Like The Dude, I Abide

The chaos was not quite as bad today. I did have some periods of time where I got some actual work done. That's always a good feeling. If I had one principal complain about the high work rhythm it's that there never seems to be an end or a sense of completion. It is like fighting the ocean, there is always another wave coming.

Our wave crested on Monday. They announced that our current director would be leaving at the end of the month and we were being moved into an already existing organization. Continuity matters when it comes to organizational effectiveness. I have to say, honestly, that I've never had good continuity at the upper leadership levels since I have been with the evil corporation for 19 years. The average director seems to last maybe a year and a half. Oddly enough the director that lasted the longest was pretty horrible, both as a professional and as a person. Maybe that's what it takes to survive the Game of Thrones in corporate America.

I keep my head down and I keep working and I move in the shadows. Damn, I sound like some kind of corporate ninja. The sad thing is that from my point of view the director we just lost was actually one of the better ones. She knew the business, she knew the functions, and she seem to be a decent human being. Now, I know nothing about the new director, he's relatively new so I have my fingers crossed that he's at least as good. We'll find out!

One advantage I have is that I'm already across the threshold for early retirement. So, to a degree, I could care less what happens. If things turn bad I just move on and start the next chapter of my life. It's a very good position to being. Knowing where the escape hatch is and having my parachute on lessons the stress significantly. It does not make it vantage, I think the working world will always carry a layer of stress with it, but it makes the impact less because I have options.

So the sun keeps rising, the moon keeps falling, the tides come and go, and in the land of flying monkeys, like The Dude I abide.

A Spot of Tea

Chaos Tea would be a good name for a band.

It is a little after 7 o'clock in the evening here in California. The workday was as chaotic as I expected. I had a solid block of meetings from 8:00 AM until 1:30 PM. That is always brutal on a Monday because everyone tries to hit the deck running and email are flying all over.

I made it through the day and tomorrow's calendar is fairly clear, so I've blocked out some time for what I called Project 125. It's the number of backlogged email I want to try and get through.

I wrapped work around 5:00 PM then popped out for a bite to eat at a local dinner. It was tasty and quite which is exactly what I was looking for. After dinner I circled back home, restocked my tea box, and made myself a nice cup of Harrowgate of London Orange & Lemon tea to savor as the sun sets on a beautiful evening.

My mind is kind of exhausted from all the mental gymnastics of the day so my energy is running a bit low. Savoring a cup of tea has restorative powers, even more so when it's coupled with the poetry of Mary Oliver (which I always get confused with the music of Jane Olivor).

So, with a cup of good tea and a good book of poetry I wish you, dear reader, all of the good things in life - and tomorrow is another day!

Strange Days

These have been strange days.

If I had to sum it up in a nutshell - over the last year or so I've lost a lot of focus. Between the work overload and assorted bits of chaos in my personal life I became cluttered. I've been working this year to regain some of the clarity I've lost. My motivation has been low. When all it seems you're trying to do is move sand dunes you tend to get tired of shoveling sand.

This weekend was pretty good, though I moved through it under the shadow of work. The weather in this part of California was stunningly beautiful and a welcome relief from the long wet winter. It was nice just wandering around in the sun.

I met up with Tyrone at the Hickory Pit, then swung over to visit Bob for a while. It was a nice visit, all things considered. Brandy swung by my place during the day and dropped of several servings of chicken tortilla soup from her restaurant. After that I ran a few errands and then met Rick for lunch down at an Asian Fusion place. I had a miso glazed piece of sea bass that was truly outstanding.

From there I swung home and spent a lazy few hours watching a movie (Killing Me Softly) and then The Simpsons. My inner clock is still off due to the switch to daylight savings time today.

I'm not looking forward to work tomorrow because the chaos level is going to be pretty high. But, it will be a good day otherwise and I'll get a chance to work on my detachment from expectations and cognitive focus on attaining key steps in a wide variety of projects.

It's weird because I know all kinds of tricks and techniques for controlling workflow, detaching from expectations, and attaining clarity - I'm just struggling to implement them.

