best of me, and I explained it was an area of difference between us. (What I didn't like was the language he was using - we must, we have to, we are required to, we need to.)  So, I suggested that, once and for all we need to go to our respective management and figure out who is the tiger and who is the tail. 

The source of my objection is their process drives us through specific steps, processes, documents and reviews that we do not need.  I want to establish that WE run the program, not him and not his process.  It is a challenge and now we're trying to draft up an email to engage our management and get a decision as he insists that he is doing it the right way and the way that has to be done.  I content that this is not a technical group development project - but that it is an IS SaaS vendor implementation.  We are going to be working together closely on multiple projects in the coming year and we need to establish that we run the project, not them, since our model is different then theirs.  Their process will add time and cost to the projects -  potentially significant time and cost.

I thought we had it straightened out earlier, but I don't think we did - he keeps circling back to wanting to do it their way.  I hate to go to our management - but we need to so, going forward we do not have all the conflicts where we're subtly trying to figure out who is in charge and whose processes and process steps apply. 

And of course, one of the things that made the conflict even more difficult for me is that I happen to sincerely like the guy, and I felt bad that we ended up there again, so I apologized repeatedly for getting hot. Mara in action. I am very sure that I have the right of it at the end of the day, but I would have much preferred that it did not go to conflict.

I will segue for a moment here and say this - it is actually a problem with the people from that group on other projects as well (though the lines over there are drawn a little better).  The challenge is that they just relentlessly push and don't listen to you because that is what their organization rewards.  Oh, the challenges of corporate life.

A Bit of A Longer Entry

For reasons known only to the universe Dragon does not work well in Internet explorer. It seems to end up with strange trailing or leading letters all by themselves. I blame Internet Explorer because it doesn't seem to do it in any other application. For example here in the DragonPad it works great. So, I pivoted over here to write a bit more about today.

It started out simple enough. I woke to the sound of rain. I wasn't expecting it because I hadn't been paying any attention to the Weather Channel so it was a pleasant surprise. I lingered in bed for a while just listening to the sound of the rain. That is a truly wonderful sound. Eventually though I rolled out, took a hot shower, shaved and started the day.

The work day was divided into three big blocks now that I think about it. The first block was to productive part of the day. I got us couple of smaller projects knocked off and I got permission from my manager to pursue a bit of a vanity project. One of our customers keeps requesting a system enhancement and the request keeps dying on the vine. Having watched it happen through two or three cycles I've come to the conclusion that the root of the problem is they are not adequately prepared.

It is in the nature of conservative corporations such as mine to begin from the default position of no. If they don't like the idea that no. If they don't understand the idea then no. It can be a tough environment to get any change in. So I asked my management for couple of hours to work with them and help them build their business case. It made me laugh because my managers initial response was also no. I don't know I guess I have a totally different mentality where systems should bend to the will of the users and not the reverse.

In our case I think sometimes the people who controlled the administration systems are so swept up in the chaos of their days that they're not listening to the customers. They know they should, they would like to, but they're just too damn busy. But I want to do when working with the customer is show them how to build the business case that will force the decision they want. There is always a chance of course that the decision won't go the way they want it to go but if that happens then I want them to understand exactly why so they can drop the request and not keep resurfacing it.

Work aside, I am looking forward to the weekend. I don't really have anything planned except the usual breakfast with the guys but I'm sure I'll figure something out. Maybe catch a movie, maybe take a short local trip. Definitely get some laundry done, spend a little time cleaning the spare bedroom, and of course a little bit of that all-important time relaxing. With that I'm going to wrap this entry up and officially settle into the lazy evening.

When Idiots Attack

Well, my Idiot Director came roaring out of hiding this week and is hurling herself into everything.  Just when I thought it was safe to go back into the water.  Basically, tomorrow, I have a meeting with my customers and team members regarding a project I am on.  However, a few minutes ago, after I had left for home at the end of the day, I got a call from my boss telling me I have to pull part of my presentation back tomorrow for fear that it might inflame my director, who is apparently on another passive-aggressive rampage. 

I am confident that everything I did was the right thing to do and that the quality of my work is professional as always, but suddenly a project that looked like it was going to move forward is going to grind to complete halt.  Once again, it is going to cost three times as much and take four times as long if she thrusts herself in the middle of it.  I wonder when the corporation is every going to take notice of her blatant incompetence.  Such is life when idiots attack.

Outside of that, I am in a fairly good mood today.  It was a non-productive work day, but that is typical of Monday's and my plan was to sit at home and work my way through my backlogged email. I may still do that, but I have to now add into it the process of redoing my presentation for tomorrow.  I may take a spot of time tonight to meditate, since that will pull me into a healthier place in regards to work stress.  I feel for my boss, who bears the brunt of my directors idiocy.

Any Day - Today

It was a good day at the office.  Busy, long, but productive.  I made some real headway and I am looking forward to making some more headway tomorrow.  This is my five work day week and I'll suffer a bit tomorrow - I think I was close to having worked 48 hours in four days, so tomorrow's three meetings is about all they are going to get out of me by the end of the day.  I had a meeting with one of the system engineers who pushed a little hard to do some expectation setting, since I thing we were off track with each other.   I always hate doing that - basically the baseball equivalent of brushing a batter back, but there are times it has to be done.

