Changing Jobs Again

Time to Wind This Up

2007-01-28T17:30:00.000-06:00

Hmm...I feel bad about having one of the those millions of blogs that never get updated so I think I'm going to stop going down this particular blogpath. I always have reasons not to blog--I'm taking Spanish one night a week, play soccer one night, but mostly I don't feel like doing the work of writing a post (30-45 minutes per post) on the other nights.

I'll finish with a few observations.

- One year and a quarter after beginning my job, I think I'm doing pretty well. I'm competent, got a good year end review and solid peer reviews. I've become more discliplined and detail-oriented and have learned to adjust my project management style to work with different people, getting really prescriptive in some situations but staying laid back in others. I wish I had developed these skills at Widgets but there was no mentor for me and little chance for training.

I'm on a variety of projects--some long-term, tedious projects but also the key company-wide project for the next year--so the projects balance out. I've actually had two products release into Production and should have more in the coming months. The company is great and will be vastly expanding my campus soon, creating more opportunities that I could move into. I was given a good raise last year and will get the company bonus in a month or so. The company stock that I can buy at a discount is slowly rising and pays dividends. The negatives of my job are pretty minimal--I think if I wrote them down it would be minor whining, so I won't.

- Widgets has changed quite a bit but, unfortunately, has also stayed the same in many ways. I think the situation has improved for some people because of reorganization but not for others and the big problem area of planning and prioritizing work still need a lot of development.

- Some of my friends are leaving Widgets but I know some will be there until they close the doors. I'm hoping for a buyout of my shares next year. I enjoy doing lunch with Widget friends, attending going away parties as people leave, and staying up on the news.

- The ex-Widgeteers that I communicate with seem to have found good opportunities and miss the people, not the place. They have found companies that appreciate it when you work hard don't consider working long hours a requirement.

- I'm so glad I did this blog! Putting time into writing again has inspired me to get back to a writing project I put off a long time ago--writing up the journal entries that describe my experiences during the Democracy Movement in China in 1989. I may do that as a private blog so I can get comments and questions from people who were there (like my kids) and from people who weren't who can prod me to explain things that most people wouldn't understand. If you want to be invited in, let me know.

Thanks to everyone that's read this blog and especially to the people that wrote comments!

Bye

P.S. I downloaded these HTML files and copied the text of the blog into a Word file for archiving. The Word files is 133 pages long!

Fish

2006-12-12T15:24:00.000-06:00

We do a lot of group activities like icebreakers, motivators, welcoming lunches, etc. Last week our group watched a video called "Fish!" about the guys that work at a fish stall at the Pike Place Market in Seattle.

The video is about how they have fun at work. They throw the fish around (hard), shout out funny things, get people to do goofy things with the fish, and presumably sell enough fish to stay in business.

I can't remember what the main points of the video were but it was similar to a yoga/meditation/mystical book I have called "Be Here Now." That book is about being all in the present and living life fully and completely. The lessons I remembered were something like

- Have fun!
- Make your day great by believing it will be great!
- Bring the customer into the fun (that one wasn't in the book)!

They really did look like they were having fun. While I watched the video I wondered how much those guys got paid, if anyone starting work at 6 a.m. and being covered with fish guts all day could really be that happy, and how much fish (big whole fish) they actually sold.

At the end of the video the person that suggested we watch it asked the group how we could apply this to our jobs. There was a thoughtful silence-a long thoughtful silence. Luckily our time in the room was over at that point and we could leave without discussing how testing legal software was like selling fish.

Not that we don't all try to have fun at work. It just seemed like it was a long way from the fish market in Seattle to my cube. I guess I could throw things...

The Watcher

2006-12-04T16:27:00.000-06:00

On the day before Thanksgiving, the husband of a coworker gave her a giant, helium smiley-face balloon to cheer her up (personal story omitted). She tied the huge smiley-face balloon onto the chair outside her cubicle, two cubes up the row from me, and it's floated there since then....smiling.

The workday after the balloon arrived I was sitting at my desk, staring at my computer screen (typical pose), when I had a weird feeling. I looked up and slightly to my left and saw, just over the top of my cube wall, two huge black eyes with white dots in them. The balloon was staring at me.

Of course when I caught it staring like that it very slowly turned away but it happens all day long when I'm sitting at my computer. Sure, you think the ventilation system causes it to look one way or another--you think that giant smiley-face balloons have no free will. You haven't seen this one.

I mentioned the intrusive behavior of the balloon to it's owner but she either wasn't listening (it was a talk-over-each-other conversation) or she thought I actually enjoyed being spied on by a gas bag. She hasn't taken it home and it hasn't lost any gas as far as I can tell. It may be there forever....watching me.

It would be a shame if someone happened to it. ; )`

Winter Holidays at Law R Us

2006-12-01T16:55:00.000-06:00

Right after Thanksgiving they put up the holiday stuff at work. For those of us that aren't the majority religion, it's very refreshing.

Holiday banners are hung from the ceilings near the main doorways. The banners are probably ten feet long since the following holidays are listed on them along with appropriate symbols:

Chinese New Year
Christmas
Hanukah
Diwali
Ramadan
Hmong New Years

In addition to the banners, there are small tables put in the public areas with items symbolic of these holidays. There's a Hanukah menorah but also a couple other candle things--one is for Diwali and I don't know about the other one--and some dishes with something in them. I stopped at one of those tables once and tried to figure out each item was but nothing is labeled. I should put in a suggestion to the Diversity Council to label that stuff.

Of course there is still a Christmas tree in the big lobby with fake presents and wreaths in strategic places. I don't think you'll ever see that go away even if a large percentage of the people have last names reminiscent of South Asia.

The company has one big company event which consists of thousands of people streaming through the cafeteria for a drink and some appetizers. There's usually a jazz band playing too. It's time away from the usual routine so people generally go, even if they skip the appetizers. I think last year the Moose coffee shop also gave away free holiday drinks but the lines for their free stuff are too long for me.

Our organization is having a bowling afternoon for our winter holiday party (we did a big picnic thing during the summer). We did the same thing at Widgets during our first year as a big Production group and once as the company's yearly party. It should be fun.

Our group is having a massive potluck. It's been organized in terms of "booths" with themes, as in the "Indian booth." The booths are spread out over two group areas on two floors plus one booth isolated way at the end of the building. That, of course, is the Healthy/Natural Booth where I'm taking my spicy noodles. I can't believe people are going to walk down the hallway with plates of food past all the other groups so I'm expecting a lot of leftovers.

There's also a kids party on a Saturday. I guess thousands of kids are brought here which seems scary but the company has been doing it for decades so I'm told it's well managed and also fun.

I don't have much vacation left for December but I will get two long weekends. Imagine, using all my vacation! I never got to do that Widgets.

Turkey Day at Laws R Us

2006-11-28T20:14:00.000-06:00

The Tuesday before Thanksgiving at my workplace is Turkey Day. Okay, it's not officially called that but it is the day they give every employee a turkey. Giving away six or seven thousand turkeys is quite a production.

During the two weeks leading up to Turkey Day, everyone is given a turkey ticket. You then have the choice of hanging onto the ticket and turning it in for a turkey or you donating your turkey to Second Harvest (which I did).

Early in the morning on Turkey Day, they cordon off a large area near the front door. Why a large area? Well, they need to park four or five large moving trucks full of turkeys nearby. They also need room for the conveyor belt that runs from the truck parking area to the front door.

Early in the day, the boxes containing 14-17 pound turkeys start rolling down the conveyor belt. Third shift workers pick up their turkey on the way home. Some people pick up the turkeys at lunch time and head home. Retirees come in for lunch and a turkey. During the day you see people walking around the building carrying the boxes.

At the end of the day (people start leaving in droves at 3 p.m. and stream out until 5 or 6), you can either just take a turkey off the belt or drive up to the conveyor belt and have a cheerful volunteer puts your turkey into your car. I suppose they're there distributing turkeys until the end of the second shift in manufacturing.

Turkey day kicks off the holiday celebrations at work. That will be the subject of my next post.

Hiding Places

2006-11-14T20:14:00.000-06:00

(Okay, summer, construction projects and the elections are over. I have no excuse not to blog.)

I thought I would ease back into it by writing about something light--my hiding places at work. Wait, they're not hiding places, just places I go when I want to get away from the attractive nuisance of email and the piles of things to do sitting on my desk. Sometimes I just need a relatively quiet spot where I can think through my next step on a project or read through some background material.

My favorite space is back behind the "university" classrooms on the fourth floor. The space is divided into three small areas with four comfortable chairs in each. It's a great place to sit and think because it's a relatively quiet spot in a not-very quiet building.

This space is next to big windows that look out over...some parking lots and a big package express factory--but that's only if you're standing up. If you're sitting down you see some pretty hills and a lot of sky. It's a nice place to watch the weather on stormy days.

The best part about this spot is the big sound-reducing baffle-things hanging from the ceiling. They not only reduce the noise floating in from the elevators/cafeteria/classrooms but they very effectively hide me from anyone who might want to interrupt my thoughts by talking to me about their favorite topic.

There are a few baffle-enclosed tables nearby in the library area. I would sit there too but there are usually groups there doing their collaborative projects for classes. I suppose I could go the huge library downstairs (my daughter's former turf) and sit at the single table but the library workers would think that was really weird.

I also sometimes sit at one of the small tables next to the windows in the cafeteria, again on the fourth floor. That side of the building has a view of...parking lots. Oh well. Actually it also has a good view of the "back door" of my building so I can watch people coming and going. You can also see a very pretty city park that is next to the Laws R Us property.

I like sitting in the cafeteria spot. I don't think I've ever run into someone I know there but, unfortunately, the shortage of meeting rooms has forced many people to hold their meetings in the cafeteria. If the person running a nearby meeting is loud I have to slink back to my desk.

I almost forgot about the far corner of the OTHER cafeteria. Unfortunately I always see people I know there. They don't always talk to me but they do that quick look and move on. I know they're wondering what I'm doing sitting there....

I Applied for Another Job

2006-10-25T21:54:00.000-05:00

Well I celebrated my year anniversary at Laws R Us this week. I couldn't believe a year had gone by.

At our group meeting on Monday I was awarded the one-year anniversary recognition gift--a nice pen. My manager told me I had to tell the group what my best moment was during my first year. Put on the spot like that I couldn'think of anything interesting or humorous so I just said it was the free fruit. I think now the best thing was probably going home after eight hours and not even thinking about work but I don't know if that would have been an appropriate thing to say in front of all the new employees in our group.

Since I've completed a year in my job, I started thinking about what else I might like to do in the company, expecting that job search to take months. In my department it's often said that management doesn't expect you to stay in any job for more than a couple of years. I began a regular scan of my company's job listings, both for my Widgets friends and for myself.

Amazingly, I quickly found a job that was a promotion and would use my web skills. I asked around and found out that the proper way to apply for another job in the company was to talk to your manager first, then apply online. I was nervous about that--what manager wants employees telling them that they want to take a job somewhere else. But my manager was very professional about it and even offered to find out more about the organization I was going to apply to.

Luckily there wasn't much updating to do on my resume. A quick, enthusiastic cover letter and it was done. Now the waiting.....

Reviews

2006-10-14T13:33:00.000-05:00

I spent most of Friday and a little of Thursday working on my year-end review. My organization's year ends now but over the next year the year-end will shift to the spring to be the same as everyone in the larger corporations.

Reviews at Laws R Us are, IMHO, something that should be restricted by the Geneva convention.

First we have to write about the Goals we set for the year. It's pretty easy to write a paragraph that says, Yeah, I did that. (Yata! for Japanese pop fans.)

That's the easy part. Next you have to evaluate yourself against the eight or nine Key Success Factors. KSFs are about HOW you do your job. For example, how do you communicate, solve problems, etc. That's not all. There are six or seven qualities for each KSF that are different for each job level so there's really thirty to forty parts to the KSFs. Apparently other companies use KSFs but Laws emphasizes them in the review process over the Goals.

That means it's really important for a good review to write a lot of sharp stuff about how you satisfied the KSFs. Luckily a good review only has to include writeups on three qualities for each KSF but that's still 24 paragraphs that include a strong example. It's a lot of work.

My manager kept telling me "Don't overthink it! It's easy!" Right. I had to keep going back to his office to ask him about jargon in the KSFs that I still didn't understand. Every time he'd give me that "you're making it too hard" look.

It took most of a day to write the KSFs but I finished and I think it's okay. Unfortunately I still wasn't done.

We do 360 degree reviews, where a small number of people are asked to review you based on your Goals and....the KSFs. I gave my manager a list of people to review me (most of whom I'm confident will say good things) and I received requests to review a dozen people. Some of the reviews I had to do were easy but I realy struggled with some of them, not sure what things to comment on and how important my feedback will be.

Next I wait for my manager to write up his review of me and collect the other comments. He's going to go right to the deadline so it won't be for a few weeks. Then I can get my first raise and, amazingly, retroactive pay all the way back to when I started. That's more than fair.

The other downside to all of this is the less than optimal software we have to use. It's a product of some other division of the company so we're stuck with it. One of the first things you have to learn is how to go around it's limitations.

Is this a better process than others I've gone through at places like Widgets (no reviews or overtemplated ones) or Not Big Blue (manager reading my self review back to me)? I think there's too much writing but the measures are fair.

I think doing reviews is really important since they are the official statement of how you're doing but day-to-day honest communication and feedback has to be there too. My current job is the best I've had as far as communications goes. As they say in the HR manuals, the comments you hear in a review should not be a surprise.

I'm not expecting any surprises.

Career Class

2006-10-03T20:09:00.000-05:00

Last month I started watching for the new batch of class announcements. There are always skills classes and classes on the products but I've taken most of the ones I'm interested in. The less-frequent topical classes get announced periodically on the location web site and fill up fast--classes on topics like Negotiating, Influencing People, and Career Planning.

I took Career Planning last week. I didn't know too much about the class when I signed up but within a few days I received a thick envelope with a bunch of glossy workbooks. The class was bought by my company from one of those learning/career curriculum places.

I really liked the prework. First, I had to answer questions about what actions I've taken about my career. Second, I had to fill out a career interests workbook. Third, I had to use stickers to rate my work skills and behaviors as "Rough Edges," "Polished," or "(Needing) Continuous Improvement." I gave copies of the ratings booklet to three people I work with so they could rate me using the same stickers. Getting feedback from others is a big part of courses like this at Laws R Us and I really like getting that information.

The class was two half-days in the afternoon. I think it probably could be two days or maybe a day and half but there was enough time to go over how to understand the information we brought and to see what we could do with it.

There were four tables of people in the classroom, a mix of people from very different departments and some people from the field. The format was typical Laws R Us, the instructor walking through a topic which we then talked about at our tables or in different groups that she created. It seems funny that a class about your career would include group interaction but it worked.

What I really liked about the class was that we started with thinking about our values and how we want our job to be in line with our values. There were a few people that had "Move Up Through Management" as their number one value but almost everyone else had "Be Content at My Job" or "Have Enough Time for Friends and Families."

We graded our workbooks. My score was low on career work--researching, networking, etc. I have to try harder to learn, look, and also to leverage my network.

The self-assessment versus co-worker assessment comparison was really interesting. Generally, my peers rated me higher on my skills than I did. I think there was only one area that I rated myself higher than they did so that's an area I need to look at. We created a plan for following up with our raters. Overall it's good news for my 360 degree job review that is just beginning.

At that point we had all the pieces to create a development plan...and we were out of time. How can I make myself do that when there's no pressure to finish it?

Fire Drills

2006-09-28T20:25:00.000-05:00

I've never worked in a really big building, a building with thousands of people. That's why I suppose I've never experienced fire drills like the ones we have at Law R Us.

Fire drills are done by floors and are spread out over a day or two. If the alarm goes off on the floor you're currently on, even if you're just standing in line for coffee, you have to go outside. Security does a sweep to make sure people evacuate the building.

Once you're outside you stand around until the security guys let you back in. The drills are in the spring and fall so it's not too punishing but I would have liked to have my coat today. If you're outside for any other reason (e.g., coming back from lunch), you have to wait outside until the fire drill people are allowed back in.

It's possible to have to go outside for multiple fire drills. You may be caught in a fire drill when you're at your desk on the first floor in the morning, then another an hour later while you're in a meeting on the fourth floor, then another two hours later while you're talking to someone on the third floor. There are people that claim that has happened to them many times over the years.

Of course there's also the urge to cheat. I was on the fourth floor in a class today when the fire alarm went off. We started down the stairs and I'm pretty sure I saw one of my classmates quickly go through the door to the third floor which already had it's fire drill.

There's a potentially funny situation when the basement evacuates--there are shower rooms down there. I was using one of those shower rooms to change into my soccer kit on Wednesday when I saw a sign that said "Fire Drill on this level, Thursday at 8:15. You will have to evacuate the building!" Okay, no problem for the drill but if there was a real fire...

That reminds me of the 911 instructions. We call an internal emergency number so our security people can call 911, then meet the ambulance/firefighters at the main entrance so they can direct them to the exact area where there's a problem. There are five or six buildings and lots of doors so I suppose it makes sense.

Widgets Update

2006-09-21T19:45:00.000-05:00

Last weekend I had a chance to talk with some of my favorite Widgeteers.

What's up with Widgets? Well there's been a major reorganization, the first in probably five or six years. Some of the changes, like consolidating programming under technology, has been talked about (quietly) for a long time. There's a new PMO that's staffed with a crew of people that in the past few years has had the thankless task of managing projects that don't have defined requirements or reasonable deadlines--will there be enough training and recognition of process within management to make it work? There's also the back to the future idea of having partner coordinators that manage the relationships with the customers (that's what Producers were originally supposed to do). There's also a building move for the tech folks which could be good, although I hear the new cubes are the short fabric kind, not the designer wooden deskticles left over from the internet boom.

There are some major initiatives from The Network Who Shall Not Be Named that sound like they've become little mini-organizations within the company. The Network, never the company to prioritize, is still demanding everything/anything they want NOW and Widget's management still tells everyone that doing what The Network wants is crucial to the company's future. I wonder if that's going to make my shares in the company more valuable (they're value-less right now).

When I talk to people I hear that familiar Widgets ambivalence--they usually like what they do and are proud of their accomplishments but dislike that fact that they feel unappreciated. A year ago management made appreciative noises and threw around some cash when they feared everyone would quit before The Games but the flow of money (and kind words?) has apparently dried up.

Hmmm, there must be another way to show appreciation. How about a picnic away from the building and an accompanying budget for small celebrations in other places? Small gifts and prizes? An awards program which gives out gift certificates? Peer awards? Web geek of the month awards? If someone over there needs ideas on employee appreciation I'll check out some books on the subject from my company library for them.

Well, I could write more but I won't. I'm close enough to Widgets to know a lot but far enough away to not have all the context I'd need for a good critique of what's going on. All I can say is good luck to all of you that are sticking it out there!

NEXT: My first project release.

My First Overtime

2006-09-18T21:34:00.000-05:00

Last weekend, after almost eleven months on the job, I worked more than forty hours for the first time. Working extra hours on a regular basis was one of the things that drove me crazy at Widgets so I've enjoyed working eight and leaving. At the beginning of the year, however, my manager informed the leads in our group (I'm a lead but don't have anyone reporting to me) that he would appreciate it if we would all volunteer to be the test lead during one of the monthly releases of our flagship software, Gold-Law. He then tried the Jeddi-mind-trick on me to get me to volunteer. I volunteered anyway.

The actual go-live period for the release is early Saturday morning so a test lead and a tester come in at 8 a.m. and run through a suite of tests until the "all clear" is given. Most of the tests are automated so you start them off and see if anything breaks. The test lead is responsible for communicating our group's status and finding out what's going on in the other groups that are testing that day. On an easy release, everyone is there for four hours and goes home. On a difficult release, there may be a number of fixes which require several rounds of testing. Everything needs to be working perfectly (or as good as it was) by Monday morning.

I don't have much to do with the mechanics of testing software--my job is to make sure people have a test plan and actually do the testing. If someone asked me what the test suite actually tests, I couldn't give a good answer (the software, right?).

Luckily, since this was my first release weekend so I was just shadowing. We (me, another lead, and a very experienced tester) spent the morning in the test lab down the hall from my cubicle. I spent most of the time manually testing some new features, actually getting the correct results. There was free Sunny D (yuk) and lots of doughnuts (which I don't eat).