On that note I'm going to call it a night and curl up with a book to read myself to sleep.


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Into The New Year

The new year seems to be off to a brisk start. When I woke up Monday morning and my brain was racing as I tried to get ready to swing back into the working world. Things are fairly chaotic at work but I'm hoping to put the processes into place that will, if not smooth the edges completely, at least reduce some of the turmoil experienced.

If I were to sum up our challenges in a single statement it would be this – we are short resources and we have a relatively uncontrolled flow of work. That combination means that rather then doing a deep quality of work we are just moving things through as fast as we can. Quality suffers.

I think in a high percentage of the projects that get completed there are always unintended consequences. Those consequences lead to a lot of rework. There is an abiding sense that we are not reaching our potential, both in terms of personnel and in terms of quality. It is quite the challenge and I'm going to see if I can manage up, but his bandage my management, this year and make something of a difference.

On the personal front I got a new computer after my laptop started acting up. I could see the end of life cycle somewhere in the near future and decided to preemptively replace it. I didn't replace it with another laptop. I replaced it with a Lenovo desktop system, A very nice touch screen and a very modern system. I like the new system but it's probably going to take me a week or two to get it set up like I want it. I am looking forward to it though and I've been enjoying it so far.

With the quality of the iPad it can now, effectively, replace a laptop for travel. It's a pretty impressive system. I am dictating this on the iPad right now. If you haven't used as your personal secretary, you're missing out. I've also mentioned in the past that I am a huge fan of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. It also is a pretty impressive piece of software. I plan on installing it on my new computer sometime later today.

Well, it is time to start swinging into the day. I'm going to finish my cup of coffee, run through the shower, and fire up my work computer. I hope your day is going well.

The Breach

I left work today about 3:30 PM.  I was pretty much done. I didn't sleep well last night - I woke up about 2:30 AM with a brain full of stuff, stayed up for an hour, then tossed and turned for another hour before I finally gave up and got up. I headed into work early, spent a few hours preparing for a UAT kick-off meeting (once again, I am pulling an entire complex UAT out of thin air "just in time"). The meeting went well - and the rest of that day was back to back meetings until about 2:30.  By the time I got home I was fried. I laid down to try and take a nap, but I couldn't drop off.  Though I was tired, I was still too wired to drop off. I got up, spent an hour talking to my nephew Tom on the phone, then had a nice dinner of cream of mushroom soup and home made buffalo wings.  By the time I finished dinner I was feeling human again, so I answered some email off my Blackberry and watched part of "A Knights Tale" with the late and very talent Heath Ledger. In a short while I am going to crawl into bed with my new book and get a good nights sleep, then hurl back into the breach again tomorrow.

Another 13 Hour Day

Thirteen hours. Nine hours of meetings.  Started at 6:00 AM and ended at 8:00 PM. Quite the day.  On the plus side, made a lot of headway today. Managed to successfully rebuff the stupid requirement changes.  Finished up the last of the requirements for one major form.  Finished the requirements for an automated data processing trigger.  Two meetings with the systems engineer to get my brain wrapped about UAT. Probably a lot of other stuff I only vaguely remember.  Planning to get up at 5:00 AM tomorrow for a 6:00 AM start time, all to line up a 9:00 AM UAT meetings that is going to be Rod, improvising, to the best of my ability. Outside it was a beautiful day. My missing package showed up - UPS had delivered to the wrong street address and the people who got it walked it down the street and gave it to the manager.  The jacket is nice.  Tonight's plan, a pair of sitcoms (Whitney and The Neighbors), then a bit of reading and hopefully, a clear night of sleep.

Three Reasons I'm Cranky

Today was mostly a wasted day.  Oh, it had some good moments, but they were few and far between. First, I woke up about 2:30 AM for an hour or so, thinking about work.  Then,  I had a series of four back to back meetings at work and they were each as contentious as the one before.  Of a particularly frustrating nature was the last meeting - I was attempting to have a meeting about the UAT testing, but one of the team members invited a person who had no business on an UAT meeting, and then spent the entire meeting with us trying to get through anything, but we couldn't because they spent the whole meeting trying to explain it to the person who shouldn't have even been there.  Totally frustrating.