Our company has a group that provides into technology services and they are, essentially, a captive vendor that we have to use for most projects.  The problem is, like all captive vendors, they have no financial incentives to provide good customer service.  As a result, they can be pushy and arrogant.  That is not necessarily a reflection of the individuals - but rather a reflection of the culture that has grown up there. Meetings with them can be tough because they tend to be all about what they want, not what the customer wants.  Since I sit close to the customer (metaphorically), I have, over the years, been forced to give them a brush back a time or two or more.  I always dislike doing it - but I have learned that if I don't do it, I will get eaten alive.  But, even with that, it was a good day.

On the personal level I had a wonderful email from TR yesterday and enjoyed writing back to her today.  Her journey continues and I love and support her on it, though are days when my heart yearns. I am home now, for the evening, settling in with the plan to watch a spot of TV, then do some reading into the night.  I was watching Craig Ferguson tonight as I ate dinner and the actress Alice Eve referenced a truly great George Harrison song - Any Road.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mePp1l299EE

The Day Unexpected

The Day Unexpected

I woke up early this morning and spent the first hour or so laying there and reading from Django Wexler’s “The Thousand Names”.  I followed that leisurely start with a hot cup of coffee and a bowl of Special K. I tossed a few text back and forth with T.R. before finally starting the inevitable morning commute.  My monkey-mind, much beloved and terribly exasperating, started chattering and jumping around.  I used a few counter-measures to hold it at bay.  I took a different route to work.  I focused on going with the flow.  I stopped to gas up the SUV.  When I arrived at the office, I visualized being armored and I repeated a simple mantra - “Stay tight. Stay focused.”  I started the day weaving through all of the steps necessary for a project go-live.  I reviewed documents. I reviewed checklists. I updated the cut-over plan.  I moved smoothly into the first meeting of the day and…

The day unexpected appeared.

The project I have been working on, the project that was scheduled to go live later this week is suddenly on hold. Technically, we are ready to go.  The portion of the project I am responsible for is sitting in the box, ready to be deployed. The customer is not ready to go.  The customer feels they did not communicate well enough or deeply enough to their core constituency.  They need to plan their portion of the roll-out again.  All of the pressure that was inside of me, that was building to completion at the end of the week, is gone. Poof.  We’re on hold for future direction.  In my experience, most programs that get this close to completion and the stop…they are done.  They are not revivable.  This one might make it.  They seem convinced they are heading in the right direction and it is more a problem of execution than a problem of concept.  They may be right. I give them about a fifty-fifty shot at salvaging their work.

Half of This, Half of the Other

I thought I would take a few minutes here in the evening and try to deliberately slow things down a bit.  It was a busy day at work - pretty much the constant weave in and out of meetings, with a bit of productivity in the late afternoon, followed by an irritating schedule meeting.

One of the things I struggle with under our current management has been their remarkable ability to create schedules that are only distantly related to reality, then get all worked up when reality does not coincide with the schedule.  I've got two projects running right now, both on an aggressive schedule, that I am trying to bring into place as quickly as I can.  I was assigned to both projects about two weeks ago, as were most of the people on the project teams.

Management wrote out the schedule with no input and no buy in from the teams who actually have to implement them.  As a result, both projects are completely stalled, as the resources are all trying to come up to speed.  I did manage to get both of them moving in the right direction this week - but only by basically ignoring the schedule.

So, today, I go into a meeting and management keeps asking "did you meet this milestone" and "when is this going to be done" and I kept responding with things like "no, there are no resources to do that" and "no, this item is out of sequence" and "no, these two items are tied together for no apparent reason other than they use the same word in the title".  It was a challenging and uncomfortable meeting.  Management really, really wanted to check the boxes off and I am not inclined to check the boxes off for the sake of checking the boxes off.  We skated along the lines of being a very testy set of exchanges.

The thing is, neither of this projects should have reached this particular impasse.  They are not difficult projects technically or functionally. It is just that, in our top down management style, almost everyone seems to be afraid to make any decisions and no one seems able to say no.  As a guy who can both make decisions and say "No", it often puts me in a very uncomfortable place. 

But, in the plus side, I actually expect both problems to go live on schedule - even on the aggressive schedule because, again, they are not that complicated.  One is implementing a mature piece of technology, and the other is making a set of clearly defined changes in a web application.

Elsewhere in Corporate Land, the Game of Thrones continues.  We are in the midst of a big reorganization that is seeing some alterations in the positions of the Powers-That-Be.  I am hoping that, during the course of this, my Director gets removed.  Either removed from our sphere entirely, or removed from her management position.  The level of stress and chaos she causes has taken a big toll of the people who work for her.  There are a host of other problems that land directly back on her doorstep. Her sheer incompetence astounds me - and reflects poorly on the people above her.