At noon we announced that everything was good in our tests. Unfortunately, there were some "customer facing" issues that required fixes which would not be ready until later in the day. Since I was the shadower I was released but the tester for our group wound up working a few hours late on Saturday night and again early Sunday. Normal stuff for Widgets but unusual for Laws R' Us although there are a lot of release horror stories.

Hopefully I won't do this again for at least a year.

NEXT: Widgets Update!

Spaced Out Presentation

2006-09-14T20:42:00.000-05:00

So I went to one of my usual project manager meetings with my manager yesterday and no one else has shown up. He looked at me and said "We need to have this meeting because we HAVE to talk about this presentation now. You have to give it to the Project Management Office tomorrow afternoon."

Sirens go off in my head. When did I....oh shit, last week I said I would take the lead on a meeting. But I thought it was a meeting to talk about the presentation. I was stuck.

And I wasn't feeling too good--I think it's a sinus infection that's also messed up the rest of my systems. I had that almost-out-of-your-body spaciness that makes thinking or talking or anything else difficult.

So we talked about the two year old .ppt I was going to work from. There were things to add, language to clean up, and I had to collect a number of sample documents and make a training package.

I spent the afternoon working on the .ppt instead of doing some last minutes things on my project that's launching next week. I was sort of done when I left last night.

I came in today even spacier. I was so spacey that I went to a meeting I run without a pen or pencil. I didn't write anything down and certainly forgot everything before I got out the door.

I showed my manager the .ppt early in the afternoon. He said it was fine. I told him how spaced I was and he said "Well how are you going to do the presentation?" He suggested a lot of caffeine. But I told him I knew what to do...Dew.

(Does anyone else remember when Mountain Dew was marketed as a "country" drink--Yahoo! Mountain Dew?!)

I felt okay at show time. There was a poor turnout at the meeting (although all the senior PMs came) so it was very informal. My peers who were there thought it went well.

When I got back to my work area, I sat down and stared at my computer for thirty minutes until I could leave. Yay! Survived again.

Award Programs

2006-09-12T20:41:00.000-05:00

The new award programs were announced at my job. There are three levels.

The first is (let's name it Olympic style) bronze. We've had this level for a while. Anyone can reward anyone else for something good they did, giving them a gift certificate-the kind that you can use in a lot of different places. It's not big dollars but it's a really nice thing to do. I've given one out to a tester that helped me and all the other testers to do a better job on a project.

The next level is silver. You get nominated for this, your accomplishment getting reviewed at a fairly high level in our technology organization. The reward is big, we're talking thousands of dollars. The idea is that a lot of these will be given away, not one. Sure cash gets taxed but it's still enough money to pay off some bills or take a short trip.

I don't know how many gold awards they will give away but it's major dollars. This probably has to go to the VP level but it's enough for a real vacation.

We still have the recognition cards that you give to someone when they help you out. There's no money right away but every six months there's a drawing for a gift certificate from the pool of people that gave cards and one from the card recipients.

Also, every six months a number of people are recognized at the tech organization meeting. Anyone can send a nomination to an employee committee that reviews the nominations and chooses six or seven winners. There's usually a project team or two that wins.

Of course there are Happy Hours for software releases--if you can get the software released. I have one project that's had release delayed four times (for quality reasons) and we've about given up on that party. But I've got a release on Saturday!!! Party (I hope)!!!

[Name Deleted]: Stop writing about Internet Broadcasting.

2006-09-08T23:13:00.000-05:00

That was the comment someone made to my last entry on Widgets and mentoring at my new job. They put my first and last names at the beginning but neglected to give their name. C'mon, tell me who you are and why it makes a difference what I write.

(BTW, I deleted the comment. If the person wants to sign a comment with both names they can use both of mine.)

Why do I continue to write about Widgets, a place I left almost a year ago?

1) I have many friends there, some of which I see or talk to on a regular basis. They tell me interesting things and sometimes I want to comment on those things. It's a free country...well, mostly...for now.

2) I am a major Widgets stockholder...well, a minor stockholder...okay, I've got a few shares so I'm interested in what happens there. Like, what's the mission of the company these days and how will it lead to growth of the value of my shares (which I think are actually worthless)? How are operations being aligned to more adequately handle the constant-urgent needs of the customers? Are employees being compensated fairly and motivated to increase their productivity through incentive schemes? Are they being trained to handle their current jobs and their next career opportunity?

3) I like writing about Widgets as a example of a workplace with great potential for good because of the quality of the people.

4) Some of the many Widgets expatriates read my blog for company news. I can't let those lucky folks down.

Note that I also write about Not Big Blue, my former workplace that completed yet another major round of layoffs this spring/summer. A new employee in my current group just came from there and said morale is very, very bad. That's what happens to a major computer company that ignores the Internet.

I could go back further but my short term contracts and freelance jobs aren't that interesting. I could reach back to the Going Postal Service but no one can relate to that except for the six or seven hundred thousand people who move the mail.

Retirement

2006-09-02T23:12:00.000-05:00

Am I announcing my retirement? I wish. No, I watched the PBS Frontline show on Retirement streamed it from their web site and it was scary. It was especially scary for me--someone who didn't start saving for retirement until ten years ago and will supposedly retire in ten to twelve years.

The most important point the show made was that 401Ks work well if you save 15% of your salary for thirty years, you make a mid-middle to upper-middle class income and you invest the money in a mostly intelligent way. Everyone else will come up short at retirement and basically work until they die so they can maintain a middle class life style and pay for health insurance and medications.

That means that a large percentage of the baby boomer generation will never retire. There'll be grey haired people driving the buses and making capacinos (that's what I'm applying for) and otherwise holding onto jobs that younger people need. Oh and we'll be pissed that we're stuck working like that.

Some states are actually opening pensions back up because they see 401Ks aren't working for their employees but company pensions are disappearing because 401Ks are cheap for the company. My company just closed off the pension to new employees so they only get the 401K. I have both but my confidence in a pension plan that doesn't have new employees joining it is pretty low. Maybe I'll get a lump sum payment at some point.

I also have a very small pension from Not Big Blue. That'll be enough to pay my bus fare to the coffee shop where I work. The odds of that pension surviving are about the same as the odds that the Greenland ice sheet willincrease in size next year.

What about Social Security? I trust that the politicians of both parties will work together to destory Social Security before even I can get anything out of it, probably spending the money in a controversial war against you fill this in. When Social Security fails the number of poor elderly people will be staggering but they are the easiest segment of the population to ignore so it won't be a problem for the policitians, just the children of those poor people. Sorry kids.

If you're rich or inherit money I suppose you don't care about this but everyone else better pay attention. Make a plan to save money, stay as debt free as you can, save a lot in your 401K or Roth IRAs.

Oh yeah, you also need to hope the brilliant people that make our laws don't change the retirement laws again and make it even harder to retire.

Widgets Update; Mentoring

2006-08-28T20:57:00.000-05:00

Widgets: Just an update for Widgets expatriates. The Production department is slowly splitting up--programmers will go to the technology group, Admaster to Sales (and I assume the SPCs too), project managers and other capable people to new product and partner management jobs. I don't know what's going to happen with the designers but getting broken up in to multiple groups organized around areas of work (sales, application development, ?) is likely.

It's likely that this won't be the end of the changes but I think this change (which they've needed for several years) will be an improvement. The next big change they need, something I offered an opinion on in my exit interview (I think she kept a copy if you want to check), is the hiring of an Operations Manager to keep the company running day-to-day by coordinating resources in a planned way according to company priorities. Oh yeah, you have to set priorities...well, it's still a good idea.

Mentoring: A few months ago I got an email at work asking for volunteers to be mentors for new employees. I wasn't sure if I was company-ready enough to mentor but I asked my manager about it and he encouraged me to do it. The people to be mentored are in a special program that lets people right out of college rotate between three jobs in the company during their first two years of work. They get different job experiences, meet a lot of people and create big networks, and have a chance to figure out what they might like to do.

About six weeks ago I received an email saying that a new programmer had started that I could mentor and I would receive two twenty-page books explaining the mentoring program. After I lightly skimmed the material I set up a first meeting during his second week of work.

We've met three times now. I think our last meeting hit the right mix of suggestions from me about training and ways to find information with friendly talk about families and vacations. I also helped him find an expert on some software he had been told to research. The company doesn't demand too much of the mentors (meeting every two or three weeks) but I hope to be helpful.

BTW, the company is celebrating the mentoring program with a lunch next week. We get a ten dollar voucher at the cafeteria (way too much for lunch) and then meet in the special events room for discussion and prizes. I hope I don't wind up with another company lunch bag!

My Ex-Manager Quits

2006-08-23T22:44:00.000-05:00

I just can't wait for the official announcement. My former manager, the guy who asked me why I worked there in his bitter-sarcastic way, has put in his resignation. His job was essentially eliminated in the company's big reorganization and I doubt any executive positions were going to be offered to him. Or maybe any position at all.

I have a lot more I want to say but I think I'll wait for the complete story.

Still Alive

2006-08-19T23:53:00.000-05:00

Me and the blog are still alive.

Where have I been? It's been a very busy summer between graduations, moving people, major construction, minor construction, soccer and more. There's just no time for blogging in that mix. Thanks to the folks that have asked why I never completed my big sumup entry and created the new blog.

I'm going to stick with this blog theme for two reasons. One, as I approach ten months at my new job I'm probably going to start looking for my next job at my company. Changing Jobs Again will still be appropriate.

Second, I'm embracing change as the only constant in a workplace. I've really learned a lot in my new job and I continue to learn. There's no plateau to relax on, just a long uphill walk. Notice I said a walk, not an insane run.

I'd also like to invite the other Widgets expatriates to add their views on changing jobs from IB to somewhere else. I can paraphrase your stuff or give you rights to log in and blog under any name you choose.

So what's happened this summer?

-- My daughter was hired as a intern after I asked if she could shadow someone for a day. She learned a tremendous amount, got great job experience and a reference, and they paid her a decent wage.

-- I was assigned to my first high-profile project and things didn't go as expected. More on that later.

-- My first major project is closing in on it's release date but the testing will go to the very last minute. While that's scary (we could find something at the last minute that would mean fixes and delays), we did test the hell out of this software so I'm not too worried.

-- My group had a fun afternoon outing at Cedar Lake Farm. I mainly did horseshoes and some boat riding but the highlight of the day for everyone was the water ballon fights.

-- I did not have an exciting vacation at an exotic place. Just some local camping and a nice trip to Madtown. I will, however, easily burn all my vacation and personal holidays this year.

So you're caught up! I promise to keep on blogging. As always, please comment or email me your ideas and comments.

Some More Things

2006-06-17T00:03:00.000-05:00

I remembered some more things I wanted to mention about my job.

Problems One thing I noticed right away when I changed jobs is that at Laws R Us we never talk about "problems." We talk about risks (things that might happen that will slow down the project) or issues (things that are slowing down the project). The discussion is about how to avoid trouble or get things going again.

My experience is that talking about "problems" always lead to someone getting blamed. "It's ***'s fault! When you focus on problems you spend all your time discussing the negative side of what's happened and even the people that aren't blamed get demoralized. It's the difference between "Why is this software so slow?" and "How can we make this software faster?" There can be a surprisingly large difference between those two questions.

People do make mistakes. At Laws R Us when we talk about a person who is having trouble on a project, it's always in terms of what we can do to coach the person or in the worst case, whether they would be a better fit in anothe project. I've seen a lot of cases where people pitched in to help their coworker during a part of the project where they were struggling--helping them with their knowledge and experience and a bit of time (but not much since everyone is booked). I don't know of anyone moved off a project because of performance.

I also want to touch on how people work together at Laws R Us. It's a big place with lots of different organizations, different types of jobs with different kinds of skills, and lots of competing projects. There's bound to be politics and some friction but it's surprisingly minimal and hasn't gotten in the way of my projects. I've only run into one truly annoying person and I'm working around that. Otherwise people are very good at what they do and they all bring their ideas and questions to the meetings which is what makes the projects go better.

Meetings Setting up meetings is still the most annoying thing I do. I just set up a meeting that had to include twenty busy people plus some optionals. Getting a time that worked took me parts of three different days including emails to some of the people asking if they could shift their schedules. When I finally had a time that worked I coudn't get a room big enough for the group!! I now have a room that holds about 15 so I'll offer them my teleconference number if they don't want to squeeze. AHHHHH!

I'm pretty comfortable with running meetings now--I mean really running useful, substantive meetings where you get things done but humor and friendship are allowed and encouraged. I do agendas and contact people ahead of time to make sure they're prepared and I cancel the meeting if I don't think there's real business to do. I also do the meeting notes as soon as I can. That's a total turnaround since Widgets.

Top 100 I had my second thank you afternoon on the Terrace at work in recognition of something that I and hundreds of other people did (I'm not sure what we were recognizing). The CTO announced that we are in the 2006 ComputerWorld 100 Best Places to Work survey. I guess this is the sixth year we've made the list. No ice cream this time, just "energy drinks," cookies and candy bars.

My Job After Six Months

2006-06-14T21:41:00.000-05:00

Once you stop writing it's very hard to start again. That's my excuse for why these entries are taking so long.

Okay, I've been at my new job six months. How's it going?

My Work Yesterday I had to explain my job to some skeptical project managers. I laid the high points out for them in five minutes. They were excited! They saw I could really help them! My manager was there too and he thought it went very well.

So I know what I'm supposed to do! Yay! But how well do I do it?

This is relatively easy to answer since most of my work revolves around the production of a set of goal, planning and tracking documents. In general I produce them successfully using the guidelines I was given although my manager lets me improvise to handle differences. I think I add the most value, however, when I help people work through problems with the project or with other people on the project. My mid-year review still hasn't happened but my own evaluation of my work was "Meets Expectations" and I think my manager will agree.

Is this such a good job that I want to do it forever? It's a good job but at some point I will start looking around in the company at the dozens of opportunities in other areas.

My Company About once a month I learn about some new benefit or matching fund or go to a multicutural or theater performance at lunch time. I think it's a great place, full of opportunities and very good people. The company is centered on the customers first, then the employees.

Yes, it's a big company and there are the inevitable big company issues like many levels of management, tools and processes imposed from the top, etc. On the other hand, because it's a big company (that makes billions a year) there is also training, excellent equipment, support for personal development, a wonderful campus and a real quality ethic.

While there's no ideal workplace that I know of, Law R Us is a great place to work, probably the best place I've worked.

Coffee I'm known to some of the women at the Moose Coffee in my building as "Dry Jay"--their way to remember a dry skim cappucino and my name. I restrict myself to three of those a week unless I can get free ones from the contract program managers who get free Moose cards from their companies as perks. A while ago my manager remarked that my coworker was really busy but I was sitting around drinking coffee--it's become my identity to my coworkers.

Parking Every day I park in the third lot from the front door on it's closest edge to the door or else I forget where the car is. I wandered around a lot for five minutes one day when I parked somewhere in the middle. I haven't come in at 10 a.m. yet so I haven't experienced the dreaded overflow lot.

Campus Sure I get lost sometimes when I need to get to a room, office, or cube I've never been to. Everyone does since the numbering is different depending on the year the floor was remodeled and which side you're on. I actually think I know more about the main building than most people since I always used to roam around after lunch (no time anymore).

It's an interesting place. I like to walk through the basement to meetings on the other side of the building so I can see the media studio and the display of antique cameras. I like to go to "the other" cafeteria where the manufacturing people go so I can listen to the tables full of people conversing loudly in Spanish, Chinese, Hindi and possibly Hmong and Urdu. The walking paths are nice and full of people. The data center is astounding (to geeks).

My State of Mind I was a wreck when I left Widgets because working hard and getting things done was no guarantee that 1) anyone would appreciate what you did and 2) they wouldn't ask you to turn around and redo it for no good business reason. In that atmosphere I had to worry about every project, every rumor, and every scowl from my manager because I didn't know what was going to happen next.

Which brings me to the best thing about my job--when I think about my job I think about how well I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. Period. I usually feel pretty good about that but sometimes I get down on myself if I don't do something thoroughly enough and I fix it and I feel better. Sure there are problems with projects and between groups but they're not my problem. I walk out the door after eight hours and I'm done for the day and I rarely think about work again until the next morning. I take vacation whenever I want and don't check my emails until the night before I go back.

What else? I didn't take the time to review all the other things I've commented on in the past. If you want to hear about anything else, throw in a comment.

Time to Wind This One Up

2006-06-06T21:09:00.000-05:00

I haven't blogged in a while. (That must be some of the most common sentences in blogs.) We had a graduation, a vacation, some health issues, gardening, construction and now even more soccer so I've been busy with other things.

I just passed my six month anniversary at my new/current job. Six months! I think it's time to wind up Changing Jobs Again and do something different--maybe a different blog or some other exhibitionist activity. I'm going to wind this blog up with two or three entries. Something like 1) My job after six months, 2) Reconsidering the past, and 3) What's next?

I'll have Part 1 by Sunday, June 11.

Mid Year Review

2006-05-08T20:51:00.000-05:00

Amazingly I'm coming up on six months in my new job. Of course I'm still the new person and I'm constantly asking "dumb" questions that it seems like everyone knows the answer to. I'm comfortable wandering around the cruise ship headquarters now amongst thousands of people and a growing number of friends. I'm working harder than I have in years, prepping myself for my meetings and trying to actually understand things I would have glossed over in the past.

I happened to start at Laws R Us as my organization was finishing their yearly reviews (review periods are staggered across the company). A few weeks ago at my group's leadership meeting my manager said "Oh yeah, everybody has to do their mid-year review by the end of May." Everyone who had been there longer than me groaned and someone said (predictably) "Do we have to?" My manager just gave them "the stare" and together we devised a very minimal set of instructions to send out to everyone.

Reviews are based on how you reach your goals (e.g., did I produce a certain set of documents for each program) AND on the manner in which you reached your goals. Were you innovative? How well did you communicate? Did your work align with the company or the organization's goals? These quality of behavior measures are called Key Success Factors and I'm told a lot of companies use them in reviews.

So today I went into the not-very-good but internally created tool for recording goals and reviews and wrote some stuff. Talking to my peers I got the distinct impression that this mid-year thing was not a big deal and I should use it as practice for my end-of-year review which is a big deal and will affect my raise. (Imagine that Widgeteers, a review that affects your raise!)

I suppose my manager and I will talk through the four paragraphs during my next one-on-one. I predict he'll say it's fine and then we'll go off into some side discussion about glaciers or something unrelated. Things are going okay and I'm not sweating it this time.

Speaking of Widgets, congrats to my friends that got their ten year jacket! You deserve a lot more than a jacket for surviving there for that long. I heard the big Holiday party in May was quite the pep rally and included the members of the Board flown in to hear the rhapsodic praise of their wisdom in running the company. As a shareholder I object to spending money on those airfares. They should have flown the ten-year people to New York for the weekend!

Layoffs

2006-05-03T21:00:00.000-05:00

No, not at my job. The layoffs were at Not Big Blue, the slowly expiring mainframe company I worked at during the '90s. The director at my new job gave me the news since she worked there at the same time I did and keeps in touch with people back there. The company did their usual pattern of doing a voluntary layoff then doing the big bang layoff. People were dumped all across the facility and part-timers were forced to full time.

I watched the corporation shrink from 120,000 to 42,000 people during the nine years I was at Not Big Blue as a contractor (four years) and captive employee (five years). Most of that happened when I was a contractor. They always kept us contractors and dumped the captives by the dozen. Every month a new section of the large building would empty out as whole groups were disbanded. After a while it was kind of creepy to walk through the darkened areas to the cafeteria.

Later, when I was a captive at Not Big Blue, I was much more part of the general anxiety when layoff rumors started. That's funny isn't it---when I could lose my job with a day's notice I was relaxed. Contractors expect that, it comes with the job. When I was a captive waiting for the layoff announcement I joined the rumor circles that dotted the cubicle city and worried.

The anxiety is pervasive. People worry about losing their job AND they worry about keeping their job and having a ton of additional work dumped on them to cover for everyone that is laid off. Younger employees worry about not having enough experience to get another job and the high seniority (mostly middle managers) worry about ever getting another job. Managers worry about being demoted to workers or being given one of the "difficult" groups to manage.

I left Not Big Blue at the end of a period of relative stability. We had a new CEO who was one hell of a PR and finance guy. He had hyped the stock price from $6 to almost $50 a share, had increased our benefits, and was heavily promoting new products and a services organization. I left about the time it was revealed that creative bookkeeping was responsible for the wonderful quarterly reports and the stock price fell from 48 to 9 in two quarters.