Then I had a UPS incident - and this has actually happened to me before with UPS.  I wish, when you ordered things, the shippers let me decide which carrier to use, because my experience with UPS has not been good.  I'd ordered a jacket that was shipped via UPS, with an original scheduled date of the 28th.  It never made it. The UPS site said it would arrive today on 29th, so I was home all afternoon, waiting for the arrival.  It never showed - no knock on the door, no package delivered, nothing.  About six PM this evening I went online to check the status of the package - and it said it was delivered at 2:35 PM and left at the door.

Uh, not a chance.  I live in a small apartment and at 2:30 PM I was sitting in the spare bedroom/office specifically waiting for the arrival while writing on a work project.  Nothing was delivered.  So, who knows where the heck it was delivered too, but it certainly wasn't me.  I even took a walk through the apartment complex to see if it was accidentally sitting at someone else's door.  Nothing that I could see.  So, I suspect that the UPS driver probably dropped it at the wrong street address.  Which means, starting tomorrow, I have to go through the hassle of contacting the original shipper and having them file the claim with UPS.  Normally, it would be an irritant (and it is), but I have had this happen with UPS before - where they claimed to deliver something, but they never did - and it's not like I could have accidentally missed it - I was sitting at home specifically waiting for it.  Frustrating.  And what is going to frustrate me even more is, if the vendor ships a replacement - they're probably going to ship it by UPS again.  Okay, that was my UPS vent.  I personally have better service with the USPS and Federal Express.

Okay, so let me sum up the three parts of my cranky - UPS (grrrrr), Work (grrrrr), Thinking About Work When I Should Be Sleeping (grrrr).  I don't know what it is, but when it rains, it sure seems to pour in life.  All right, got that out of my system.

I am going to go back online hear and do a small spot of work (a pair of configuration requirements) and then call it an early night and maybe try relaxing into the evening with a little writing or a little reading, something to break the relatively stressful routine that I've found myself in.

Thirteen Hours

Thirteen hours today, two waves of frustration, both of which ebbed with sunlight, walking and zen.  It was a moderately productive day - too much time in meetings and, as usual, too many changes at the last possible minute. That seems to be par for this project, but now, as I slide into the scant hours of the evening that work is not intruding on, I am actually in a good mood.  Though it was a challenging day, I did accomplish some things and I ended the day strong.

Point one that frustrated me was, as usual, a last minute change to a set of requirements - and no real reason for the change that have been made at the last minute.  I didn't have a lot invested in it, so I will execute tomorrow.  Point two was a potential change in requirements that I did not agree too, so I protested fairly strongly.  We will see if anyone listens. I can implement, but I really think this particular set of requirements is a bad idea. Point three was a meeting about some upcoming testing and I got really frustrated because several of the people were not listening, they were simply talking over each other and not getting into the level of detail that we need to get into. All three are frustration points, but I am pretty zen today.

I will give credit to a nice sushi dinner and a meditative walk at about four in the afternoon. I worked from home all day, so that helped too.  In the office, I have no natural light (our work area is deep inside the building) and here at home I have nice big windows for the sun to shine through. It's a much nicer environment here.  When I find myself grasping at my job, I remind myself that there are many things that would be a nice change and one of them would be that our office space truly sucks. Almost any change would be a good change there.

So, tomorrow will be another day. And maybe another thirteen hours.

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.

Deep and Peaceful

Thirteen hours of work today. Hosted a pair of UAT kick-off meetings, bounced through a couple of technical meetings, coordinated some test case construction, and then came home to spend most of the evening reading and responding to 109 email.  What a day.  Tomorrow however looks relatively sane.