You might ask "Well Rod, why do you stay there?".  It is a question that I have asked myself more than once and I do have a set of answers.  First, in spite of my complaining, there are really only four things that irk me at work, and of those four, my Directors incompetence is the one that makes the working world a very difficult place, not only for myself but for other people as well. 

I also don't like our performance review system (which is undergoing another major revamping this year as they try to figure out how to stop alienating their employees), I don't like our raises of late (which I blame pretty squarely on a poor performance management system, an incompetent Director, and the tightening contractor environment), and our facility (which is old and ugly, but which has been sold, so assuming we get to keep our jobs, we will move into a different building either at the end of this year or the beginning of next).  I like my work cohort, I like my immediate manager, I like many, many of customers, and I thoroughly enjoy the work I do.  I am compensated well and the benefits package is good.

So, like many things, work is half of this and half of the other.

The End of the Week

The week moved pretty quickly. Because of the nuances of the holiday and my 9/80 schedule it was a three day work week, which was very nice. It also helped that, at work, the load was light since so many people were out on vacation. In the aftermath of the project, I can feel myself relaxing.  My subconscious has been spinning, throwing up strange dream images each and every night, most of which are directly related back to work.  There will be plenty of headaches in the months to come - but it does appear as if there will be plenty of work.  My boss is going to be hiring another analyst and today, in our one on one, she assigned me two more projects.

In some ways, this is one of the challenges I face at work.  I am particularly good at taking projects that are tangled up and troubles and getting them straightened out and back on track - mostly through the process of simply lining things up and then executing with discipline.  So, naturally, two of the projects that are being assigned to me are projects that have been running - in both cases for several years, and have never been effective.  One has had their go-live delayed for over a year and the other went live, but with a pale shadow of the promise of the program.  So, my immediate future will be working to get my brain around them and then get them moving forward again.

In the Corporate Game of Thrones, the investigation into my complaint continues - on average, they say it takes about thirty-five days to complete the investigation portion - so that means that portion of it should wrap up in late June.  I am perfectly fine with that - as far as karma goes, my responsibility is to report the behavior. What happens from that point is up to them.

Things are going a well as can be expected with my aging parents and my sick nephew.  Life continues at it's own pace along with all those other things we cannot control and can barely influence. But, smooth is good, so I am going with that.  The process of aging is an ordinary thing and is part of life that we are all going to experience, sooner or later. The best we can do is make that trip as gracefully as we can.

Other than that, I am slowly healing from my separation, which is also part of the process of life.  Now that I think about it, life is always a process of adjustment or readjustment and learning to not be attached to outcomes is so crucial. Be in the moment and when the moment goes away, be in the moment.  So, in that sense, I am going to settle into the moment and watch some Archer, then curl back up with Leviathan Wakes.

An Uncertain World

I'm feeling a bit cluttered.  That's usually the sign for me to enter another cycle of simplification and I can feel the need rising up within me.  Today was a typical work Monday - part productive and part frustrating.  We are live with the project and now we are in the place where we're dealing with the assorted design flaws and mistakes.  It's chaotic, but it is a tailing off of chaos.  Though, right now, if you imagine it as a tail, it is a very vigorous tail, wagging frantically in all directions.

I have been put into the position of lead on one of the trouble-shooting teams, assigned to one of the more major problems. I spent most of the day just getting my arms wrapped around it.  The problem has to do with a menu that is autopopulated based on a combination of values in another system.  I don't have visibility into this other system, so I am trouble-shooting blind, which can be difficult.

I arranged a meeting in the afternoon with some of the members of the group that designed this particular piece of functionality so I could understand what they were trying to do.  It looks to be a case of good intentions but a flawed design, so tomorrow I am going to document up all the known error cases and then provide them back to the technical design team for review. 

Most of the problems we are running into are a result of flawed designs and then inadequate testing - which I saw coming a hundred miles away.  Even my section of the project has two instances of flawed design - were the design that came out of management and management review simply did not account for all the variations in the field.  There are tools and exercises that allow you to avoid these kind of things, but lacking any real process discipline, they slipped through.

We need to get back into an environment of regular process discipline and I am hoping, with the big project finished, that we can move there sooner rather than later.  I've started driving in that direction already, but its a challenge to do when your own bosses are the ones ignoring the need for discipline. One of the areas I have trouble with, one of the areas I struggle in, is the area of a lack of clarity around the scope of authority and responsibility caused by micro-management.  Most micro-managers tend to be very capricious - that it, they want to micro-manage this part but not that part, and then they want to micro-manage it now, but not later, okay and then again now.  This is very touch on the individual contributors because it creates an environment where they are uncertain of how to act and when to act.  Sometimes if they act they get chastised, other times if they act no one notices or comments, so they have to move through a very uncertain world.  That is exactly where I find myself, moving through an uncertain world.

A Quick Note About Work

Just a quick note to mark the end of the day.  It was a momentous day at work today - for the portion of the project that is under my sphere of control - we have locked down the configuration.  From this point out all of the work will be focused on getting the documentation caught up and preparing for cut-over.  But, for us at least, the heavy lifting is done. I hope I sleep deeply and soundly tonight, Lord knows that I need it!