I think it was the beginning of the company's latest skid. Big Blue had wonderful technology and "resilient" software but they got stuck in the 60's and 70's. (Is that punctuation correct, daughter?) They never got a foothold in the Unix world and completely ignored the Internet. A large installed base is out there but it's not enough to support a large company. I fear the future is all about anxiety and layoffs.

Reorganization

2006-05-01T20:48:00.000-05:00

In big companies there are a million reasons to reorganize. You reorganize if the CEO decides to change the mission of the company or a part of the company. You reorganize if you're not making enough money with the current org or if you're making a lot of money but you think you can make more. You reorg when you buy a company or product or you sell one. Etc., etc., etc.

Our reorg happened officially on Friday although I knew what was going to happen by mid-week. We reorged because my org hired another manager to handle the ever-increasing size of the department and it was a good time to rearrange everything since I think it had been a few years since the last reorg.

This reorg was done by moving around the various project areas and then moving the people that went with them---or something like that. My group wound up being pretty much dispersed except for the project managers like me. The idea is that we'll get more people in the group to staff our project areas as more people are hired.

We had our last group meeting today. People were not at all worried about the changes which was interesting. While all the managers in the group are very professional, there are definitely differences between them so some people are headed for a big cultural change.

At Not Big Blue I must have worked in three or four different organizational setups and survived numerous reorgs and a lot of layoffs (NOTE: Not Big Blue laid off people in my old area just last week--that's a topic for another day.) We always expected the worst from a reorg and often got it.

I care about reorgs because I do care who my manager is. I left Not Big Blue for Widgets to work for a tough, intelligent, brutally honest manager who created the perfect work environment for me. Then she left and I eventually wound up with...ugh,I don't want to think about it. I guess in the end it's like my current manager says, "You can't choose your manager."

2006-04-28T22:53:00.000-05:00

I have a bunch of things to write about so I'm going to compose a few things and spread them out over several entries. Today, it's about interviewing people for jobs in the department.

One day at the lead meeting my manager mentioned that another round of interviews was coming up and he'd need volunteers. Interviews at my workplace usually involve two interviews where a manager is paired with a department employee and a panel interview with one manager and three regular folks.

He looked at me when he said this which I took as a sign that I should volunteer. (Actually later he told me that he thought I was still pretty new to testing and he didn't think I would have to interview yet but if I wanted to...)

I did volunteer. Last week I was sent times for two one-hour interviews where I was paired with a manager that I really didn't know very well. I was also sent a sheet with ten qualities we should look for in the applicant and the weighting of each quality in the decision, a spreadsheet that would help me calculate a total, the job description, and some resumes. I've done a lot of interviewing over the years but I was interested in seeing if this seemingly organized process really was more helpful in hiring than good old intuition.

I did two interviews back-to-back. The first person didn't talk and the second one didn't stop talking. I won't go into the details, but they were very much like other interviews I've done except the manager and I did a good job of taking turns. I went back to my desk and asked a neighbor what I was supposed to do now. He told me I didn't have to fill out the spreadsheet or even have any special writeups, just gather my opinions for the sumup meeting.

Today we had the sumup meeting. Everyone shared their opinions of the candidates. The managers didn't talk, just listened to everyone's opinions and asked questions. Generally it was very positive but there were some "yellow flags" about some of the candidates and some interesting discussion. The most interesting part was when we talked about how some workplaces are so negative that people just bring attitude into the interview even though they know they shouldn't.

Yes, the managers will make the final decision but the process not only has an impact on who gets hired but it also helps everyone understand what qualities they should work on themselves.

They're hiring dozens of people now so I suppose I'll do some more interviewing. Besides it was fun and I'm doing my department duties and I feel like part of the group.

Busy? and Misc.

2006-04-17T19:41:00.000-05:00

How busy do you need to be to be happy? Not very busy, kind of busy, very busy, or crazy busy? (What are the other words for busy?)

Some people like to hang out all the time (and somehow manage to keep their jobs) and some people (but not many) like to be manic all the time. I definitely like to be busy.

But busy is only one aspect of activity. Another critical aspect is the quality of your activity. Do you spend hours doing something only to have to undo it or do you actually finish and get some satisfaction out of it. Are you actually using your mind and learning or are you doing the equivalent of pasting stamps on envelopes? Are you busy because you fear the consequences of not being active or do you like what you're doing?

I'm busy most days now. I picked up an active project and I think I might pick up another one since one of my active projects went on hold. I'm constantly figuring out how to do things that I haven't done yet that are part of my job or trying to puzzle out an architecture.

I know I'm at the right level of busyness because on an average day I'm mostly meeting with people or I'm listening to tunes and cranking out various documents. I know I'm not too busy because I don't stay late to finish things (okay I did that once) and I sign up for classes and seminars that squeeze my time but keep increasing my skills. Oh yeah, I do get to eat lunch and take walks outside too.

Misc.

I completed a survey the other day at work about the facility services and won a drawing for a $50 gift certificate--the kind you can use at a bunch of different stores and restaurants. Very sweet.

We're going to have a reorganization very soon--a relatively small one as these things go. As a veteran of numerous reorgs at Not Big Blue, I know that you just wait for it all to finish and then figure out how it affects you and if you need to do something other than just accept it (which is what you usually have to do). The initial reports are that I won't be affected too much.

We're using soccer players from my new workplace on my coed rec team. There's a guy and woman who are really good and fun to have on the team.

2006-04-11T20:24:00.000-05:00

I've been a very inconsistent blogger lately. Between soccer, working on an election campaign, spring drawing me outside, and time spent planning for a graduation, I've been slightly stretched lately. Not badly stretched, but enough that I haven't written even though I've had material.

What to do? I've decided to commit to blogging twice a week, probably on Mon/Tues and Fri/Sat. I like writing something other than my 9 to 5 content--meeting minutes, build/deployment descriptions, etc.--so I want to continue. Also, there are interesting things going on at my workplace and at my former workplace that I want to comment on. I'm going to take notes during the week and write off them when writing time comes.

Project Management Offices.

The answer to every workplace's problems is a PMO--well, maybe. The PMO is home to a group of project managers who attempt to document and manage whatever projects a company's management decides should be done. Document as in figure out and write down why the project is being done, what's required, who does what, and how it should work in the end. Manage as in trying to make what's documented real.

I'm not in a PMO. My company has several separate PMOs, and I work with project managers in one of them--a large group that handles migration projects. They handle the overall management of the project and I have the Quality piece which involves working with a subset of the project team. I'm close enough to the PMO that I know what goes on in the group and the politics. About a third of the project managers are highly paid contract project managers who are very knowledgeable and professional.

In fact there's a senior project manager job open in that group that my coworker thinks I should apply for. My spouse thinks she's trying to get rid of me but we actually get along very well. I don't have my PMI certification yet and I'm clueless on a lot of the advanced pmilingo so I don't think I'll try this time.

Widgets is developing a PMO. I wonder if anyone in management there is as supportive of a PMO as they say they are. Do they have the patience to explain why they want a project, explain EVERYTHING that's required, and then go through a CHANGE MANAGEMENT process when they change their mind later?

Yes, real project management should help any company do their projects faster, cheaper, and better. Coding off real requirements! Figuring out what might go wrong before it does! Planning with all the groups involved so nothing is missed! Actually leaving time for testing so the project meets quality standards that are specific and measurable!

There is some bad news about PMOs. Having a PMO doesn't mean that high level managers can't make bad decisions and then tell the PMO to "make it so." Sure the project managers will provide documentation that may lead to questions about how a commitment fits into the business plan, but project managers are implementers, not decision makers.

Still, having a PMO is going to help the people working on the projects a lot! Good night and good luck to PMOs everywhere.

2006-04-04T21:01:00.000-05:00

I got an email from Audible about a new book--Working With You Is Killing Me: Freeing Yourself from Emotional Traps at Work by Katherine Crowley and Kathi Elster. The blurb says, among other things,

"If you find yourself getting fed up and frustrated with a colleague whose incompetence is driving you crazy, a boss who gets angry when you're not a mind reader....chances are you're caught in an emotional trap in the workplace. Quit complaining and do something! Freeing yourself is easier than you think, and you don't have to quit or fire anyone to do it. The solution is simple: Take control of your own response."

While I haven't listened to this book and probably won't, I already have a response: If your manager is driving you crazy, just quit! Tempering your reactions means 1) you're supposed to say it's no one's fault if work is hell (wrong) and 2) you wind up spending a massive amount of energy controlling your responses (which may be justified) instead of doing anything constructive.

At my current job I spend energy on prepping for meetings, preparing planning and tracking documents, running meetings, etc. I don't have to spend any time figuring out how not to react badly to bitter, sarcastic managers. Life is good.

All Hands

2006-04-03T19:55:00.000-05:00

On Friday I went to my first "All Hands Meeting" at work. (That's large company talk for a meeting of a large organization where everyone is invited/required to come.)

There must be about two hundred people in my organization so we were in the auditorium in one of the other buildings. I knew a lot of the technical groups were in my organization but I was surprised to see the Project Management Office people there too. Everyone was relaxed and talkative.

This was the yearly meeting about goals. My company's philosophy is that everyone in the company should know what the company's goals are and everyone's personal goals should connect with the larger goals. It took me about four months to get my head around this but now I understand how it's done.

The first step every year is having a meeting where the higher-ups present their goals, which are, of course, in line with the top goals of the company. At the All Hands meeting the Senior Vice President/CTO of our company (which is a big chunk of the larger corporation) told us about last years accomplishments and this year's goals. He's pretty entertaining and, like everyone here, is very open about the good and bad things that go on at the company. He gave direct answers to blunt questions, some of which were a bit surprising (or at least different than "common knowledge.")

Then the organization director did his thing, then the directors from the next level down. They all talked about whether we made last year's goals and then showed their organization's goals--my organization's goals.

The funny thing is that my manager required all of us to finish our personal goals by the end of last month since it seemed like this All Hands meeting was never going to happen. My goals are, in fact, the same as my peer's goals which she used last year.

There were some criticisms of the meeting from the people in my small group. The goal about staff development was too vague for everyone, there were a bunch of slides that you couldn't read and we didn't have handouts, and, worst of all, we ran out of time before they announced the winners of the peer awards so they didn't announce them and just sent an email later.

Oh well, for an All Hands meeting it wasn't tooo bad. Next year, they probably won't make those mistakes again. If I'm there, I'll let you know.

Mentors

2006-03-30T20:03:00.000-06:00

I was talking with someone the other day about having and getting mentors. I think mentors are crucial in any job or workplace.

Dictionary.com defines mentor as "a wise and trusted guide and advisor." I define a mentor as someone who will share their knowledge and experience with you and help you figure out what's important and what you just have to let go. I suppose a friend could be a mentor but you really need someone who will be blunt and honest even if that might hurt your feelings. Mentors need to tell you the truth.

My new workplace (I'll be new there for a couple of years) has a formal mentoring program that includes group, email and face-to-face mentoring. Unfortunately for me, it's closed to employees at my job level this year because they enrolled a bunch of people at my level last year.

So I have to find a mentor the good old fashioned way--watch for someone who knows what they're talking about and has the time and inclination to sit down with me when I need it and just talk things over.

At Not Big Blue I eventually discovered a great mentor. He was an expert at handling the incompetent middle managers so he could get things done. I would storm into his office, mad as hell about something the management was doing and he would chuckle, hear me out (so I calmed down), and help me analyze the situation and devise a counter strategy. He helped me figure out how to sway my organization's managers into establishing a relationship with the U which cost the company thousands of dollars but was great for our group and the U students.

My first manager at Widgets was the closest thing I had to a mentor there. I think she became more of a mentor after she left when I would email complaints and she would tell me to cut out the whining and get moving. She was always telling me to get certified as a project manager and I thought it was weird--big mistake since she would have helped me when she was my manager. When I decided to leave Widgets I emailed her my resume and she replied with something like "NO. Here's some examples of what you should say and here's a job description with the terms you need to use..." It helped me quite a bit.

I have a couple of people that may work as mentors for me now. One is young but with a lot of company experience and the ability to explain anything and to help me form plans to deal with "situations." The other is a senior project manager who has already given me some stern direction to get more aggressive about my role-I'm working on it.

My manager also mentors me. Our weekly one-on-one meeting usually involves me asking questions about some company group/practice I really don't understand, or, like today, asking advice about what to do in a specific situation. He's always helpful and practical. I feel like I can take any problem to him but when you talk to your manager there's always that worry that you'll ask a question that'll make your manager say "You did WHAT?"

So, I'll keep looking for help, advice and guidance from wherever I can get it.

Me Bitter?

2006-03-28T18:37:00.000-06:00

This comment was posted at the end of my Olympics Part III entry.

"Bitterness can be exhausting." This was in reference to me saying I was exhausted by the time I wrote and edited that long entry.

Interesting. Rereading the entry I don't see any bitterness. In fact I really don't ever feel bitter about anything. Angry, definitely, and I've blogged about that. At this point I have only good feelings toward the company (I'm a shareholder after all) and almost everyone that works there.

Yeah, I'm still angry at that bitter, sarcastic guy that forced me out of the company but I try to think of him as little as possible even though I know he thinks about me all the time--why else would he read my blog everyday?

I think what I wrote in the Olympics entries is as accurate as any journalistic report would be since I don't believe in "objective journalism." I'd love to hear your responses. (Bitter, sarcastic comments aren't welcome.)

2006-03-20T18:53:00.000-06:00

I've been slowly but surely going through an online project management training class. There are ten modules, each about some aspect of the pm process. Each module is broken down into two or three dozen two-minute content points that each contain a few screens of lists or important points.

There's a picture on each screen--pictures of people (models) that look really busy and happy. Sometimes they are in a group looking at a computer monitor or taking seriously but most of the time it's one person acting like they are doing something. Really, what can you show people doing that goes with project management? I've read hundreds of these screens by now and the pictures repeat over and over. I might start tallying them to see if the picture of the woman holding a Blackberry-like thing is used more than the picture of the happy meeting of young men and women of various nationalities.

There is a narrator who happily explains everything. "Scope management" he cheerfully tells me "is the sum of the products, services, and results to be provided as a project." I can just see this guy finishing up the hours and hours of taping this course and either bursting into tears or heading to the bar to try to forget what he does for a living. Maybe he was sedated the whole time.

(Once, when I lived in a foreign country for a time, I did English language-learning tapes as part of my job. It sounds like that would be interesting but it was so incredibly boring to read these really simple phrases into the boombox (third-world country). The funniest part was when my hosts corrected my English--I would just roll my eyes and read it the way they wanted. The sessions could take hours.)

Is my online class interesting? Welllll, I am learning stuff. I've come across business terms I've heard before but didn't understand and I'm learning about things like estimating methods that are relatively interesting. But it's all just a step on the way to getting my certification.

The real downside is that my method of typing notes fast while I listen to the happy narrator has inflamed my usually dormant carpal tunnel syndrome. That damn repetitive-motion assembly line job from decades ago can still come back to haunt me.

**Geek alert**Today, I finished my training sessions for the new XML-based content system. It's not a content management system, it's a repository that huge amounts of data can be loaded into and searched very efficiently. They also have an interesting way of externalizing relationships. It all sounds relatively simple but the problem seems to be reconciling the features of all the applications that want to display and search the data with the data repository services. I think the developers in the audience signed up for the hands-on class but all of us are going to get read-only access to the data GUI where you can see what they were talking about in the class.

2006-03-19T16:12:00.000-06:00

I've always claimed (to myself and others) that one of my greatest skills was the ability to pull the important information about a project --the information I needed to figure out what to do next--out of a conversation or meeting. I did that partly by observing what other people thought was important and partly based on whatever experience I had on the topic. While taking the next step I would often find an issue that I missed but I would cover that through more conversations or meetings.

I think that strategy can be effective in companies like Widgets where there were some superior people in the meetings and my projects were basically repetitive, but it's not really a reliable, repeatable method.

Using what I've learned in my classes at Lawyer's R Us and because of the requirements of a particularly insistent senior project manager, I'm learning to be more active in the project process. For example, I'm working on
- creating goals for meetings,
- anticipating what issues might come up in meetings and which can/should be deferred,
- paying VERY close attention to what's going so I can steer the discussion toward the meeting goals or sum up why we can't reach those goals.

Because I'm dealing with all new people and products, I can't rely on my old method. It's hard to change because I'm not a very methodical, detail-oriented person and on the Myer's Briggs scale, I'm barely an extravert.

On the positive side, I have a supportive manager, friendly and very capable co-workers who want my leadership, and a long enough time frame to do the work I need to do. I've been given every chance to succeed so it's entirely up to me to just do it.

Learning and changing. We never stop doing it.

Olympics Part Three

2006-03-14T19:16:00.000-06:00

First, I was kidding about going back to Widgets. I just wanted to see who was reading this. Thanks for your emails!

Second, I'm under a lot of pressure to post part three of the Olympics saga/tragedy/epic. Okay, a few people keep asking when I'm going to do it. The more I thought about it, the more I felt like I didn't know enough to comment since I was long gone from the place and only followed the action through the opinions of a couple dozen people. But hey, this is the blogosphere and anyone with a keyboard can say whatever they want, so here goes....

I left off with this statement.

"Unfortunately, at this point The Network Who Shall Not Be Named (NWSNBN) obviously decided that it might be fun to make a little company in Minnesota squirm or maybe writhe would be a better word. Okay, it probably wasn't a malicious conspiracy by The Network, but it was a perfect storm of several new half-thought-out projects. The Network said all these projects must launch in December--the same time as the Olympics site!"

Widgets and maybe the people at the NWSNBN were in a tight spot. Widgets was in the middle of a major debt restructuring and it wasn't a good time to annoy a very big (and potentially even bigger) service customer. The NWSNBN had it's own internal politics (or so the rumors said) that were driving their people to drive Widgets people into the ground. Everyone was, perhaps a bit desperate.

So, it's fall 2005. The web site for the Five Ring Circus is barely started, major undefined projects with short timelines are committed to, and it was hard to hire people who could come in and help in the short time frames since there is so much proprietary software to learn about before you can code anything. The company correctly began to give raises to some (but not all) of the vastly underpaid people. Bonus money was promised if "everything goes okay." I heard that management people even wandered around saying nice things.

In other words, whoever was in the building had to do all the work and quickly. If we had made a plan in 2004 when we finished the last Five Ring Circus, we would have started hiring much earlier and we would have had documentation of how far behind we were.

The constant at Widgets is the willingness of the majority of workers to do whatever has to be done, whether it is the launch of a website, incorporating a new technology, or just slogging out a massive amount of sales work. We got the work done even when there wasn't enough time or people or we were told to do something and then, halfway through, were told to stop and do it a different way. I think I've mentioned that there was little or no recognition or reward for this incredible work ethic.

The new projects for the NWSNBN turned out to be worse than anyone expected. The site concerning weather was poorly conceived and designed and another vendor on the project just plain failed to do what they promised. The new design for other sites was...poorly conceived and designed and the people in the basement had a big mess dumped on them and were told to get it done fast. Widgets people worked very hard to try to cover for the failures of others, but the results suffered from the fact that all the web knowledge of the Widgets basement types was ignored because the customer is always mostly right.

The Five Ring Circus site moved ahead slowly, a massive, intricately designed package of rotating and updating information that needed dozens of tricky methods written to make it work. That the project moved at all was due to an incredible number of hours of work being put in by the programmers and tech staff and people doing sales. I think some people worked every day for weeks and a lot of those days were ten to twelve hours long. Project management to try to track the thousands of pieces of work was only added near the end.

Did the Five Ring Circus site launch on time? Did the results display on the page within seconds of each athlete finishing? Did the sales placements satisfy the customers?

Yes, of course. Sure there are small problems and some of the requested googaws weren't exactly finished but overall the site was a huge success with impressive page views since it was actually advertised this time. Bonuses were apparently paid out and there is going to be an event in another month to thank everyone. (Hmmm, why not do a small event immediately after and then...no, never mind.)

During the Olympics, did I wish I was sliding in there every morning at 6 to eat Egg Bake and then put in my twelve hour day? I did miss watching the cable broadcasts of the live sports (I don't have cable at home) but I really only wanted to watch Curling anyway. Otherwise I was happy to not be there.

I salute the Widgets workers for their Five Ring Circus success! You should be proud of your accomplishments. You deserve better - go find a job at a company that is organized, consistently appreciative, and that will train you for your next job.

I have to stop now, I'm exhausted.