I am planning to go to bed early tonight, spend a little bit of time writing, and fall asleep.  I wish I had more exciting things to tell you about - but work seems to be the order of the day for the immediate future. The project I am working on has three functional parts - and now two of them are delayed.  The only part of the project that is still moving forward is mine - but there is now a very good chance that we are going to slip the whole project again (which is actually a good thing, as it will give my team more time to polish their applications and systems). We should find out in the next couple of days I hope.

So, here is hoping that the dreams tonight are good and the sleep is deep and peaceful.

Struggling Into The Morning

I'm struggling into the morning today. I slept well enough, though I woke up a little early then I had intended to, but it seems to be going well. Black coffee and oatmeal, sunrise and "Haven" on the DVR.  I am estimating that I have four to six hours worth of work to do today, maybe more - I really have two things that I want to accomplish. 

First, I have to prepare the PowerPoint presentation for Monday's meeting, which I anticipate is going to take two or three hours, then another two or three hours working on the actual test materials. I've got the whole test cycle broken down in stages, so I am going to try and roll it out, one block at a time, which is less them optimal, but the whole project is less then optimal.

I am going to try and move easily and smoothly through the day. A simple breakfast, then, maybe a movie, or maybe just come straight home and work. I have to do a couple of loads of laundry at some point during the day, so I may do them here at the apartment complex, and I may do them at the laundromat. It will depend on whether or not I have an urge to get out of the apartment later in the day. 

I definitely want to head over and get a pizza at Patxi's today, in part because I am pretty sure it's going to be a hectic and busy week, with more than it's fair share of stress moments.  I am going to try and keep focused and move easily through it, but I am not sure I am going to be able to. I think I am going to have to use all of my stress management skills to make it.  Actually, sitting here thinking about it, the week should not be too bad - it's going to be the first couple of days that are very difficult, but once I make it through them, I should be all right.  I will have to keep telling myself that as the week starts.

On Saturday, I Ramble

It was an even 60 hours by the time I logged out of work Friday, which was a mostly unproductive and frustrating day. I made it a point to take most of today off just to give myself a chance to recover. I was mostly successful. 

Here is what the day looked like - I got up about seven this morning, after a long night sleep.  Breakfast with Tony and Ty at the Hickory Pit, then I zipped home for an hour long teleconference. When the teleconference wrapped up I dashed out and met the guys at AMC 14, where we saw "Skyfall", the new James Bond movie.  It was...excellent.  After we came out of the movie I made the comment that it has that one thing that all good Bond movies have to have - that ability to thrill you.  An excellent addition to the Bond canon.

From there, we had lunch at Buffalo Wild Wings.  Then, I came home and just relaxed - I did some work related email off the Blackberry, but mostly I watched "Carnage" on the DVR (based on the play "God of Carnage"). It was a strange and amusing movie, a good choice for easing through the afternoon.

After it ended, I curled up and took a nap for the better part of two hours.  I had set the alarm to wake me after an hour, and it did, but I needed the extra time so I simply stayed in bed. All of the hours I worked last week caught up with me and I needed to get the batteries recharged.

I am tired, all in all. I am on the borderline of being burnt out at work, so I need to be careful and "brush back" to a degree and make sure I don't let myself get unhealthily overloaded.  Part of the process of brushing back is to remember to take time for myself, in simple ways, and give my brain a rest. I keep letting the frustrating things at work get under my skin and make me short tempered, which is a wicked little loop to get caught it.  It becomes a feedback loop of frustration and I have a tough time breaking through it.

I do give a lot of credit to the counselor that I went to several years ago for work stress, in that I am putting a lot of the techniques to use and though my stress does occasionally peak, it rarely stays at the peak.  Generally, when I go through a peak period I start laughing about it - finding the humor in it, realizing that most of the stress and unreasonableness at work has nothing to do with me.

One of the key stress triggers I run into is when I am told to one thing, start work on that thing, and then get told to either do it differently or to do something else.  This stop, start, and rework has been one of the killers on this project - wasting a tremendous amount of time. I estimated at one point that some very routine and ordinary tasks were taking up to three times as long as normal to get done because of the constant rework.

That was part of what sent me into a stress loop on Friday.  I'd been asked to create 250 test scenarios, so I got the team working on it. It was slow going, as I had predicted, and we made some progress but not as much as project management would have liked.  I provided the feedback on the progress - and after a days worth of work, was told to do it a different way. Now, the different way is faster, but it was not what I was originally told to do, and it completely skips one of the purposes of the exercise.  It was very frustrating and I expressed that frustrating. (One of the key things I learned from the counseling was not to lock it up inside.)

53 Hours

Well, if you're wondering what happened to me - it's Thursday, I've worked 53 hours in 4 days.  Fun. Not. 

I ultimately caught the role of functional test lead for UAT because....no on planned UAT, no one appointed UAT personnel, and I have the skills and ability to bring order from chaos.  (No modesty here, that happens to be one of the things I am good at.) 

Now, I won't kid you, it is an uphill battle - I am going to try and roll the UAT out one step ahead of the testers. Prepare block one, roll out block one, and then while the testers are moving through block one, be working frantically on block two.  There are about six blocks, all told, of varying degrees of complexity and it is going to consume the next two weeks.

I haven't had much time for anything else. I wake up in the morning, I start working, I work through the day, I come home and have dinner and then go back to work. I have deliberately decided not to work tonight, just to give myself a bit of a rest.  I think 53 hours so far this week is enough, and I know I am going to wrack up a few more hours in the run of the next two weeks.

If there is a project management take-away it is this - it is all in the planning. Succeed in the planning and you will succeed in the project. Fail in the planning and you will fail in the project.

The Challenges of Juggling

It’s early Monday afternoon and I am at the office.  I started work at 5:30 AM today and, given that it is now 1:30 PM, it dawns on me that there is a reason I feel tired.  I’ve already worked an eight hour day.  Five of those hours were spent weaving in and out of meetings, which can be exhausting in its own right. I am fighting, but not for much longer, a compelling urge to go home, take a nap, and then try again after an hour or so.  That is one of the drawbacks of starting so early in the morning - but the time you get into the afternoon you are pretty much finished, at least as far as anything detailed and creative goes.

I find that the early morning hours are the best for me.  It is then that I feel at my intellectual and physical peak.  It would be nice if I could figure out some way to have multiple mornings through the day. Perhaps a rhythm of work, sleep, work, sleep, work would do it.  I do feel I would be more productive if I have the opportunity to take a true nap midway through the day. I may have to try that one of these days when I am working virtually.  I often find that when I nap I don’t actually go to sleep - but I do slip into a different mindset when I am taking a nap.

I find I am really struggling at work and I am struggling with getting all the parts of the project I am working on organized.  I feel like I am juggling multiple balls and I can’t get a rhythm established, that every time I just start to find the rhythm, they change it.  They change it by adding new balls or by taking existing balls away, or both. It can be, at times, maddening. I try to pull back, to focus on one thing at a time, but I find that is very difficult when I am trying to move through an environment of constant interruptions. It’s like trying to juggle when someone keeps randomly pushing you in one direction or the other.

Annie Lennox In My Ear

Midway through Wednesday and I am paused for lunch, listening to Annie Lennox's "Bare" album. The sun is shining out the window to the left and the leaves are slowly turning in a cool breeze. It's a beautiful lunch and I am going to give a lot of credit for that to the restorative power of music and the creative genius and talent of Ms. Lennox.

It was a quick morning. I'd finished five different meetings by eleven, on five different subjects. I don't have any meetings scheduled this afternoon and my plan is to focus on achieving one of my goals for this week, which is to deliver a set of requirements for a phase of the project. I'd hoped to deliver them last night, but it didn't happen. Yet more requirements were levied during the meetings yesterday, so I need to rework them a bit. I've got about a two and a half hour window this afternoon, so I am hoping I am going to make some headway.