2006-03-12T17:18:00.000-06:00

Wow! I hear my old job at Widgets will shortly be available. I'm going to call some HR and management people on Monday to see how the job is going to be posted. It's worth some phone calls. I know I quit but I've learned a lot since October and I feel like I could really come into that challenge with a new attitude. Really interesting.

I got that intel from a Widgeteer that came to the cruise ship (that person compared it to a mall) for lunch on Friday. It's so nice to see my Widget friends!

More Training

2006-03-09T21:16:00.000-06:00

I went to a brown bag session today about CMMI. For those of you that aren't development geeks, it's the organizational maturity model that Carnegie Mellon University developed. The presenter was a director of the tech organization that is trying to move his organization to the second level, still immature but showing definite signs of progress. He was interesting and funny.

The maturity levels relate to how organizations use projects to organize their work and how they standardize those projects. The interesting thing about CMMI is that it doesn't tell an organization what to do, just helps them understand what they're doing and what they could start doing that would help save time and money and increase quality.

After it ended I walked up and told him I worked on ISO 9001 at Not Big Blue and wondered how it related to CMMI. He looked at me and said "Are you looking for a job?" I had no idea what to say in response. "Uh, no....not right now." Then he turned to talk to the organizer of the event. I still don't know if he was serious.

In the next two weeks I have four half days of training about the XML repository that is the basis of the company's future infrastructure. The training is in the small auditorium because there's so much demand so it won't be personal but there are good training materials.

I've managed to get through one module on my online project management course. I should be able to do at least one more tomorrow, maybe two.

I also have a half-day class coming up--intermediate Lawyers.com. I'm thinking about signing up for a class on negotiation for the next time it comes around.

2006-03-08T21:22:00.000-06:00

I had soccer tonight and I'm tired so I'm going to keep this short. (We got hammered although I thought we played okay.)

First, I want to say that I'm ready to finish my Olympic trilogy but it'll take a while to write it. I'm getting the final results of the experience from various people now.

I've been using some of my vacation time, visiting Chicago. That was so nice after losing a big chunk of my vacation every year at Widgets because I was stupid enough to be conscientious and not use it and the company was.....well, they took everything over forty hours away even if they asked me to keep working to finish a project.

Speaking of that, my projects are maybe going to change. More on that tomorrow.

2006-03-02T21:11:00.000-06:00

I spent most of the night volunteering for a candidate for Governor. You know, those calls you get at dinner time when someone reads a script to you and even if you're sympathetic you want to hang up? That's what I was doing. People were, in fact, almost all very friendly and I had several nice conversations. In fact I talked to almost twenty people in eighty calls which is a pretty good success rate.

I said I would help the campaign with "internet stuff" too. I did the web stuff for a valiant but unsuccessful campaign five years ago and learned a lot.

I started my online course on project management. I quickly found myself spacing out so I decided to take notes as I went along, especially since I think I have to pass the test to pass the course. Taking notes makes it go slower but maybe I'll learn something.

I also was part of a one hour training on one of the core systems that our primary product uses. People in my group have been very successful lately in convincing members of other groups to do sessions explaining various important products.

My projects are sloooowing down. I've cancelled my quality meetings this week for all except one of them because we had no release dates and no clear direction. The project that's rushing ahead toward release has to have all new dates calculated and we can't do any test planning until then.

When it's slow I set up one-on-one and small group meetings where I can talk to different people on the project about what they're doing so I can understand things better. I did one meeting today and learned quite a bit about the plans of the principal development group.

2006-03-01T20:10:00.000-06:00

At lunchtime I went to the monthy Project Manager's Forum. The first one I went to was intimidating and boring but they've changed the format to be much friendlier and actually useful

The session was about project startup. We did introductions, one of the session leaders presented some sample topics for a startup meeting, then we broke up into small groups to talk about what we think a startup meeting is and what you should do in one.

It was a good discussion. We shared stories of misunderstanding, lack of information, and group politics and talked about what we would LIKE to happen when you start a project, knowing it might never happen. We talked about what "startup meeting" actually means--the startup meeting when you only know generally what has to be done but not much more or the startup meeting when all the right people come and talk in detail about what they're going to do. The group got back together after twenty minutes and shared our small group discussions. The organizers will write up the discussions and send them out to everyone. The session was short enough that I had time to eat lunch before my next meeting!

I also got the go ahead to sign up for the PMI project management class that I need for certification. I had to fill out a training request form with a rationale (that I carefully worded) for the "external" training. I asked my manager if the rationale was okay and he said "Oh, that's just a formality. It'll be approved. Just sign up." I signed up online at the end of the day but I haven't gotten the signon information yet and it's been hours!

2006-02-28T20:05:00.000-06:00

Last Friday I took a class titled "Getting Work Done Without Authority." The class taught us how to use different methods to reach our goals depending on who we're working with. (In fact the instructor said it applied to ex-spouses and children too.)

We were taught about the trademarked "Influence Edge" system which breaks "influence" methods into three groups - Push methods (e.g., making suggestions), Pull methods (e.g., asking open ended questions), and Push/Pull methods (e.g., offering incentives). We identified which methods each one of us use and practiced the methods that we don't like to use.

The process to reach your goal is to 1) you figure out your goal and who needs to help you reach it, 2) figure out how you think about it, 3) figure out how the person(s) and organization think about it, and 4) figure out the right method to use. Then you have your meeting, apply the method and ta dah--it's done!

I know it sounds hokey but right now I'm trying to rationalize how I work with others so it was useful. I particularly liked the prework which consisted of me sending surveys to coworkers asking them about how I used push, pull, and push/pull methods and if they wanted me to use each method more or less. The results were generally okay but they did want to use more of the methods I don't like to use (e.g., summarizing).

The instructor was great. When she heard I had to miss the last 90 minutes of the class she called a break and talked to me for tweny minutes about the last part of the class and about what I'd learned.

I have to work harder at having and communicating clear goals for my meetings and do better at listening (understanding), summarizing, and asserting what has to be done. My past practice is sloppy and works out if everything falls into place but I deal with a lot of people on all sorts of projects and I can't just expect things to work.

I've also requested an online PMI class that should get me ready for the test prep class for certification. I hope that gets approved soon.

2006-02-23T20:43:00.000-06:00

Over the last five years I've written some screenplays for short films. My film partner, Kubrick Jr., and I made two short films and we are talking about (but not yet doing) another one about insomnia. I think it's great but I wrote it.

What I've been thinking about lately is a longer screenplay I wrote. The film is about one day at a tech company--the day a bunch of people are laid off. I really like it--it's a funny tech comedy (except for the layoff part) with a lot of shots at tech management, HR, outsourcing, FPS games, and more. I wrote it a few years ago and put all my tech experience into it. I think it's good but it's too short and lacks drama.

Now I know what to do with it! I'll just set the film on the day after the tech company finishes working on the Olympics. Everyone has been stretched to their physical and mental limits after three weeks of odd shifts, long hours, and catering to the erractic demands of a national TV network whose programming isn't being watched. Instead of grateful exhaustion that it's over, everyone is worried about the next batch of poorly thought out projects that are hanging over their heads, as well as the last batch of problem projects that were never finished.

The film is about the tech people who work in the basement of a typical, suburban office park, nondescript building. It tells the story through the experiences of a young, guy programmer (a probationary hire) and a lower-middle manager. The programmer has tried to help out during the long crunch by doing things beyond his knowledge and experience. Unfortunately there were no requirements/rules/written descriptions for his projects and there was no one assigned to help manage the ambiguity, so he wound up doing and redoing the projects until his life was a blur of red eyes and Red Bull. The lower-middle manager has spent weeks scrambling to cover piles of tasks while being glared at by his manager. He is worried by the addled certainty of the company's decision makers but can do nothing to affect what they do, only be increasingly frustrated when he's told to somehow make everything happen.

In the new story management is making appreciative noises (because HR tells them they have to) and they are paying some bonuses out of the large pile of cash (large for the tech company anyway) that the network promised them. BUT in their hearts the top management is considering delivering more value to the shareholders (themselves mainly). They think "If we could do ALL of these projects AND the Olympics, we could get along with less "resources" after the Olympics and create some more value for the shareholders." That gets me to my original screenplay about the layoff.

This is, of course, not intended to describe past, present, or future events at any company, real or previously described in fiction. The layoff plot reflects pieces of my experiences at Not Big Blue and at some factory jobs.

I like it. I'm going to start revising the old screenplay tonight!

Olympics Yet?....Not Yet

2006-02-20T20:11:00.000-06:00

Today we had a "cultural presentation" at our group meeting. A guy from the Indian outsourcing company came to give us his perspective on Indian culture that would make it easier to work with his people.

Unfortunately, it was a Powerpoint presentation and there was no food, so he had two strikes against him. He also told us it wouldn't be a very worthwhile presentation if we didn't ask questions, but when people asked questions he was very curt. Strange.

Anyway, it had some interesting moments. First, he said to get to India, imagine getting on I-90, driving 8,500 east and arriving in New Delhi. Next he briefly explained the many differences in culture across India, touching on architecture and language.

At that point he talked about the educational system. Someone asked how much education costs, especially college. He replied that there were 40 rupee to a dollar and so it was cheaper there (Huh?). I asked what languages are used in education since there are eighteen official languages. He said you could learn in Hindi or English in primary school but after that it's strictly Engish.

Then he told us that the time difference between here and his home city was 11 and one-half hours. "Why is there a half-hour in there?" people asked. He mumbled something about longitude then said "It's so we don't have the same time as the Pakistanis." I guess it was a joke but I don't think the Pakistani guy in our group thought it was funny.

Then came the stereotypes section. Americans are like this, Indians are like that. The biggest thing we are supposed to watch for are Indian people on-site who smile and agree with everything we say--he said they just agree even if they think we're totally wrong. No wonder I thought I was brilliant whenever I talked to the Indians doing QA work.

My favorite point in this section was about the use of the word small. He said if an Indian tester says there is a small problem, something is seriously wrong. Likewise, if an Indian tester says he/she has a small suggestion, it means they have a major solution to all the problems. I have to remember that one.

The presentation wasn't gripping and some of the group were nodding off all through it. I thought it was worthwhile but it would have been even better with some Palek Paneer or an ice-cold Taj Mahal. If I head down to I-90 and start driving now, I'll make it back with the refreshments in time for next year's cultural presentation. Here I go!

A Small Town

2006-02-15T17:20:00.000-06:00

(The Olympics final entry is still in development. My thoughts are still with those people working around the clock to keep that going.)

I just wanted to talk a little about how working in a complex with over five thousand other people is like being in a small town. How you ask?

-- We sit in neighborhoods. For example, I sit in the Tech Services neighborhood. I know where the necessities (printers, supply cabinets, break areas, restrooms) are and I know where to find the people I talk to most and where the meeting rooms are located. I also know that if I go to a different neighborhood I'm going to have to wander a bit to find someone, kind of like driving down a street looking at house numbers until you see the right one.

-- There are all kinds of people in the town. I haven't tested this yet but I think if you walk into a crowd downtown they would look just like the crowd I walk into if I stray into the cafeteria at noon. People are of every type. Dress ranges from the techie jeans look to three piece suits on the corporate types (but there aren't many of them). People range from extraverts in the business side to mild-mannered law librarians. If you wander into the manufacturing area it's real blue collar work and a union crowd.

-- You get to know a few people well, be friendly with a lot of people, and be strangers with most. Some people feel uncomfortable if they don't know everyone (or something about everyone) but I'm content to have a variety of relationships and also to be able to just walk around anonimously.

-- Of course there's culture. I saw a violin quartet from the Saint Paul Chamber Orchesta last month and on Friday I missed (because of my new employee orientation) a performance by the Mixed Blood Theater of their Jackie Robinson play.

I can't remember much more about small towns so I'll stop here.

Olympics Postponed

2006-02-13T21:08:00.000-06:00

I'm going to finish the Olympics series tomorrow night. I hope that doesn't inconvenience the guy who asked me why I worked at Widgets. That person is my most loyal reader and likes to ask everyone if they've read my blog. Thanks for spreading the word! I would like to talk instead about my orientation day last Friday.

Imagine my surprise when a few weeks ago I got an email invitation to a Technical Organization new employee orientation. Hey, I've been there for months! Apparently, they haven't had one in a while so this was a catch up session.

The session lasted all day and included snacks, lunch, and some swag. We heard presentations from not one but two Chief Technical Officers, had a question and answer session with some long-timers in important positions, had the head of employee engagement encourage and challenge us and then finished with a presentation by the head of global projects. Amazingly the presentations were all interesting and all the speakers answered any question that was thrown at them.

I thought the most important point they made was that my organization is the technical center of a larger corporation. The research and development for the corporation is being done in my building and the rest of the company is adopting the new technologies. They really stressed the opportunities to move into new areas as they open up, both here and around the world.

People at my company are always forthcoming with information. I asked a question at the panel session about the potential use of Akamai at my company. The head of procurement gave a detailed answer with all the pros and cons of the situation, probably more than I really wanted to know. At Widgets keeping secrets was the main communication method--wait, that doesn't make sense!

The executives also used their presentations to challenge people to make the most of the opportunities at the company and find jobs that we really like and that make coming to work fun and challenging.

I got one of those insulated lunch boxes for asking a question at the global business presentation. I wanted to know if we were moving into the China market and got a maybe. There are a number of people in my building in the global projects group that are working weird shifts so they can manage projects with team members on three different continents.

I also had a small world moment. At a receiving line at lunch I came face to face with a familiar looking guy. He looked at me and said "You're from Not Big Blue, aren't you? I was in the Blah Blah Blah group." Sure enough, he was a lead technical guy at the time and is now a vice president at Lawyers R Us.

That was a nice day. I do appreciate the company's desire to show how committed they are to making everyone successful and their patience with new people. One of the VPs ate lunch at my table and talked about how hard it is to learn all the acronyms and groups and said we should speak up, ask questions, and take the time to learn all we need to know.

Take my time? I can handle that.

Olympics Part Deux

2006-02-09T19:23:00.000-06:00

Last entry, I stopped at the point when we finished the Athens Olympics with a wonderful technical performance on the web site. Sales were very good for the first try at a global event site but page views weren't since no one thought about marketing the site. No one upstairs said thank you to the basement dwellers like me and I was depressed for several weeks because even though the hours were ridiculous during the Olympics, there was a real adrenaline rush to keeping that site working round the clock. I was also depressed that I had gained four pounds eating large portions of Egg Bake every morning at 6 a.m.

The Torino (Turin) Olympics were only eighteen months away when we finished Athens. A well managed company with good planning and staffing policies would have created a calendar for those eighteen months with milestones for beginning work, hiring people, etc. A company with a sense of organization would have made sure that everything that was done during the games was carefully documented so it all could be easily repeated.

Nah. We launched into some other projects that absolutely had to be done that very minute and forgot about the Olympics for a while. I'm sure no one could name one of those projects now. We would pull it out, we were pros now!

The results coding did start well ahead of Torino because the company supplying us data said that's when they were going to start. We took a trip to FL (very nice but short), set up a good process for working together, and started. The results work went well through the winter and spring.

But what about everything else. Well six or seven months were spent on design, a lot of it on creating lots of little widgets that rotated, changed content, and did other coool stuff. We went to meetings about the site all that winter and said "we'd love to start coding that stuff but we have to relaunch the Kane network first...don't worry, we'll be starting Olympics soon." Ha ha.

Six months later we were still launching the Kane network--we had done nothing on the Torino site because "key resources" had to make tricky changes to the Kane sites that we were told to do by people upstairs who "changed their mind" or "just didn't think things through" the first time. Before we knew it, it was Fall, we were still relaunching the Kane network and the OLY site was not started yet. Uh oh.

At this point I was asked "Why do you work here?" by my you-know-who and I knew I had to leave, not because I was scared of the work ahead, but because the stress and paranoia of working with that management team was making me ill. The situation was tough but I thought the team would pull it out with the help of the excellent people on the Tech side that had pulled it out last time.

Unfortunately, at this point The Network Who Shall Not Be Named obviously decided that it might be fun to make a little company in Minnesota squirm or maybe writhe would be a better word. Okay, it probably wasn't a malicious conspiracy by The Network, but it was a perfect storm of several new half-thought-out projects. The Network said all these projects must launch in December--the same time as the Olympics site!

This is where it gets really bad. Next part tomorrow.

The Olympics Again....oh the horror (Part 1)

2006-02-07T19:54:00.000-06:00

You'd think it would be really exciting to work on the official Olympic web site for the Network Who Shall Not Be Named (henceforth called The Network). You would learn so much about the sports and about reporting on a global event. Your company and The Network would make you feel like you're a part of one of the most important events on earth. When the web site performed almost flawlessly your company would generously reward your work and The Network would gratefully flood your workplace with swag. And if you did the web site again it would be easy because everyone would know how hard it is and staff accordingly and you'd have all that documentation of how to set things up, etc.

NOTE: Widget employees that are sensitive to criticism of their company should stop reading NOW!

I'm a survivor of doing an Olympic web site for The Network and I'm watching, even as I write, my former coworkers struggle through the games that begin next week. Part 1 is about the last Olympics.

The first time it was a challenge that we proudly took on. Working with The Network is a bit like hacking your way through a jungle (take a step, get stopped, whack your way through, take a step, etc.) so setting up the hardware and software side of the site was difficult. On my side we were doing things with XML and XSLT that no one had done before.

That was cool, trying to do something really hard. Unfortunately, the company didn't want to invest much money. Oh, they hired some very high priced consultants to tell us what to do. They also fought paying on-call pay for people that were going to be....on call...for seventeen days and complained about bringing in food for people that weren't allowed to leave the building. There was no encouragement, no swag, and only threats from management and The Network.

For the eighteen days of the Olympics I worked twelve hour days (6 a.m. to 6 p.m.) five days a week, less time on the weekends, and took phone calls at night. I worked for 24 hours the first day when we anxiously watched to see if our system would actually work. I worked because I felt responsible. When I wasn't mad about the way we were being threatened instead of enouraged, I was excited.

It worked. We delivered. The site stayed up, features worked correctly, sales were correct, and results hit the web site within seconds of the event ending on live TV broadcasts. Yes, there were things that weren't perfect and we fixed them as fast as we could because we knew it was important, not because someone in Greece was yelling over the telephone. Sure the page views weren't that great but they didn't market it. As far as I was concered it was a tremendous success.

When it was all over we got....nothing. Well, we did get the hundred dollars of on call pay and the food. Yay. What about the celebration that our grateful management put on? Nope. I had to ask an executive to come and tell my group that they did a good job. The Network said...I really don't know what they said.

I left Widgets months ahead of the Olympics web site launching when we were already falling behind on our build schedule but I'm painfully aware of what's gone on. That's for the next entry a few days from now.

Outsource, Insource, ....Othersource?

2006-02-01T21:03:00.000-06:00

I've done a lot of talking and thinking in the past few months about the things companies do to cut their expenses. First, a relative by marriage is now selling outsourcing to banks and sent me interesting article about how to successfully outsource. Second, I work at a company, in fact in a group, that does a lot of outsourcing and follows the developing trends in other-sourcing. Three, I've talked to people at Widgets quite a bit about their new outsourcing scheme.

I've actually been involved with outsourcing for years. At Widgets I regularly sent web site testing work to a very nice bunch of Ukrainians (Hi Yuri!). There wasn't much method to my outsourcing, just minimal test plans that they somehow interpreted. They did a good enough job and they were cheap. We were lucky.

But there is a method to other-sourcing or at least a company needs to use a method to make success more likely. The work needs to precisely defined and surrounding standards need to defined and explained so they’re really understood. All necessary information needs to immediately accessible to the...uh, other-sourcees and any decisions they need to make should be of a yes/no nature. If there's any ambiguity, they are either going to stop work or give you something that’s probably not what you want.

There are new trends in outsourcing. You don't have to go to India to save money, just find a company in rural America or, in some cases, a blighted American city. You can also have onsite people from an other-sourcing company who help with coordination but can also get you 24 hour coverage.

Will outsourcing make Americans poorer by stealing our jobs? Probably, but there's no way to stop it from happening in this business culture where a bad quarterly profit can tank a company. I do think there are more or less ethical ways to handle it, however. If a company lays off people and replaces them with outsourced resources, they suck and will probably suffer in the end if that other-sourcing doesn’t completely live up to expectations. If a company tries to replace growth with other-sourcing, it's still stifling hiring and career development of American workers but at least no one is losing their jobs. The least harmful way seems to be other-sourcing as a way to handle periods of peak demand and to provide around the clock work for short fuse projects or major projects with minor budgets and short time line.