I had a flash of insight last night, while in conversation with Don while I helped him move his furniture around. I need to be learning new things - learning is an integral part of being alive for me. Lately I don't feel as if I've been learning and I think that might be a part of the unfulfilled sense I have. More of a sense that I am not living up to my own potential. So, what I need to do is start learning a little something every day, use the power of incremental learning over time to find that feeling that I am mastering something.

And having documented that little piece of insight, with Annie Lennox singing in my ear, its time to wander back to the office and have a productive afternoon.
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Long Day Quiet Evening

A full day at work doing the thing I like the most - complex, detailed, patient analysis. One item at a time, through and through. That is what gives me the best buzz at work, that is what lets me lose the entire day in work, or like today, allows eleven hours to slide by with minimal burden.  We are at the part of the project (at least in my part of the project) where all the talk starts turning into reality. Or, as I like to refer to it, the best part of the day.

I got home tonight after work made some chicken and coleslaw, watched "Solomon Kane" again (the last day on my On Demand), then settled in for a hot bath.  I was going to work some more this evening, but pacing is also key to success I think.  Slow and steady always wins the race.

The hot bath was nice and while I was in the tub I got a call from one of my nephews.  My nephew had a surprise visit to the hospital last night - due to a bleeding ulcer.  Definitely not fun, but he is home now, with a handful of drugs and a diet and lifestyle sheet, along with a follow up scheduled next week.  I wish him the best of luck!

Tomorrow is my Friday at the office and it is also going to end up as another eleven hour day, most likely.  This week and next week are going to be pretty solidly work focused. But, once I get through the heavy lifting, I should be able to slide relatively seamlessly into the rest of the fall.  Speaking of fall, the turn of the season is almost upon us and I am looking forward to that - fall is my favorite time of year, so lets hope for, or perhaps make, a great fall.

Process Certainty

Yesterday was a bit of a challenging day, from a work standpoint.  The computer problems in the morning through me off for the rest of the day.  I was able to salvage some of the day, the afternoon, once the computer issues had been resolved, but it still felt like a mostly squandered day. I am at the point right now in the project I am working where I’m deep into the details of design and configuration. That is just a process of details, finding them, documenting them, communicating them and double-checking them.  It leaves room for error, especially since, right now, we are working in solo silos, without the covering effect of peer reviews.  It is a time of focus and I really struggled with focus yesterday.

So, today is going to be an exercise in deliberate focus - staying tight, staying crisp, staying clear.  There are three major phases in my portion of the project and at this point it is just a question of focusing on the first phase.  I would like to get the first phase handed off by close of business today.  It is the complex phase, since it involves the most configuration change. Phase two is straight-forward and phase three is more a process of reduction then change.  It would be nice if I had process certainty beyond myself, but that is wishing for something that simply doesn’t exist on this project.

My Laptop Is Possessed

Well, it's pretty much been a wasted morning here at work, at least as far as productivity goes. I started the day early enough - at 4:30 AM when I woke from a dream about work. In the dream I was venting to HR about the conditions at work and realizing that it was all kind of pointless.
I had a simple breakfast - a bowl of cereal and a whole wheat muffin with cream cheese, and then headed into the office. I had every intention of leaping into my tasks but I ran right into a technical wall. We use encryption software to protect our companies information in the event of a lost or stolen laptop.

After I logged in I noticed my laptop was lagging and not behaving correctly. I tried doing some work but all I managed to do was frustrate myself badly - about half my applications wouldn't open and when they did open I had a difficult time working within them. Activities were slow and unpredictable and the applications kept locking up. Twice I lost work, which is very irritating. I fired up my system monitors and discovered the encryption process was using up about seventy five percent of my processing power.

It was very frustrating, then I realized what I needed to do was step back, take a deep breath, and let the system do what the system was going to do. Which I did. I then watched about three and a half hours of the day slip away. I was able to do small things - work email, return calls, but any time I tried to do anything significant the computer would go wonky. It appears the bulk of the processing finished up a few minutes ago, but I still can't reboot and half my applications don't work.

Since I am going to take lunch in about twenty minutes, quite frankly, I've pretty much written the morning off as far as productivity goes. I will circle back around after lunch and attempt to tackle the one task I want to get finished today. One simple thing.
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Evening, Covert Affairs, Work Life

While I was on my little zen-cation there I took a leave from writing here online. I took a week off work and spent most of the time just being.  It was very nice and it contained several lessons that I am attempting to incorporate into my daily life.  The primary lesson there was the importance of just sitting things down every now and then.

I am back in the full swing of the absolute insanity that is work, driven ultimately by a director that is, charitably, in way over her head and less charitably, incompetent. The project has slipped back to a more reasonable schedule, but on the high level they are still going totally insane. I could rant and rave for a while about it, but in the end I just have to lean back and laugh.  I keep thinking a grown up somewhere has to be watching.

It is a quiet evening tonight, I am at home watching the most recent episode of "Covert Affairs" with the lovely and talent Piper Perabo. It has been a very entertaining series of episodes.  A little later in the night I am going to curl up and read for a while.  Hoping to get a nice chat in with T.R. tonight, but that is going to depend on schedules.

I thought I would write a bit more about what is going on at work, minus the ranting and raving.  Let me see if I can summarize the problem in a nutshell.  I am an information system analyst - I design and implement information processing systems, I am not a programmer, I provide the direction to the programmers.  I've got close to 25 years of experience - I am very good, and I am currently at the staff level. In system design and implementation process matters.

There is a classic story told by Deming, used to emphasize the importance of process.  In the story, you have a bowl of beans, some brown, some blue and a cup.  Your job is to use the cup and scoop out a cupful of beans. You scoop out the first cup and you have 80% blue beans. You are told that is very good, but you need to do better.  You scoop out the second cup and you have 85% blue beans.  You are told that is great, but you need to do better still or you'll be fired.  You scoop out the next cup and you get 70% of blue beans - and you're fired on the spot. The moral of the story is this - you can only be as good as the process that is being used.  It doesn't matter what you want, will, or intend.  You're only as good as the process.

We have well developed and mature processes at work. It's our job to hold customers to the process. But, in this case, the person who cannot hold to the process (who doesn't seem to even understand it) is our director.  She has zero process discipline and consequently this project has been all over the map. It is constantly one day, one moment away from disaster. It is burning people up and it is burning them out.

I am in a unique position - most of the worst behavior of this director I am not a direct witness too.  About two years ago now the director and I had it out in a high tension teleconference that lasted in five hours, during which I was told I had to "drink the kool-aid", which meant toe the line and not engage in any form of dissent, even constructive.  I refused. I told her flat out that I never drink the kool-aid.  That was the end of that and other then large group meetings she has spoken to me directly twice.  Which is fine with me.  That leaves me in an awkward point though - some of the things I have heard about her conduct I would never tolerate, but for me, they are only hearsay.  It's frustrating.

So, we continue forward in fits and starts, one moment from disaster.  If nothing else, it sure is a learning experience.  I am not sure how to go forward, but I am sure I will figure something out.

12 Hours Later - Punch Drunk

It was a twelve hour workday today. I spent the vast majority of the day testing the configuration of one aspect of the new project.  It's a monster.  My portion alone is - 107 items in 2 templates in 4 user roles. Can you say 856 distinct items to check?  I made it a little over halfway through - and then I started getting punch drunk and I couldn't tell if what I was seeing were actual errors - or just my brain frying from checking too many items that were too similar. I voted for the last and called in a night, punch drunk.  I get to go it all again tomorrow morning - and weave through meetings. (This whole exercise just demonstrates the importance of having well documented test cases, then make the whole test process easier.)

Ah, but there was a bright and shining light at the end of the day and that was a great little conversation with T.R. early in the evening. It definitely made my day. So, it is chasing 8:30 now, I have the slight edge of a headache, it is hot and humid outside, and I need to take a cool shower and then head to bed - curl up and spend a little time reading, and then fall asleep.  Then, I get to do it all again tomorrow.