What do you think?

Meetings Today

2006-01-31T17:08:00.000-06:00

I’m writing this at work since I’m going right from here to do phone calling for the most liberal candidate for governor. It’s frightening to think of several hours on the phone but I’ll survive.

Over lunch time I had an hour-long meeting to discuss the job responsibilities of the project managers in my group that do different stuff than I do. We’re all PMs though, so all of us had to be in the discussion which was slow and painful. We had to translate each activity that a PM might do into separate Planning, Execution and Communication goals. OMG it was painful and we barely got started, so now we’re going to meet every Tuesday at lunch time until we’re done.

While it’s annoying to write those responsibilities, that document will form the basis for the PM’s reviews so they are being given the opportunity to create goals that really match their work. My job document was written before I got there.

The second thing that happened was straight two hours of meetings on my newest project. First there was a “core” meeting with more than a dozen people, then I ran a Quality meeting. By the time the group got to my meeting, they’re all burnt out (most also had lunchtime meetings) and antsy. This is the late stages of the project with major milestones coming in February and everyone has lots to do. Unfortunately no one paid any attention to testing earlier in the project so I’m backtracking a little and trying to get things organized which seems like a waste of time to a few people in the group. AHHHHHHHHHH. They’re testing like crazy but they don’t even know if they’re testing all the requirements.

Today, I figured I would try to be more visual in my approach to my meeting so I created a calendar with some key dates and we filled in the rest of the dates. About three quarters of the way I had to start doing a lot of “hey, let’s talk about that next week, but right now could we just figure out when we’re…” Overall it was good, we accomplished a lot and had some laughs and I didn’t show too much ignorance of the product or their process. What more can you ask for?

Automatic Email Deletion....Nooooo!

2006-01-30T18:55:00.000-06:00

About two months ago everyone at my workplace (probably the whole corporation) received a friendly email explaining that the company had adopted a new email policy. In addition to limiting the size of everyone's mailbox, any emails more than three months old would be automatically deleted starting on a day in February.

I read through the email several times looking for the loophole, something like "emails you designate for follow up will not be deleted" or "this applies to everyone except technical project managers sitting on the south side of the really big building." There were no loopholes.

Yes, I know that you can create personal mailboxes on your computer and back them up in any number of ways. Yes, I agree that some people (e.g., me) keep more emails than they really need to. Yes, I know a corporation with tens of thousands of email users probably has to have a server room about the size of a stadium just to store all those emails.

But automatically deleting emails? When I expressed my horror about this, my manager just shrugged his shoulders--kind of a "whatever" shrug. No one else seems to think (or will say they think) that's it's creepy. What's next, deleting programs from your computer that you're really not supposed to have there? (I bring this up because I got a form letter asking me why I had Quicktime on my PC and suggesting, but not demanding, that I remove it.)

I've been adjusting. I created my personal folder, moved some files into it, and set up a search folder so I can look weekly and see what is going to be automatically deleted in the next week. I stopped complainly out loud since, after all, I've only been there three months and it's not a big problem for me.

It's just the principle of the thing, right?

2006-01-26T21:48:00.000-06:00

It's late so this will be short.

My class today was really fun. We were talking through the planning and development phases of a project, so we watched an entertaining video about XP development and testing and then attempted to build a "product" for our customer (the instructor) using playing cards and tape. Not only did our product fail, we also forgot to follow all the rules we had learned over the last three days. That was the point of the exercise, to show you how easy it was to overlook good change control, risk management, etc. We had a lot of fun failing too. I have one more day of class, part of which I have to miss since I have to lead a meeting in the late morning.

I had my weekly one-on-one with my manager. I tell him interesting things about what I'm doing (he doesn't want to hear the details) and then he asks me penetrating questions that get me thinking about how I can do better. I'm sure I get more out of the meetings than he does.

While I'm not the world's greatest expert on testing (my peer is an expert), I've managed to stumble into some interesting areas. The best is building a relationship between my group and the group that directs testing for "the business."

Who is "the business?" During my first couple of months I would hear people say things like "Oh, he's from the business." I had no idea what that meant but I was sure that everyone else knew. I knew I was in Technology, but isn't technology part of the business? I tried asking people about "the business" but people in Tech were evasive and people in the business would say "Well, I'm in the business" and stop there which told me absolutely nothing.

I finally felt better when, at my Friday quality meeting, a fifteen year company veteran looked a guy from "the business" right in the eye and asked "Just who do you mean when you say the business?" He was surprised, stammered a little, then reeled off a list of groups that sounded businessy. There was a collective "Oh, I see" in the room. Just another workplace mystery solved.

2006-01-24T19:45:00.000-06:00

I'm taking a project management class every morning this week. The teacher is great-she has every certification I've ever heard of, is funny, and has lots of experience doing all sorts of projects.

Most of the class is group work. She introduces a topic like how to identify and deal with risk, then we go into groups and do that using a case study. I'm in a group where we all have roles and I guess we're going to get a "project" to do that involves us actually planning, creating, testing and releasing something by Friday.

The people in the class are either project managers in groups like me or technical people who are going to start managing projects. Everyone is friendly and the group discussions are intense. I actually already know about five of the twelve people.

After class today my manager called me and my peer in to tell us that there is going to be some other types of project management work we can do besides quality. He said (and he really was sincere) that we need to think about how we can be best prepared for senior project management jobs or other jobs in the company and he thought we'd get burnt out if we do the same thing all the time. Seriously. So we said "Sure."

After that I had my first Quality meeting with a new project team. These are folks that are very deep into the details of the content that we're serving--they're the ones that can look at something and say "That comma shouldn't be there" and give you the reason why in legal terms. I was worried that they would either not be interested in Quality or just not participate. They did, however, have a lot of questions for each other about how we are testing and though a portion was over my head (writing the minutes is going to suck), we had a productive hour.

Those first few minutes of the meeting were tough. Even though I know they're nice people, it's pretty intimidating when a group of people you really don't know all look at you waiting for you to say the right thing. It takes me back to my short teaching career when 25 people did that. The only way to approach that problem is preparation, preparation, preparation. Too bad I like things to be spontaneous. Oh well, this is only for five years.

Coffee Club Culture

2006-01-23T19:20:00.000-06:00

There is a chain coffee store in my workplace, a Moose Coffee. It looks like a regular Moose with the usual prices and products--it's just tucked away inside a large sunny space on the fourth floor of the main building. The coffee shop is, in fact, the most successful store in the Moose chain.

There are several things you notice when you visit the Moose. First, the people that work there are really friendly. Really, really friendly. They know the names of a bunch of the customers and know their drinks. In fact, this Moose just recently won the first "really, really friendly" award from the chain. The manager, a woman who has worked her way from serious illness to this success, regularly engages anyone who will make eye contact with her in conversation on her subject of the day (we've talked about her grandchild, and cappucinos with too much milk).

Second, there are really a lot of people working there, most of them young women. In the morning when it's busy there are people at three registers, two people making drinks, and one or two people walking up and down the line of up to twenty people at a time taking orders for coffee or "fancy drinks."

There are people (okay, mostly guys) that have learned the names of all the young women and like to hang around the Moose just a little longer than necessary, loudly telling (really funny?) stories that are received with a big smile. There are also a few women who hang around trading family news with the Moose crew. That clogs up the small waiting space during coffee rush hour for those of us that are just passing through.

I do pay attention to who is working. By now I've figured out who can make a dry cappucino and who can't, so I take a look and don't even order if I see someone on the machine that's going to make me a latte (yuk!).

No one at the Moose knows my name (unless they see my security badge) or my usual drink. I don't know whether to be depressed about that or not. Maybe when my projects launch in 2008 I'll have time to hang around and really be part of the culture.

How soon do new things get old?

2006-01-19T20:41:00.000-06:00

As I took a Widgeteer for a tour at lunch time today, it occured to me that I no longer saw my work place with the eyes of an outsider or even a newbie. Am I taking the cruise ship for granted after only three months? Do I feel like it is (yawn) just another place to work?

Let's look at how I relate now to some things I blogged about during my first weeks.

- The building that seemed as big as the sMall of America is just a big building in which I can find any person or room with a little wandering. That's how everyone does it. The stairs are now part of my regular workout program.

- I've bought something from every station in the fancy cafeteria but I usually go for the tacos or the salad bar, not the fancy stuff. I also use the less fancy and less crowded cafeteria that the manufacturing people use in another building.

- I've taken two classes and I am signed up for three more, one of which is four hours a day for a week. They've been great so far. I check out books from the library occasionally but I do wander through the new book displays once a week.

- I park in almost the same place every day in the third parking lot from the door and don't try to work out schemes to park closer. I've only used the shuttle during storms.

- I try not to hit the coffee shop too much, usually only going when I'm nodding off AND there's a barista on duty that knows that a dry capucino has a lot less milk than a latte. (This relates to the Coffee Shop Cult that I'll blog about very soon.)

- I love getting the free fruit but I often forget to pick it up.

So I've developed my way of relating to the amenities. Does that mean I don't appreciate them? I don't think so. I know this is the nicest place I've ever worked in and may become the nicest place I ever worked in so I continue to appreciate these things even if I (yawn) don't get as excited as I did that first week.

What are project managers like?

2006-01-17T19:18:00.000-06:00

I had a lot of face time today with my project management peers. I spent time throughout the day talking and meeting with other PMs about my projects and at noon I went to my second project manager brown bag.

There are forty-five PMs in my particular part of the company. Most are in the project office but a lot of departments have one or two project managers like me. I suspect the PMs in the project office are watched more closely by their management and are under more pressure to succeed than people in non-PM groups.

What are the PMs at my job like? About half the group are men, although the leaders are all women. There are a few people in their 30's but otherwise they're 40s or older. Almost all (except for me and my peer) have the coveted PMP credential from the Project Mangement Institute, the Microsoft of project management. Most of them have been project managers for a long time although a small number were promoted in the last few years from the development staff. A handful are contractors, senior people brought in at very big rates because 40 PMs weren't enough.

The people with the PMI certificates tend to talk in PMI. They say things like "I can't wait to do a WBS on that!" or "We must have accountability from the stakeholders to have a valid bug tracking process." They like to talk about closing a project and about really good processes used in their last jobs. Sounds dull, doesn't it? It is.

I'm not sure I exactly fit in but it's a considerable pay raise if you move into a job in the project office. If it helps me retire a year or two earlier, I'll talk the talk. Hey, did I ever tell you about that great baselining macro I wrote for Microsoft Project?......

2006-01-14T17:55:00.000-06:00

A long weekend. Yay!

Here's the first installment from my new business book on creativity and innovation--"The Concise Adair on Creativity and Innovation". This is a great book, kind of a Dummies book on creating a workplace that inspires those wonderful skills. Here's an interesting passage:

"Characteristics of an Innovative Organization

- The management is personal and informal
- There is not an emphasis on functional specialization
- Workers have been allowed to have freedom of thought
- The management structure is quite flat with leaders being very approachable
- Clearly laid down procedures are kept to a minimum
- Workers are encouraged to be creative and flexible, and to develop themselves."

Do you work at a place like that? I don't know if a workplace culture exactly like this exists, even at places known for innovation like 3M. My workplace has a lot of these qualities but certainly doesn't have a flat management structure (I can't even imagine how many layers of management there are between me and the corporate CEO). On the other hand, I have met with executive-type people who are very curious about how the projects are being run and listen carefully to how people expect to reach their goals without dictating their own preferred way of doing something.

Does a company have to be small to be like this? My (informal) mentor at Not Big Blue was in charge of fostering innovation and did some wonderful training to get things going but there was a lot of resistance from management and workers. At Widgets we innovated all the time, usually just for survival, but there was a hierarchy and most of the creative work people did was unknown to the company leaders. (Note: the innovation program at Not Big Blue was stopped about two years ago and my ex-mentor was laid off after twenty years at the place. Nice.)

My computers are set up and I think I've screwed around enough with my LCD monitors and should leave them alone. I started working with Final Cut again using a bunch of family videos. I was surprised that the new G5 take a long, long time to create a .mov file for a 30 minute video (using Sorenson's which I supposed adds a lot of time). I just couldn't hold out another six months for the very-much-faster Intel Macs.

Anyone want an ancient iMac for free?

2006-01-12T21:18:00.000-06:00

Well I blew most of the evening showing my daughter my company's online product. We did some case law searches and a lot of public record searches to find out the secret lives of everyone we know. Not really...I always search for myself or other family members.

We did find a tax assessor record that says my lot has one million acres. We're going to start evicting the neighbors this weekend! We were unsuccessful in finding death records for my grandparents and we did confirm that I hadn't been convicted of a crime.

I've spent the last few days at work in small group and one-on-one meetings to figure out what people do and to explain the status of my projects to other groups. I really like that kind of interaction. People are very friendly, ask good questions, and always think of ways they can help, even though they're really busy like everyone else. (I think I have the smallest workload of anyone in the building at the moment.)

The company is in the middle of a major hiring binge. The web site has dozens of jobs and we've been told to expect a lot more postings, all to handle the migration that I'm part of as well as new features that the company needs to compete with our one major competitor. I have no idea where those new people are going to park.

The migration, which was originally scheduled to be done in 2005 now is stretching out into the future. My peer and I joke that we're going to retire when the migration is finished.

Ok, back to trying to make my extra hard drive accessible.

2006-01-11T21:25:00.000-06:00

It's late for blogging. I had early soccer and then talked for a while with a couple of Widgetistas. I heard that it was announced to my former group at Widgets that I wasn't responsible for the big mess that happened there in November and December. I knew when I walked out the door I would be blamed for anything that went wrong, including higher gas prices and the avian flu. Now I know that, in fact, I WAS blamed for most everything (but probably not the avian flu). I actually do care if people think I caused all the misfortune so I'm glad that no one is spreading that story at the moment.

Things certainly did change for the worse in the basement after I left Widgets since no one took over the project management work I was doing. That created problems that were....someone else's fault.

I was given a new project today that will move very quickly. I looked on the intranet for information but it was very sketchy so I talked to my former coworker who is working on the DTDs for the content. He explained it generally but it's tough to follow the jargon when you first start on a new project. I need to draw some diagrams tomorrow and talk to some more people.

I have some interesting things to talk about but no energy or time now. Tomorrow.

2006-01-10T18:11:00.000-06:00

I haven't blogged for days! I've been going through the painful process of trying to get my new G5 and two LCDs working the way we want them to. I've already returned a Samsung LCD because text looked terrible on the display. I have a better samsung 19" with the G5 which is okay but now we have a Neovo with the G4 and it's still sketchy but maybe as good as a relatively inexpensive LCD is going to get. Any suggestions?

I had my Goals and KSF (key success factor) workshop today. You write goals that state what you will DO this year (more general, not specific things) and how that will help the department and the company. Then you write these ksfs that say HOW you will do your job. There's a matrix that explains how each level of employee should be doing things in the areas of problem solving, collaboration, etc.

The year end review then becomes a reading of your goals and ksfs. Your manager gives you a number for each goal (degress of completing it) and agrees or disagrees with your ksf writeup. My manager said he presumes I'll do what I'm supposed to so most of the discussion will be about how I did the job. For example, I could write up strategy documents just sitting at my desk and emailing people but I should be calling meetings and having one-on-one discussions.

It sounds horrendous and I didn't understand it until the workshop, but it's mostly straightforward. I'm going to write goals with my peer since we do the same job so that'll be easy. The ksf matrix is quite large so I have to figure out how much of that I really have to deal with and if I'm doing things at or above my level.

Meanwhile we're all writing some goals that will be magically converted in a consolidated goal for the department. I'm also saying I'll help the department improve in the areas of training and communication, although I'm not sure how.

This is typical big company stuff but they presented it well and it's a better way to review people than the mostly worthless guidelines I was using at Widgets (when we did reviews) or the phony self-reviews at Not Big Blue. Who knows, maybe I'll learn something I can use on my next job!

2006-01-05T20:03:00.000-06:00

I have to apologize to the creators of my new time tracking software. It does total the hours for each day. The total is at the top of the column, not the bottom where I expected the totals to be.

The free fruit of the day was bananas.

I found the matching gift form on the HR web site today. The company matches employee contributions to a wide variety of non-profit organizations. I'll be putting in a few of those this year.

I spent a few hours learning about laws/statutes/codes and how my company receives, annotates, relates them to past laws and judicial cases, and delivers them. A very nice reference attorney and another co-worker walked me through the subject, then gave me some materials to read. I logged onto our online product to see how the users viewed the information and then I explored for a while.

While I was logged into the product, I decided to look for the scary personal information I had heard was there. As an employee, I have access to all 20,000+ databases while customers only buy particular databases and have a lot of access controls attached to even that information.

I didn't find much. I can do reverse phone lookups, get into the general information in the license databases of most states and see the address/phone information from your credit report.

Oh, I can also check for criminal records. I found out that a couple of guys with my last name had a lot of trouble with the police in the 60s. (I'm almost sure they're not related to me.)

I went to the library and checked out a new business book, "The concise Adair on creativity and innovation," to write about. I'll start this weekend. I also got some books on CD out of the library that I'm importing right now. I love that library.

2006-01-03T20:05:00.000-06:00

I arrived at work later than usual today because I took my work computer home before the holidays and forgot to bring it when I left for work today. I drove home, retrieved the computer and drove back to work, pulling into the company street at 9:15. I was worried I would be stuck in the dreaded overflow lot--a space the size of a football field that is located somewhere on the MN-IA border. Luckily there was still space in the far corner of the third parking lot from the door and the shuttle was sitting there waiting. I've heard people say that if you need to come in after 10:30 for any reason you may as well wait until 11:30 and grab a spot that was vacated by someone leaving for lunch.

I thought I would be busy today but I had two meetings cancelled because people were sick and I had to reschedule another meeting that I had called. People have taken a lot of sick days in the last month for themselves and to take care of children, mostly due to a virus that has slowly circulated through the building. My manager has it now.

A new time tracking tool was introduced today. Anyone who has ever been forced to do time tracking knows it's very annoying and time consuming. Time tracking software seems to be carefully designed to be slow, ugly, hard to customize, and prone to crashes. I suspect there's an international organization of time tracking software designers that publishes strict (bad) standards and does user testing to make sure people can't use the software. They may even whack people that turn out a good product.

Is our new time tracking software any better than the old software? It is less ugly than the old software, which looked like it was created by some manager's eight year child. It's also a bit quicker than the last software, which would take so long to refresh the screen after a save that I would just go to another window and do something else instead of waiting.

How well does it work, you ask? Hoping that it would work they way it LOOKED like it worked, I carefully set up my projects so they would become defaults. I pressed the save button and......it deleted all my projects. I reentered the projects and then yesterday's and today's hours and saved again. It reloaded briskly with all the information intact (projects must have hours assigned to them to be saved) but then I saw it--they made the screen less cluttered by taking out the total fields. I have to add the hours for each day and the for the week in my head!!!

Thank goodness--they followed the (bad) standards. Now I have countless hours of time tracking fun to look forward to!

2006-01-02T16:17:00.000-06:00

Thanks for the responses to my recent "Angry" entry--I enjoyed reading your comments and emails. I promise my anger at Widgets isn't affecting what I do or how I do it but it hits me when I think about that place or talk to people still working there or other Widgets survivors. Writing that entry really helped me understand what I was feeling.

BTW, I didn't make it to Widgets for the shareholders vote on the company's fiscal reorganization. The reorg was approved, which will make certain partners happy and lead to a confrontation with another partner. I hope the fiscal leaders correctly calculated the cost of this change.

Arizona was great! It was in the 70s during the day, 40s at night and sunny most of the time. They haven't had rain in Phoenix for three months so it's very, very dry. I got to do a little climbing and see some ruins and red rocks although we didn't have time to look around Sedona.

Wow, having more than a week of vacation has been wonderful! We have MLK day off so that's another long weekend and then I already have a long weekend in March set up. I think I can handle going back to work tomorrow.

2005-12-27T23:25:00.000-06:00

Just to prove I'm not part of the conspiracy against Chrismas, here's a Merry Christmas for all you that celebrated it (sorry I'm late), and a Happy Hanukah, Joyous Kwanzaa, Cool Dwahili, etc.

I'm on vacation and will resume bloggging on January 3 when I return for a new year of work.

BTW, it's strange to go from Minnesota to Arizona. I don't think I could get used to living in the desert but it's in the middle 70's and quite nice. We hiked up Camelback Mountain, which is right in the city, and that was rigourous and really, really dry. When you get near the top you can see all the golf courses irrigated with the precious groundwater or the water diverted from further north. Sedona tomorrow.

Have a good week.

Two Things and Then....Anger

2005-12-22T19:01:00.000-06:00

First, by request, the title of the book that I've pulled my business essays from is "Best Practice, Ideas and Insights from the World's Foremost Business Thinkers" Perseus Publishing, 2003.

Second, my son called me on point 5 of my last blog about whether something we KNOW can be false. I think the debate about what is knowledge and what is belief underlies some of our headlines these days, particularly the evolution vs. intelligent design debate. I'll debate it with him next week.

I've been mulling over what to write about Widgets, where people are being "asked" to work very long hours, sometimes six or seven days a week to meet ridiculous commitments to the customers by upper management.

The more I thought about how to respond, the more I asked myself what compels me to respond at all. I had to dig a little into that dark closet that is my mind but I found the answer today.

I'm angry at that place.

I'm angry because I had to leave a job that exactly fit my skills and abilities and that involved working with some of the smartest, most interesting, and most fun people I have ever known. I had to leave because the games played by many of the managers and the utter contempt of the top management for realistic planning created what I felt was a hostile, stressful workplace. The stress was eating away at my entire life. When someone in management sneered at me and asked "Why do you work here?" I knew I had to go.

I'm also angry because the people still at Widgets, people that I truly care about, are treated worse than I've ever seen anyone treated in an organization (except at the Going Postal Service I suppose). They are treated badly while being promised it will all get better if they can just get past the next deadline (which leads to the next deadline). They are treated badly and rewarded with pizza, snack bars, and standard job benefits like training which is portrayed as an amazing concession by management. The people who run the place understand very little about who works there and what they want and need. In fact, they hardly understand the Internet or how you organize work for that medium.

Yes, I have a good, if not exciting, job at an excellent company where my coworkers are friendly, cooperative, talented and professional. My manager is funny, realistic, and appreciative of what I do on an ongoing basis. My psyche recovered when I left Widgets and I also got back several hours each day that I would have been working. I should be happy...I should drop the whole Widgets thing.

Unfortunately, I'm still angry at that place. I think I'll be angry for a long, long time.

2005-12-20T19:05:00.000-06:00

Today's topic is knowledge. I'm partly reacting to an essay titled, "Managing What We Know" by Laurence Prusak.

1)Knowledge is more than information, it's information and experience combined. You can also learn things by extensive study but the advanced student tries to also experience the subject (i.e., a French major goes to France).

2)The best way to teach/train someone is for the teacher to share the experience of the subject with the student.

3)People often don't share their knowledge because they are unable (because of time or ability) or unwilling (no incentive) to do so.

4)People are divided up in organizations without a good understanding of what they know. Everyone wants to draw organization charts, not knowledge charts. (I started "evangalizing" about organizing people according to knowledge near the end of my employment at Widgets--I'm sure everyone has forgotten about that by now.)

5) There's a difference between knowledge and truth. Knowledge is socially constructed--if we all agree on a fact, then it's a fact, even if it's false. (e.g., Most Americans probably still believe that Al Quaeda was active in Iraq before the US invasion).

6) There's a kind of knowledge we can't explain, sometimes called (among other things) procedural knowledge. How far do you have to turn the car's steering wheel to make a right turn? You can't explain it, you just know how to do it.

I think we all wind up in situations where we need to share information or we need to learn to do something. What should we do first, what's a good strategy? Thinking about knowledge helps you make those decisions when you need to and every time you try, you learn how to do it better.

2005-12-18T21:03:00.000-06:00

One more week and then vacation. I have a lot to do on Monday and three hours on the phone on Wednesday with people at the other location, but by Thursday it'll get quiet at work. On Friday everyone will, I'm told, be out of there by 1:30.

I have a few interesting business essays still to talk about--one on Knowledge Management and a few on leadership. I think the essays I've talked about already are the most pertinent to my own and the Widgets situation. I'll cover the rest this week.

I'm looking forward to my first week off in a year. If you work, shouldn't you have and be able to use your time off? Shouldn't they make you take your time off so you can fresh and enthusiastic? I'm really so sick of getting up five days a week with very few breaks (apologies to my Widgets friends working nearly every day for much longer hours than I work).

I got the information for my legal insurance this weekend. I can call a lawyer line and ask about all sorts of stuff. I'm going to call about an unresolved issue at my last workplace and about doing a will. They also have a web site with downloadable forms for common legal transactions and for living wills.

2005-12-15T19:36:00.000-06:00

This week I was encouraged to sign up for one Saturday this year as the representative of my organization for the monthly software release. It's actually two Saturdays since I have to shadow someone before I "solo." It's surprising that they would trust me to do it but I'm okay with it. I did the same sort of thing for years at Widgets during launches except now I'll be coordinating people who are testing the software as soon as it's launched.

My group is going to grow quite a bit in 2006. That's mainly tester jobs, testers being programmers who really like detail. A lot of the work is writing the test cases then scripting them in various ways. They pay pretty well and it's a very nice, well run group. If you're interested let me know.

I met another ex-coworker of mine as I was walking up the stairs to lunch. We both stopped, pointed at each other and said the same name out loud. (He has the same first name as me.) We were both tech writers at Not Big Blue. In fact he and I did a presentation together in San Francisco at a Sun Jump Start conference. He left there pretty soon after I did and has been at Laws R Us since. The tech writing group at Laws has seem a lot of turnover and turmoil (normal for tech writing groups) so he's had good and bad times there. That's four ex-coworkers from Not Big Blue that I've found.

One more observation. I've ridden the parking lot shuttle busses twice since they started running in late November. What I've noticed is that even in bad weather (I rode it when it rained and when it snowed the other day) the bus is almost all women. The men just trudge through it, which I normally also do.

The other interesting thing is that even though a lot of people ride the bus in from the parking lots, not many people get on the waiting busses at the end of the day to ride back out to the parking lots. I still haven't figured that out. Anyone have any theories?

2005-12-14T17:18:00.000-06:00

My seven hour class on the legal and regulatory system was good. I was surprised how much of that stuff I remembered (three branches of government, federalism) but I didn’t know much about legal practice (criminal vs. civil). There are intriguing questions like how could OJ be not guilty in criminal court and guilty in a civil proceeding (different burden of proof, no right not to testify in civil cases, etc.)

We were also given an introduction to how legal and legislative information is published (in consecutive order, in subject areas, etc.), who publishes it, and what the competing products are. I picked up the meaning of a lot of company acronyms.

I left home fifteen minutes early this morning and got here right at 8:30 when the class started. Driving in snow storms is annoying. Surprisingly most of the class was there when I got to the classroom.

I did manage to sneak in a flu shot at lunchtime. I was worried that there would be a long line but when I got to the door there were three nurses standing around waiting for someone. They started to jokingly fight over me until I picked one. With all the pandemic publicity, I suppose the regular flu doesn't seem so scary anymore and people are just skipping the shot.

Now I’m headed out to soccer through what will be an abysmal traffic jam on 35E. The traffic should be cleared up by the time I head home.

I haven’t heard much from Widgets in the past few days as people put in their 18 hour days to prepare for this week's launches for the Network Who Should Not Be Named. I’m withholding comment until then.

Food and Learning

2005-12-13T19:35:00.000-06:00

Today was holiday pot luck day. Considering that I work in a place with a wide diversity of national backgrounds, it was disappointing that it was the same potluck you see everywhere in the upper midwest. There was the usual section of meatballs, cocktail weiners, and sloppy joes in crock pots, a macaroni and cheese section and the required pasta salad section next to the standard veggies and dip. The only interesting thing was a delicious carrot desert that you see in Indian restaurants. I did my usual peanut/sesame spicy noodles, which got some good comments--I put a lot more hot stuff in this year and it was way better than previous versions.

Yesterday was Sri Lanka day and the Diversity committee put on a lunchtime event. First there was a tabla player and slides of Sri Lanka, then food and a talk about the country. I didn't stay for the whole thing but it was nice.

Today they had a three hour play about the life of Thurgood Marshall that the lawyers went to for continuing learning credits. I was going to go for a few minutes just to see what it was like but I never got around to it.

Tomorrow, I have an entire day of class on the legal and regulatory system. That sounds like what they tried to teach me in high school but now I work with these public records every day so I really do need to understand them. The teacher is the same one I had for my product intro course--she's funny, explains things well, and moves things along. I'm looking forward to it.

I also signed up for a 20 hour project management class that will take me very close to my certification requirement for project management. Well, close to the classroom requirement.

I did have plenty of time today to download Firefox 1.5 and a bunch of extensions that were talked about in Wired. The weather extension is nice but I'm not sure about del.icio.us. I'm intrigued by the extension for adding your own JavaScript to pages but I didn't have time to figure that out. More stuff to play with when I have time.

The Cart People

2005-12-12T21:05:00.000-06:00

Before I talk about the cart people, I just want to say that I've been communicating with various people back at Widgets and I'm speechless. Give me a few days and I'll comment.

****

There are all sorts of people wandering through my company campus, keeping things working correctly and looking nice. There are cleaning people who periodically appear at bathrooms and kitchen areas and leave them spotless. There are tech support people who "come down" when you have IT problems and the person on the phone can't help. There's all sorts of food service people in the cafeterias and delivering food to meetings. There's even the plant people who water and wipe the multitude of plants everyday.

My favorite group is the cart people. Beginning on my first day of work I noticed that several times a day I would see someone casually pushing a small equipment cart down the hall. I never saw them stop anywhere or even saw a cart parked anywhere.

Were they from the help desk or doing cube setup? I didn't think so since I never saw them at anyone's cube. I was curious. I watched and waited for a clue.

A week into work I came upon a cart person lurking outside a meeting room. He was obviously hiding from the people in the room, poised behind his cart, waiting for something. I walked by slowly, watching, but nothing happened before I turned the corner.

Finally, two weeks into my job, I saw a cart person in action. A cart guy stopped, picked up a conference phone from the cart, carried it into a meeting room, plugged it in and left. Ah ha! The cart people are the ones that bring phones (the company doesn't have a conference phone in every meeting room since there are so many), projectors, DVD players and any other AV equipment you order for your meeting and then take it away when the meeting is done and take it somewhere else.

It doesn't seem like a bad job so I'm putting it on my list of possible future careers. Only one year until I can switch jobs.

2005-12-08T20:39:00.000-06:00

While I had a mostly dull day, I did spend an interesting hour at a demonstration by three lawyers and a law clerk of how they use my company's product. What was most interesting was their thought process before they used the product. Not only did they consider what the most efficient search terms and connectors would be, they also planned how to do the search in the cheapest way possible. (A lot of customers pay by the transaction, so every search costs them a certain amount of money, following links cost money, printing costs money, etc.) The online research cost is passed on to their customers and the customers don't like to get big bills.

One of the lawyers was asked to show how he used our competition's product to do the same search and then was asked what he liked about their product. They were all asked what they would do to improve the product.

The auditorium was full--I saw all sorts of people including programmers, testers, and librarians. I saw a lot of people taking notes.

In the morning I decided to study up on my next project so I got my usual at the coffee shop and then found a somewhat comfortable chair in the library and read. That was a peaceful half hour.

I haven't said much about my first project manager brown bag a few days ago. Project management is a craft/discipline/profession that brings order to the world and these brown bags discuss how this can be done. This particular session was about creating a communication plan and there was a wonderful example that everyone praised and asked not-too-penetrating questions about. In the midst of the discussion I asked my coworker, who is involved with the project the communication plan was for, how well this plan worked. She said, "I've never seen this before." No one had communicated the communication plan. ;)

2005-12-07T21:11:00.000-06:00

Not much time for blogging. I went to soccer from work and spent a lot of time before and after talking about the situation at Widgets with my former coworkers.

I still hear from people that even though Widgets is a hell hole, it's a cool place. I know when you're sitting there and there are some fun things going on (cool things invented by the workers, not the company), the hopeful person looks for the good stuff and says, "Well, it sucks but it's cool." Hey, no company is cool that has so little respect for people that it regularly demands all their time and energy to finish poorly conceived and planned projects.

At my new workplace we're having a serious discussion/disagreement about resources, testing and the launch date for a feature but it's a discussion that includes all the project people and starts with the idea that the feature MUST work correctly at launch. We'll come up with a consensus that we'll send to the upper management who, I'm told, will agree since the consensus will be well thought out and documented. That's the respect I look for in a workplace.

I wouldn't call my workplace "cool" but it's good for now. I don't think there's a perfect workplace, just places that give you more of what you need and want. You put in your five or six years and move on...

Geeking/Flexing, not Breaking the Workplace

2005-12-06T19:09:00.000-06:00

Geeking

I did some good work today, got a thumbs up from my manager on my first pieces of work, and attended a not very exciting project manager's forum.

The highlight of the day, however, was my tour of the Laws R Us data center. I think you have to be a geek to be excited about something like this but I was really impressed. Our group was taken downstairs to a huge complex of room containing numerous mainframes, thousands of Unix and Windows servers, rows of routers, many terabytes of storage and some of those cool robotic tape silos (that one is for you, Soccer Girl). There was a battery room with a frightening number of huge batteries and a room with generators that can produce a couple of megawatts each. The amazing thing is that there is a twin data center one quarter of a mile away in an underground bunker.

Top acronyms during the tour:
CRAC - Computer Room Air Conditioner
NAG - Network Assistance Group

Flex, Don't Break

Wow, this is a great essay. In "Making the Workplace Flex, Not Break" Ken Murrell sees the problem this way

"The roadsides of business growth will be littered with the husks of organizations that once enjoyed success but then couldn't change. Often the failure will have occurred because in the process of building success the organizations broke their people. In the past this breakage was most often a matter of physical breakdown; now more often the breakdown is in the spirit of the work force. Sadly, this also creates a disintegration of the workplace community often to an irrevocable degree."

What to do? Build a flexible workplace by doing the following:

"- Align work priorities with a clear vision.
- Involve everyone in deciding those priorities.
- Define and publicly state how people will work with one another.
- Promote the idea of the whole person at work
- Reward risk-taking to enhance experimentation and discovery.
- Boost performance by boosting learning."

2005-12-05T21:20:00.000-06:00

Monday was a big day for my latest project. I went to the weekly project meeting with the entire team and then I held my first quality meeting for an hour with the people that will test the project. This is a REALLY quiet group--I know they have all the information but they needed coaxing to get them to talk in the meeting. I did a lot of "So does anyone have any more dependencies? Anyone? Really, does anyone have any?" Kidding, but that's close to what it was like. I felt like I was back teaching my required writing class again with a room full of students staring at the floor.

I went to an hour presentation on billing, which is a big deal at my company. Someone in my group wanted to learn more about it so they suggested a training session for everyone who wanted to come and it was arranged. I learned a lot but they didn't finish the material. There's going to be a follow-up session.

Our lead group met to finish meeting about the meeting that we want to have every other Monday. We're all agreed now about what we're going to meet about and I actually think it'll be useful. Well, I hope so.

I had a nice talk with someone that works with one of the three types of content that the company sells--the type that no one was able to explain to me. She explained it all pretty easily and walked me through the process of migrating the content to XML, which is what she mainly does. The process is time consuming and gets held up in long queues and by random errors. She's working a lot of hours to try to get her section of the content converted by year end.

My business book quote today is from "Managing Today's Angry Workforce" by Florence Stone. Florence thinks the biggest causes of anger today are
- downsizing, or the threat of job loss
- the pressure to do more with less, or the loss of existing resources
- disempowerment, or the loss of control over work to be done
A lot of the essay is about the way people are acting out their anger in workplaces, but we know that in Minnesota there's just an increase in passive agressiveness. Anyone know what that looks like?

2005-12-04T17:42:00.000-06:00

Friday, I made progress on writing quality strategies for my projects and I'm about ready to put some of my documents on the intranet for my manager's review. I'm a bit nervous about it but I do think the documents are okay.

Also on Friday I went on a one hour tour of the company's printing plant and bindery. It was really fun to see the entire book printing process, following books from composition to plating to printing to binding. The operation is in a building as big as three football fields and runs 24 hours a day, every day of the week. I'm going on a data center tour next week.

I had another Widgets guest for lunch on Friday. People feel guilty if they leave the Widget headquarters for lunch since they are working long hours and all this weekend to launch all the projects coming up. The cruise ship blows people away when they visit but at this point I'm getting used to having all the amenities.

On Friday I received my Widgets stock certificate and an invitation to a special stockholders meeting in late December. I had a whole packet of information on the financial reorganization of the company, stuff I never would have been told if I was an employee. I'm going to carefully review the materials and maybe show up on that day to vote my astounding number of shares. I'm still thinking about a shareholder resolution.

I was thinking the other day that I often blog about Widgets and Not Big Blue, but rarely about prior jobs. A lot of them were short-term contract and freelance jobs and weren't particularly interesting. The only other long stretch I've done in my life was at the Going Postal Service. That was a long time ago and I can't think of much positive to write about from that experience except for learning some contract law during my three years as a union steward. If anything relevant comes up from this dark past, I'll try to remember to bring it up.

2005-12-01T18:59:00.000-06:00

Okay, before I do my business philosophy ramble (it will be entertaining) I want to report that I successfully did my job today. I led a meeting where I walked a project team through a quality strategy document. We had a very good discussion about general scope, risks and dependencies of the testing and some people were suprised at the size and possible complexity of the project. People are very intent on doing a good job and everyone contributes. Yes, they push their group's view of the process but they are very cooperative and enjoy working together. I was very happy after that meeting.

At that point I still had two hours until the huge Holiday party so I went up to the library to unwind. I was browsing around the display of new "business" books when I saw one that might be interesting and picked it up. It's full of short essays about good things to do in a business and I found things that really sounded right to me. Tonight I want to write about one of these essays.

It's called "Finding and Keeping the Best Talent in the World" by Richard Leider. His contention is that talented people want "purpose driven" workplaces. How do you build a purpose driven workplace? You answer the following four employee questions over and over.

1. Where are we going?
2. What are we doing to get there?
3. What do you want me to do?
4. What's in it for me when I do?

Good pay is essential, he says, but there needs to be more than that. If a company can't answer those four questions, the talented people, looking for "purposeful, challenging work" and the chance "to express and develop their strongest talents" will quit.

I was going to write about appreciation today and thought a lot about what I really liked from my management. Is it the thank yous and occasional bonuses that make a difference to me? Nope, what I really want is those four questions answered because then I know what we're doing and what my part of the effort is and how the company will show their appreciation. If someone answers those questions for me they're showing me that they respect and appreciate me and they need me to be part of the effort.

The next essay discussed driving fear from the workplace. I think fear comes when there is no openness or trust and definitely no shared purpose. Widgets has some people who use fear as a management tool and high levels of sarcasm and burn out are the direct result. Oh yeah, and me quitting.

My current manager talks to me about those four questions. The conversations at our weekly one-on-ones often are rambling but he likes everything out in the open as I do. The only fears I have at work are the normal fear that I'll screw up but I'm pretty good at working through that feeling. It's great to just do your job as best you can and know that you'll definitely get something out of it if you do good. That's good enough for me right now.

2005-11-30T21:33:00.000-06:00

It's late. I had soccer, dinner, and then walked the dog in a picture-postcard snow storm so there's no time to blog.

My topic for tomorrow is......"How do you make people feel appreciated in the work place?"

Note: It's just days until the Widgets crew starts popping out major projects asked for by the evil people at The Network Who Shall Not Be Named. Okay, not all the people there are evil but certainly some of them are. Working with them goes with the theme of appreciation since our work for them was NEVER appreciated. I'm sure people are working right now even as I think about reading Jane Eyre and then going to sleep. I hope things go as well as possible so employees won't have to suffer even more for management's mistakes in negotiating schedules with that network.

2005-11-29T20:45:00.001-06:00

I just wanted to say a few words about the intranet at my workplace. How people share information/knowledge inside a company is an interest of mine so I was curious about what I would find at Laws R Us.

A little background. I learned the web as, along with a few coworkers, we built the local intranet at Not Big Blue. There were no rules to follow so we created a bunch of stuff--mostly ugly pages with piles of links to things that usually loaded when you clicked on the link. Most of it was built according to the whims of the managers who used our services, particularly the "vanity" pages with the manager's picture and some words of corporate wisdom or a mission statement. That intranet was well used but it was nearly impossible to find specific information since there wasn't an intranet search available.

At Whatever You Want Widgets there wasn't much time to write things down so only the very dedicated people did it. After years of information frustration, however, we did get a movement going to use a wiki (look it up at wikipedia.org) to collect information that everyone needed but no one knew how to find. Some people entered information consistently but most didn't and I don't think many people looked for information there since they didn't expect the information to be written down. I hope it's working better now but people there are even busier than when I left so they have even less time to document their work.

At Laws R Us someone has implemented a fancy templated solution. Home pages are for "communities" which could be a company organization, an interest group, or any group that needs the same information (e.g., new employees). Projects have mini-repositories that allow you to easily find, upload, and download documents, even letting you do searches inside individual projects. Every project in my part of the company has a repository and I can view information in all of them. The problem with the intranet is that's slow and I often have trouble downloading documents. Some days it drags so much that after I click on a document link I flip to another task instead of waiting. I love the potential benefits but it's irritating.

Some people work outside the system. My organization has a minimal templated home page but also has a great, old-school, ugly web page with lots of very useful links that I use every day. It loads fast, everything works correctly, it required no software to create, and it can be updated quickly (but only by the owner).

So which is better? Well, what is technology for? Answer the second question and then you'll have your answer to the first.

2005-11-28T19:31:00.002-06:00

What are the worst days to go to work? Here's my short list (not in any particular order).

- The first day after a two week vacation
- The day you have to lay someone off
- The day you know someone is going to yell at you about something you did (or didn't do)
- Any day you come in early after working late
- Any day after you've already worked six or more days in a row
- The day after your manager asks you why you work there (you know who I mean)
- The day after Thanksgiving

Okay, today wasn't that bad, but after the Thanksgiving four days off I seem to completely lose the desire to work. During the Thanksgiving vacation you hang around family and friends, do entertaining things you wouldn't normally do, and maybe travel and see some new sights. You sleep late for four days (well I do) and get relaxed.

Then BAM, you have to get up Monday in the dark, pull on the business casual, crunch some breakfast and stumble to the car in the November gloom (rain today). I had to go to the coffee shop as soon as I got to work to brace myself.

I probably also had a hard time this year because I have only had two days off in 2006. Widgets gave me four weeks of leave a year and took back most of it every January when I didn't use it. I couldn't use it when I wanted to because there was always some crisis that required my group to finish something or all hell would, literally, break loose. My former people are living through that again right now. If I had stayed there I wouldn't have a shot at a day off until March.

In a month I'll be vacationing in the Arizona sun, not thinking about work, freezing rain or gas bills, but right now it's the day after Thanksgiving vacation, it's dark, I'm tired and late December seems a long way off. It's going to take a lot of caffeine...

2005-11-23T16:00:00.000-06:00

I’ve finished my work—actually got drafts of almost all the quality documents I’ll need for the next few weeks—so I’m going to blog for the last few minutes until I leave.

I knew it was going to be slow when I got a parking space in the second lot from the door but my meetings have been full and I had a friendly one-on-one with a quality guy from another organization. I even hung out after one of my meetings with the big brains from two groups who used my architecture drawing to figure out where the holes are in the current plan (that’s what it’s for!).

My biggest accomplishment was finally setting up the quality meetings for my most important project. I had to negotiate with several people to not have them come because there was no way I could get all these people into a room at the same time. It may come back to bite me but someone had to be tossed off the island.

People have been drifting out of here all afternoon—quicker than usual—but there are still lots of people in the building. My manager was out all day and my peer is gone so I may as well leave.

I hope you have/had a Happy Thanksgiving!

2005-11-22T21:05:00.000-06:00

I got my free turkey at work today. We don't need it for Thanksgiving so I took it right over to the food shelf. I hope it's good.

Not much else happened today. I'm still trying to set up a meeting for my biggest project, going out several weeks to try to find some open times. No luck so far.

I did have my biweekly hour with my manager and after some funny stories about traveling he asked me if I had produced any of my prescribed documents. I said no. He said well hopefully things will pick up for me since I added a project because he wants me to start cranking these things out. He was very matter-of-fact about it--he just wants to see progress in the whole migration program.

We finished with a whirlwind tour of how to write job goals that my next review will be based on. By the end he had almost decided I should just copy the goals of the person that does the same job since we're doing the same thing. I'll talk to her about that tomorrow.

2005-11-21T21:12:00.000-06:00

I was wondering today how long I can say I'm a NEW employee. When I've met with people one-on-one in the last week I tell them I'm new and ask a question and they say "You're new to the COMPANY? Oh, here let me explain." They would certainly answer the questions anyway but the "new" tag does cause them to be very careful and thorough in their explanations.

Two weeks ago I was talking with someone who said they were new so I asked when she started. She said six months ago. That's new? I guess it is in a company where people get in and stay forever. They move between groups and jobs a lot but they stay.

Does that mean my five year rule (When you've been at a job for five years, it's time to move on) doesn't apply here? Possibly. Maybe if I move to some other challenging job at the same company and that makes me want to stay for more than five years, I'll amend the rule. That's a long time from now so the rule stands for now.

The most interesting/fun part of the day was a monologue by my manager (in a meeting to talk about a meeting)about a five day creativity boot camp at a hotel he was sent to in 2000. The dozen people worked in small groups to plan software to achieve some great good (e.g., finding missing children). They had intense group discussions all day and night but could "check out" of any meeting and draw or color instead to release their creativity. Some of the people loved it and some hated it which led to loud arguments when people went back to work. The whole program was cancelled after a month but he came out of it with some great stories and some terrible drawings.

2005-11-20T21:29:00.000-06:00

On Friday I had my first Widgeteer guest for lunch at Laws R Us. That person compared my workplace to working downtown where you can quickly walk to stores and restaurants. I think that was the intent of the executives who designed the place. My director (two levels up) told me it was better to have all this stuff in the campus than to have people leaving work to wander around the Small of America.

On Friday I completed a diagram of the software architecture of one of my projects and had another great talk with one of the people that doesn't show up at the project meetings. He explained what he did in a few sentences and I understood that he really didn't need to come to the meetings yet. I talked to a new senior project manager about starting work on his project and, other than the fact I kept spacing out during his long monologues, it all seems doable. There is an actual release date for one piece of that project---next June--which means I do need to get started right away.

Project management has been a hot topic in my emails and conversations. In my post a few days ago, I linked to a piece of what appears to be a really good book about project management. The premise of the chapter in the excerpt is that you can't organize people and work without prioritizing your work.

People were particularly interested in the section titled "Things Happen When You Say No" which he begins with these lines:

"One side effect of having priorities is how often you have to say no. It's one of the smallest words in the English language, yet many people have trouble saying it. The problem is that if you can't say no, you can't have priorities." The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun.

This was appropriate since a new major project was thrown at the folks in the basement at Widgets and like all the other projects it's Priority 1. I'm so sorry.

I should have read some of my testing book this weekend. I'll try to find time at work--I'll go hide upstairs in the comfy chairs behind the library. Lots of people are out this week so it'll be hard to organize anything much. I'll just work on cancelling and creating meetings. I know it could be much worse.

2005-11-17T19:51:00.000-06:00

I had my first thoroughly enjoyable day. First, I had a half day class on the basics of the company's big online product. The teacher was an attorney (is an attorney the same as a lawyer?) who does legal education. She told us the history of the product, how to find and choose databases to search (there are more than 20,000 databases), and how to search them. As soon as I was knew how to do it, I did the legal equivalent of googling myself--I went to the case records database for my state and searched for my last name. All I saw was a bunch of cases concerning a big company run by people with the same last name. I have a lot more exploring of the product to do.

I need to squeeze into the upcoming Intermediate product class soon because I need to understand the features better, but for now I can get on there and play with my free account. (Lawyers pay big money for access.) I'm also signed up for an eight hour class on the US legal system and I'm waiting for the Legal 101 courses to start back up in January to do some basics. Meanwhile there's a class on estate planning (to try to understand what my mother is doing) coming up. I also have a tour of the data center (the above ground one, not the backup "bunker") and a tour of the printing plant coming up in early December.

I had lunch with a guy who was my manager for a while at Not Big Blue. He's a very nice guy and I enjoyed talking with him He had four jobs during the six years I was at Widgets and he's only a contractor at Laws R Us. Tech writing is a very tough field to stay employed in--I'm glad I left that behind. Writing is not valued in technical organizations but they employ most of the tech writers and the pay scale is higher for writers at tech companies than in most companies.

I had a couple of meetings in the afternoon with people who are on the S*** project. The first was with a guy who is invited to all the meetings but never shows up. He was a great guy and recognized that he had stayed away too long. We came up with a plan for estimating system capacity which consisted of me calling a meeting so he could ask a lot of questions and figure it out. Perfect.

Then I met with my favorite developer, who showed me a software architecture map she had created. It was exactly what I needed to move the testing discussion forward. We talked about kids and holiday for a while and then it was 4:15--time to go home!

Great day.

2005-11-16T21:07:00.000-06:00

It's late. Not a great soccer game but I still had fun. Next week is the traditional late game on the night before Thanksgiving that no one wants to play in. I'll be there.

I made a lot of progress at my job in the last two days. We actually had a very good discussion about software architecture in my S*** project meeting and I was able to draw that out and get it reviewed. I also got off my butt and started asking people if I could stop by their area and talk about what they do and how it fits in with what I do. I told my manager I had too much slack and we agreed that I should add a third project.

The developers told me today that they now have a planning meeting at the same time as my quality meeting. I had that damn meeting scheduled, including room and speaker phone scheduling, until March. ARGGGGGG. It'll take me two hours to reschedule.

I haven't heard any ideas for Widgets stockholder resolutions. I'm considering 1) they hire someone to actually clean the building and 2) that all "profit" from the Olympics be split among ALL the employees. I guess the second one is better, huh? I know you Widgeteers are too busy working (even as we speak) to come up with ideas or even read the blog but I'll be here waiting when you get a minute.

I blew all my blogging time on AIM. Sorry. Tomorrow I have my first class, lunch with my exmanager (that I liked) and some time with individuals. Should be fun.

2005-11-15T17:58:00.000-06:00

I have bad memory. Not "a" bad memory, bad memory sticks in my laptop at work. I started getting BSODs (blue screen of death) yesterday and called the tech support number, wondering where in the world I was calling. The guy who answered asked me some good questions, then said,"someone will be down right away." A guy came down in ten minutes (presumably not from India), goofed around with the computer for a while and then asked why there was 504K of RAM in my computer. Huh? He thought a memory stick was bad since it should have at least a gigabyte of memory. He told me he'd be by later to take care of it but didn't show up again today. I hope he straightens this out soon since I can only run a few programs at a time and if I run a program like Visio, the program crashes after a random amount of time, usually right before I remember to save what I'm doing.

There was a long excerpt (excerpt - what an awkward word) on Slashdot from a new book on Project Management. I read some of it and ordered the book. It's a common sense guide to managing projects and I think this guy really knows what he's talking about. All you aspiring project managers should read some of this. I'll be ready to loan the book out by next year.

I'm beginning my career development work. Step one was asking the company to pay for my membership in the Project Management secret society. I was told the company would pay for classes, books, memberships, and certification. Next step is to get myself qualified for certification. That may be harder than passing the test because I have to prove I've led projects for 4500 hours and get someone to back up my claims. Someone reading this blog may hear from me very soon.

I am now the proud owner of a major chunk of Whatever You Want Widgets stock. Ok, major for someone like me, tiny compared to the President/CEO, the guys on the Board, or the former leader of our company who now is driving people crazy at some other company. I'm open to sponsoring some shareholder resolutions so send me your ideas. I really want to show up for the next Board meeting in Minneapolis. This could be fun.

Lately I've been helping people figure out how much they are worth to a company. The related question is how the company should express their recognition of that value. I'll write about this when I've thought it through but send me any ideas you have.

Extreme Learning

2005-11-14T19:17:00.000-06:00

By the end of last week I was sure that I wasn't sure how to do my job. During my first two weeks I thought I just needed a cheat sheet--a list of questions that the technical people would understand (even if I didn't) to start discussions that would give me all the information I needed. During my third week I tried to create this list of questions but was frustrated because I still didn't understand enough about testing/quality in general to write the questions.

I've been in tight spots like this before. When I was tech writer, I was hired to analyze and design documentation for Accounts Payable software. My contract shop knew that I didn't know anything about Accounts Payable but they told me "don't worry, it's just like every other kind of software" and gave me a slightly better rate than usual as an incentive. I bought a college textbook on Accounts Payable (I probably should have looked for the Dummies book), crammed during my billable hours, and completed the work.

Last week I decided it was extreme learning time again. I went through the company library's books on testing (mostly REALLY boring) until I found the perfect book, a guide for new software testers. It explains the concepts, defines the terms, and gives the questions to think about while you're creating a test plan. I bought a skim cap at Reindeer coffee, turned on the iPod, read, mumbled and took notes.

After I finished the first chapter of the book I realized I had completely misunderstood one of the major tasks I needed to do. I was planning to discuss this task with a project team late last week and I would looked like an idiot if I had based the discussion on my old understanding.

I still have a lot of reading to do but I feel much better about figuring out the job now. Company libraries are wonderful--otherwise I would bought several useless books.

The only other interesting thing today was a discussion about outsourcing. My company outsources software testing on an irregular basis to an Indian company. My department is trying to figure out how to measure whether it really is cheaper to have this Indian company do the work and if they really do the work as well or better. It seems like someone somewhere just assumed it was faster/cheaper/better and started outsourcing a while ago. More on globalization later this week.

Project Management (Not Too Boring)

2005-11-12T13:57:00.000-06:00

So I'm learning more about project management from my peers and from the expensive contract Senior Project Managers we meet with occasionally. What I'm learning is different than I expected--it's lessons about flexibility and analysis of the specific situation you're in, not just applying abstract formulas and rules from the Project Management Book of Knowledge (yes, that is the actual title). In the end, I think the organization you're in really makes this type of process possible, or not.

As I understand it, the official parts of managing a project are to figure out

- The requirements
- What work you need to do to meet the requirements
- How long the work will take
- Who can do the work and when are they available
- How you will test it
- How you roll out/deliver it

They're all equally important.

What's my experience with this method in different organizations? At Not Big Blue, my former mainframe company, there were requirements written for the projects and plans created for the work. Testing and delivery were well covered. There were two problems, though. First, everyone created plans that ended at the date suggested by upper management, not the date they might actually finish. Second, whenever things didn't go well for any reason, the plan was changed so it looked like there never was a problem.

During my first years at Whatever You Want Widgets, my group was run by a very disciplined Project Manager. Okay, she went too far sometimes and couldn't get the upstairs people to ever completely buy the idea of project management, but she set up a methodology for launching web sites that was the basis for launching almost seventy new sites on time and according to requirements. Back in those early days we presented our company as people who knew the internet and our partners respected that, negotiating the requirements and delivery schedules for their various sites. For the last few years the partners starting ignoring most suggestions and dictating schedules that allowed for some collection of requirements (depending on the project), a little bit of planning for resources (more like scrambling), no schedule for the work beyond the end date, no real testing and exhausting late-night rollouts.

Lawyers R Us has put a lot of money into project management. That doesn't mean things go perfectly because they don't. Some development groups create large products with no documentation so no one's sure what they have, business people don't like to write requirements, and there is no history in the company culture of groups talking to each other about the product they are getting integrated into. But we're working on all those issues and everyone involved knows it's necessary to do the planning so they're doing it with surprising enthusiasm.

I think an important factor in our sucess at Widgets was mutual respect among the team members. The project managers respected everyone's opinion as they assembled requirements and created schedules, and management respected those schedules and based their decisions/communications on that information. Everyone in the group respected each other's contributions and their difficulties. Everyone felt like they were in it together.

Those early days at Widgets were fun and I miss them but I think things will go well at Lawyers because the management support and mutual respect are there too. We'll see.

*******

Thanks to Soccer Girl, the famous Coed Rec player, for mentioning my awesome goal on Wednesday night. I don't score many goals and I think this one was the best. In return I'll feature her next goal. :)

2005-11-10T22:33:00.000-06:00

Just a short one since I stayed a long time at the Widgets going away party for L. It was really nice to sit and talk with my friends again. I definitely made more friends at Widgets than I have at any of my jobs and I enjoy being with them when there's an opportunity--as long as I don't have to walk into that building to see them.

I had a nightmare last week where I was back in my old cube at Widgets in the middle of frantic activity but I was just in people's way--I couldn't do anything to help and I was really frustrated. That was either a message about the present, a sumup of the past, or both. Or maybe it was just a dream.

2005-11-09T19:02:00.000-06:00

Commonly Asked Questions:

What are the people like where you work?

It really looks like a little city. There are all kinds of people of all adult ages. Okay, there are more people from India than you see walking down Lake Street but otherwise it's about the same.

People work at all kinds of jobs. There are lots of software developers, but there are also testers, librarians, attorneys, business representatives, etc.

Everyone dresses casually. Business casual is the most dressy in most of the building but you see suits on the upper floors where the corporate offices are. I haven't been in the manufacturing building or the system administration bunker.

Are Work Hours Flexible?

My manager asked me when I wanted to start and I said 8:30. Thinking back on it, I should have asked what the choices were. It looks like the core hours for most groups are 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. because before 9 there are streams (not rivers) of people going into work and after 3 people are streaming out. I can't tell you how hard it is to work at 3:30 when you can see people leaving in large numbers.

Do You Still Get Lost?

I really thought I had a method for finding any place in the building. When you get off the stairs or out of the elevator, you just find a number (like S654), figure out if you're on the right side of the building and then start walking and watching the numbers since you may be going in the wrong direction. Today I got completely lost trying to find a room on the fifth floor I was in last week. I intentionally got lost after the meeting so I could find myself (trust me, it makes sense). It turns out I was completely turned around. Oh well.

Dumb Employee ID

I work in a secure building. You have to show your company picture ID to get in and you're supposed to wear it at all times, even though there's no security inside the building (that I'm aware of). I wear the ID around my neck on the shoe-stringy thing they gave me. I know if I clip it to my belt I'll lose it and who knows how much that would cost.

Are the people fun?

I work with different kinds of people. The very nice, incredibly geeky, very smart people I work with on projects tell jokes that involve products or concepts that I usually don't understand. Right now I appreciate the effort but not the humor. The lead people in my group, who I seem to meet with all the time, are a lot of fun--we spend a lot of our meeting time joking with our manager who likes a goofy, loose atmosphere as long as things are getting done. I sit away from the group because there was no space there so I'm a bit isolated which is not great, but the distance allows me to do pretty much whatever I want during the day without any monitoring me.

What are the holiday party plans?

(I had to throw this in) There is a reception for everyone in the building at the beginning of December, our large organization is apparently having a party at a brewery a week later, and our smaller group is doing a potluck.

I've got soccer tonight so that's all for now.

2005-11-08T19:11:00.000-06:00

The start of week three was a good day.

I had a meeting with the S**** project folks early in the day. People brought the information that we needed for planning but a key person didn't come so we figured out what to do next time and finished early. A few people actually smiled at me and asked me questions, some of which I could actually answer. The next meeting we'll start doing the work I'm supposed to be doing which is a relief. Of course then I'll see if I can actually do the job I'm supposed to be doing.

I had lunch with a waggle of Widgeteers. Everyone seems fine, not much new except another person quit that I worked with. The horrifically scheduled projects are progressing. There's a goodbye party Thursday night for my former coworker.

**I had a rant written in here about the idea being circulated that Widgets management "just figured out" what a poor job they have done in training and staffing programmers. I thought it might be a little too "hot" for this forum but it's available in it's entirety if you buy the full subscription to this blog. ;)**

Lunch tomorrow is with a guy who was my manager for a while at my job before Widgets, at a mainframe company (Not Big Blue). He's a contractor at Laws Are Us now, trying to get in as a captive.

In the afternoon I had my first one-on-one with my manager. He told me he was going to explain the goal writing/evaluation system and then embarked on a twenty minute critique of the system. There's a lot he doesn't like about it. Then I made an observation that caused him to launch into a long critique of how projects are managed where he gave me the whole history of how things were done in the past and how they got the way they are now. He's very good at explaining why things are the way they are without talking about individual people.

We managed to squeeze in some discussion of what I was doing. He wanted to know if I could pick up more projects and I thought I could (since I have too much slack which I didn't tell him). My coworker is doing about seven and I have two right now.

Then I asked him if I was supposed to be time tracking. He said "Oh, you're not? That's not good." He showed me the system and sent me the link and gave me some numbers to charge to. We agreed that time tracking was the most irritating thing on earth and changing jobs just to get out of time tracking is an entirely reasonable thing to do. Later, after I was unsuccessful in logging on, he figured out that the department never bought me a license or set up an account for me (which is why I wasn't getting those damn emails from the system). So now I have to wait for someone with a license to leave and then I get to enter all my time all the way back to when I started. AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

The free fresh fruit of the day was.....apples. I hope it's pears on Thursday.

Tomorrow: commonly asked questions

What do people wear at Laws (yes, clothes, but what clothes)?
What hours do people work?
Is it possible to not get lost?
Why do I have to wear the dumb employee ID all the time?

If you have any more questions, comment or send them to me.

Spaced Out

2005-11-07T19:20:00.000-06:00

I went to work with some kind of cold/allergy thing today. You know, the kind of thing where you get a little plugged up and cough a little bit but you're mainly uncomfortable, run down and spacey? I thought I could get through the day pretty easily since I didn't have any meetings, just some notes to write and agendas to figure out. Besides, it's the beginning of my third week, I can't call in sick.

I wasn't there more than an hour before two meetings popped onto my calendar. I still get emails that say "Hey, I don't think we ever sent you the notice for the regular meeting of the *** group that you need to go to." I wound up with three meetings beginning at 11.

NOTE: I'm happy to say I'm double booked twice every week now--I'm really part of the team. On the other hand, I have at least two lunch time meetings, one biweekly.

I figured at this point I should take a cold pill so I wouldn't start sneezing at the meetings. I know the pill will make me more Spacey which might be worse than being Sneezy but I figured I'd take the chance.

The first meeting was supposed to be a "showdown" meeting with a manager who doesn't cooperate with "our process." Of course the manager didn't show up (which showed again how much he respects our process) and we just talked with the people in his group who said THEY wanted to cooperate.

The next meeting was one of the dozen or so regular meetings I go to with other "lead" people--lead people who are working on the same kind of testing, on the same kind of projects, that have the same job title, etc. I can still play the "new person" in these meetings because while I usually understand what people are talking about, I don't usually have enough context to understand why the topic is important or how to look at the problem/issue/action item in a different way. An hour long spaceout. Mmmmmmm.

Then I met with a very nice developer to ask questions about some project information I missed in a group meeting. This guy is very good at explaining things so I thought even in my attention-deprived state I would understand him. It's vital to my work on the project that I understand what's going on.

In fact we got through all my questions pretty easily and after thirty minutes I thought I had the information I needed. I was ready to go space out in my cublicle for the rest of the day when I HAD to say one more thing. Some automatic speech generator in my head output the following. "This should be pretty easy."

His face fell. "No, this is going to be very hard. Just because we can figure out the...."and so on and so on. I blurbed out short explanations of what I really meant, which was that it was going to be easy to frame the questions (or something like that) but I was sure he thought I had misunderstood what he had told me.

I slunk over to Stairway K and went down to my cube. I tried to fix the meeting notes using the information the developer had given me but it's tricky stuff to summarize so I decided to take some time to think about it. I'm sure it will all make more sense tomorrow.

2005-11-06T16:16:00.000-06:00

Meetings/The Basement

Well I spent a solid hour each day last week setting up meetings for the S**** project. I can use any meeting room on any of the six floors of the building or the room permanently reserved for that project. Since I have no idea what the rooms are like and the pictures in the reservation system are sometimes not that helpful, I started visiting the rooms to see what they're like. I was in the premanently reserved room on my first day (see blog entry on What Am I Supposed to Do?) and I didn't remember what it was like so I decided to wander down there and take a look before I used the room again.

I took the closest elevator down since the stairs near me didn't go to the Lower Level. When I walked out of the elevaor, I turned to my right and saw an underground parking lot. There were Beamers and Lexi and open spaces....open spaces! Who gets to park here? Where's the secret entrance? I wanted to investigate the parking lot more but figured there might be a guard watching the cars with orders to shoot on site. (I'll investigate more later.)

I turned the other way and found myself in an area with high ceilings and brightly-colored carpeting and walls. This was apparently the "creative" hallway and I found myself going past the Design area (just signage I think) and the company photography studios. At the end of the creative hallway, I came to a fork where I went south and wandered past some nice meeting rooms, then past some drab open spaces with chairs set up for employee group meetings like Weight Watchers. (I knew it was Weight Watchers because there was a big sign.) I continued on to the area where our group's reserved meeting room was. Now that I took a good look at it, the room looked pretty small for a group of twelve with not very comfortable chairs. Oh well, back to the reservation system.

Contractors

The building is full of contractors working on various projects including the ones I'm working on. Some of them are high level project managers but I think most are programmers of various sorts. There aren't enough cubes for everyone so the contractors are either sitting two to four to a cube or they have desks in the hallways that are a bit larger than their computer. I almost feel guilty about my luxurious (small) cubicle with extra chair.

Misc.

In a couple of weeks they will apparently bring in a bunch of trucks with enough frozen turkeys for everyone in the company. You can also donate your turkey to Second Harvest, which I think I'll do.

I had a really fun introduction to the way legal cases are received in the building and then processed to add analysis and linking. It was like the "How a Bill Becomes Law" song. I was taken to each step and told what the people (paralegals, attorneys) were doing. Everything made a lot more sense after that. Okay, a few things made more sense.

I think I'll blog for another week and decide then about stopping.

Big Company/Small Company

2005-11-03T17:49:00.000-06:00

Some people rolled their eyes when they heard I was going to a big company that had thousands of people in one campus. Is big always bad? Is small always good? Here's a short version of my opinion. Comments are welcome and encouraged.

I think that if you can answer yes to ALL of the following questions, your job is okay no matter what size company you're working in.

Are they paying you what you could get somewhere else doing the same job or hopefully more than that?
Are your benefits good enough for you and not so expensive that they take a huge bite out of your check?
On most days do you feel good on the way to work AND on the way home?

The last one is the most important because many of us have put off a better paycheck to stay in a place because of the promise of fun, learning, and stock options that might become Googlized.

Let's run through the most common big company/small company issues.

Who Do You Work With? Whatever the size of your company, you spend almost all your working time with your group. In big companies the groups get to be a dozen. In small companies they may be smaller but not necessarily. In big companies there are groups within groups within groups, etc. but you can ignore most of that. If the people in your immediate group are nice/fun/cool, you're okay wherever you are.

Managers. What's your manager like? I like managers that let you do your job without a lot of interference but are there to support you 100% if you need them. I've had managers like that in both big and small companies. Also, your manager's manager needs to be reasonable too or the stress will follow the laws of gravity and flow down toward you. You do wind up with more managers in big companies but you can disregard almost all of the higher level ones and delete their cheerful mass emails without reading them. There's no guarantee that you can talk higher level managers in big or small companies--I was actively discouraged from speaking to my manager's manager at Widgets. (I did anyway and it was very helpful.)

The Place. Is it a nice place to be in for ten hours a day? Again, I don't think there's a big/small company rule here. Is it so huge you can't find your way? Hey, with some wandering I've been able to find any room I needed to find at Lawyers R Us although I did have to ask for help once (yes, some guys do ask for directions). You get the nice perks at the big places like cafeterias, libraries, and inhouse classes that small places rarely have but that's not important to some people.

Parking. Okay, that is an issue. Luckily I have a lock for my computer now and I don't have to carry it across the parking lots.

Would I leave my big company to go to a small company again? If the job, people and place were right, I'd leave in a hearbeat. My first two and half years at Widgets was the best job I've ever had and that showed me that a small group of people working together can have a lot of fun and do great things. For now though, I'm happy on the big cruise ship.

2005-11-02T21:39:00.000-06:00

Just a few quick things since soccer went really, really long because of a maybe serious injury to someone on the other team.

Walking It was so beautiful today that I tried out the walking paths through the woods and around two small lakes on the company grounds. Not exactly rustic but a nice place to walk. I did the short loop but I might try the long loop tomorrow. There were a lot of people out there.

I Went Back to Widgets-Briefly On Tuesday I drove back to Widgets after work to drop off my crappy laptop that they let me use. It took me until last weekend to get my personal files off it.

The closer I got to the building, the more stressed out I felt. Seriously. I devised a plan to just go to HR and drop off the computer and run out. As soon as I was inside the door, however, I saw some friendly people who wanted to say hi and to tell me that it still sucked there. I even got a hug.

After a few minutes I got to HR where everyone was friendly, asking about my new job. Then my previous manager showed up and made the obvious joke about "You can't come back." Ha Ha. I escaped soon after. I hope to never go in there again.

Widgets Update One of my longtime coworkers has gotten another job. Yay!

Today I also got an update on the hellish projects that are progressing poorly and good initial reports about my replacement. I'm hoping for the best for all the programmers.

More tomorrow.

Benefits/I Ran A Meeting

2005-11-01T18:46:00.000-06:00

Benefits This weekend I finally got into the HR system to sign up for benefits. It's actually the web site of another company (HR for Hire) that provides all your HR needs over the phone or on their website. Who needs people?

Getting to the correct web page was painful. I had to log into my company's portal, go to the My Benefits page, then click to the benefits intro page on HR for Hire, then to the specific benefit pages. Unfortunately, every time I got up from the computer to check my current benefits or talk to my spousal unit about benefits, the HR site timed out and I had to start over on my company's portal. This happened ten or eleven times.

Why did it take me so long to choose my benefits? The health plan was completely different than anything I'm used to. Instead of the typical choice of one plan or another, there was only one plan but you had to choose from among several levels of co-pay or deductible in four different areas. There must have been at least one hundred possible combinations.

To make it easier to choose they had a tool for creating three different health care "options." You could then plug in numbers for how many times you might go to the hospital or the doctor or get prescriptions and a page would come back showing you how much each of your options would cost you over a year. When my session timed out in the middle of all this choosing and calculating, I had to go back to the company portal and take eight or nine steps to get back.

Three hours later I finally hit "Save." The success screen read "Congratulations, your 2005 benefit choices are saved in the HR system. WARNING: You only have 14 days to make your 2006 choices!" Maybe next weekend.

My First Meeting I ran my first meeting, a quality meeting with the S*** project team, a very vocal and dedicated group. I explained what my job was, what information I would collect and how I would run a weekly meeting to talk about testing. They immediately started asking really good questions about how we could actually get enough information to complete my testing documents. Caught up in a wave of enthusiastic responsibility (enthusibility?), someone suggested we meet twice a week at lunch times to pull together the information since it would be impossible to schedule this group at any other time. Everyone (else) agreed immediately.

This is what I anticipated really. Who I was didn't matter much. These people are zeroed in on what they need to do and if I can help them, great. I'll try.

Parking Again Yesterday I went out for lunch for the first time so I could hang out with a Widgets friend at a coffee shop. When I came back, almost late for a Career Makeover meeting, I hoped to steal someone else's place in a close parking lot. The Security guy told us in orientation that this was possible.

I didn't see any spots in the closer lots and had to go all the way to the end of the farthest lot to get a spot. I jogged to the building and was only a little late (a few minutes after five after) but it was okay because my manager came in a few minutes after me. What a great manager.

The Hardest Day on a New Job

2005-10-31T18:58:00.000-06:00

There's a joke that you hear in every work place when a new person shows up for their second day of work. Someone says something like "Came back for your second day, huh? Didn't we scare you away? HA HA."

I think the hardest day on a new job is the first day of your second week. Everyone gets a free pass during their first week (unless you're working on an assembly line or you're a brain surgeon). During the first week you hardly know anything or anyone and everyone else is understanding. They say nice things like "Don't worry about it, it's your first week. You'll learn it/figure it out/pick it up." You feel dumb during that week and not very helpful but it's okay.

During the second week, everyone wants to help you get started on doing something. Everyone wants to start moving that extra work that they've been doing to you. That's why they hired you, right?

Today I started my second week knowing that I would have to begin doing what they hired me to do. Tomorrow I'll run a meeting with numerous people who probably won't be very excited about the work I'm going to ask them to do. I also have to start the same quality process for another project that sounds much more complex. Meanwhile, I still haven't even seen the company's product or had anyone explain any of the product features I'm migrating. I still don't know much about the two dozen development groups and I've forgotten people's names as fast as I've heard them.

Am I scared? depressed? losing sleep? Nope. There a few things about my new job that make me feel fairly relaxed. One, the time frames I'm working in are so long that when there's a problem, you have days to decide what to do. Two, people are very nice and take their work seriously so even though everyone knows I can't make them do anything, I know they'll help me out as much as they can. Three, I know if I make a good effort and things don't go well for other reasons, no one will blame me.

Hey, the job will be hard at times but I know I can do it and I know it's worlds better than what I just left (I'm talking about Widgets the company, not the people). The job may not be really exciting or fulfilling, but like any job (or anything else in life I suppose), it's only for a while.

Anecdotes from a Week

2005-10-28T22:38:00.000-05:00

One whole week at my new job. Here's the odds and ends.

One meeting per day I spent most of Friday setting up one meeting. One meeting. I spent a lot of time asking people if they needed to be there and talking to the woman who would have to leave early because she has to go to the dentist because she has a broken tooth so could I change the time again, etc. By the end of the day it was done and everyone accepted. I even learned to use the room reservation web site. My coworker told me that was great and I should just go home (it was 2:30).

Meetings Everywhere During my first day I noticed a bunch of interesting/funny spaces all through the building. They are like big colorful cubbies, some with chairs and some with a table and no chairs and most of them irregularly shaped. During my second day I starting seeing people holding meetings in those spaces, usually standing up! I wonder how you schedule a meeting for the triangular purple space near the back door?

Quality Two jobs ago I was involved in several annoying and ultimately unsuccessful quality programs (TQM, ISO 9001) at a mainframe company. At Widgets, quality was a personal effort, not regulated but appreciated, we hoped, by the users if not by the people paying the bills who just wanted everything/anything asap.

In my new job I'm actually the person who makes sure that there is quality by making sure that everything that needs to be tested is tested and passes the tests. Because of my past experiences with quality, I was surprised the other day when I heard a senior manager say "Well, when there's a choice between having a quality product and making the schedule, it's obvious that having the quality is more important."

Acronyms I've worked in a lot of places as a writer/project manager now and the funniest/most tedious part of the first weeks is learning the company's acronyms. It's funny because everyone is spouting out these letter combinations that are meaningless to me and often sound quite funny but are deadly serious to them. I've become an expert at keeping a straight face when someone says something like "If BXS doesn't talk to the INZ subsystem, we'll get a failure in the IBS and you know what that means."

At Widgets we didn't have that many acronyms because the products all had one, usually obscure name. My favorite was the server named after an Egyptian god that had a spelling that almost everyone mispronounced.

At my new job I have a cheat sheet that I keep with me at all times with the key twenty or thirty acronyms. My experience so far is that no one knows them all. In a meeting on Friday my manager asked me what an acronym meant, then started laughing when he realized that he asked the new guy.

I had a classic acronym moment in the middle of last week. We were in a meeting about a product and someone was drawing on the wall (there's one wall covered in sheets of hard, clear plastic in every room). A guy wrote an acronym on the wall as part of a flow chart and a woman next to me said "That's not where the &&& system is." The chalk board guy looked around and said, yeah it is. The woman said, the (product name) isn't there. He said "no, &&& stands for (another product name)." The woman shook her head and said "Great, now that acronym stands for more than one thing."

Working/My Father Friday was the anniversary of my father's death back in 1978. When I think of my father, I always think about the government job that he held until his death, leaving the house every day at 7:30 and returning every day at 4:30 for thirty years. His job meant stability, a good living and the promise of retirement for a guy that grew up really poor in the Hill District in Pittsburgh (now famous as the setting for August Wilson plays). He didn't like his job much toward the end but he stuck it out because, I think, he knew things could be much worse. As a brainless teenager and twenty-something year old I saw his frustration and knew I would be different.

So how different am I? I always think my job should be better--that the management should be more appreciative, the work more challenging, the workplace nicer to be in, etc. That's why I was a union steward in two different places and, strangely, that's how I approached being a manager at my last job. (My manager apparently thought it was weird too.) I have, however, for many years worked regular hours at a number of companies so we could buy a house, new cars every decade, and send my kids to college. Not so different from my father really. I wonder what he would think about it.

Meetings

2005-10-27T20:40:00.000-05:00

Okay, I knew my new company had a "meeting culture" but today I had my first experience with what that meant.

I met with a project manager for the S*** project in the morning and we had a great discussion about what he was doing and how that related to what I was doing. He also explained who all the people on the very long email list were and where they sat in the meeting I went to which was very helpful. We then agreed that I would hold a kickoff meeting for my portion of the project. I felt like I was doing something!

Set up a meeting--easy. I opened Outlook and went to the calendar. Wait....there are a million rooms and I need a speakerphone and I know that most of the rooms don't have them. Which rooms have speaker phones? Are there preferred rooms? Cold rooms? Rooms with bad associations?

About then my manager stopped by to say Hi and ask how things were going. I told him what I had done so far that day and he said "Cool." He was about to leave when I asked him about meeting rooms. I told him that I knew there was a room in the basement set aside for the project. "Oh, don't use that room! Get **** to do it for you."

So I went over to the admin's cube area and she said she would be happy to help but I should figure out the time for the meeting first. I went to my cube and opened Outlook again, put in the dozen names for the meeting and saw that it was impossible to schedule a meeting anytime in the next month that would include all those people. I knew we had to have the meeting next week though so I went over to the project manager's cube and asked him who were the least necessary people on the list. His eyes widened and he said "They ALL have to come." So he opened Outlook, repeated what I did and saw the same thing. "During lunch on Tuesday we only miss one" he said. "In the future, for the recurring meeting, look a few weeks ahead and start there""

So I went back and set up the meeting, which a lot of people (who weren't in meetings) prompty accepted. Then I looked a few weeks ahead in the calendar and I still couldn't find a time. My coworker came by about then to introduce me to someone and I asked her how to work this. She looked at my list and told me that half those people weren't necessary and I was missing a bunch more necessary people. That meant I had to redo the one meeting I had successfully called and start over on the next meeting.

The most interesting things she told me was the everyone important to a project was double or triple booked all the time and they just decided at the time what meeting they would go to. That made me wonder if anyone ever accepted all the meetings and didn't go to any of them...nah, not at this place.

So it was five o'clock (late!) and I had to do this meeting stuff. I decided it could wait until tomorrow and left for another Widgets going away party.

A lot of folks were at a St. Paul bar to send off a designer who'd been in the company almost as long as I was. Only one programmer was there and he came in right when I was leaving so I didn't hear much except that his stress level was way up. I told him my stress level was way down. There must be some stress balancing force in the universe--maybe I could get a job studying that. Hmmm, might be stressful.

The Training Is Over

2005-10-26T20:35:00.000-05:00

I came to a great realization today. I think I actually sit closer to the door near the farthest parking lot so I should park there. It's not so important now but when it's 20 degrees below....

The other realization was that I have to start doing meaningful work tomorrow. A project manager came up to me in the hall and very politely told me that everyone on his project would like me to start the testing process right away. Could we have several meeting next week? I also have another meeting for a different project I have to cover which sounds more problematic.

I don't test, I force all the groups to figure out what they will test, document the dependencies, hardware and software, and then bug them until they do what they are supposed to do. I think there's some trouble shooting in there too. See! I have the 50,000 foot view down....just exactly how I do that will be a day-to-day learning experience. My problem is that the other person doing the job is considered to be nearly perfect so every time I don't know something or inevitably screw up they'll say "**** would have known that." Oh well.

I had fun at my manager's staff meeting. My manager has a great sense of humor and likes things to be loose so there was a lot of laughing and making fun of him which he seems to like. Nice people. We all had a really good laugh about the chicken coop they built to contain the smokers. They all said it was revolting and the smoke leaked into the adjacent building. I have to find that tomorrow.

I get up and walk all the time. If I go upstairs (there's five floors), I could probably walk for thirty minutes in the building. I guess there's a walking path outside but I haven't looked for it yet. It might be buried in snow in a month.

I used the library (there are a few in the building but I went to the main one), made it back to the coffee in the next building (where the only refrigerator in the complex is located), and signed up for a class. Sweetest of all, I worked my eight hours and took off, dropping the worries out of my mind as soon as went through that door. I can live with that.

Good news from the Widgets place. The dumbest waste of time web redesign project that I ever saw there launched on time tonight thanks to the hard work of several people whose skills were totally wasted. I apologize for assigning those people to those web sites. Please forgive me!