Management Uppers / BWE

In which our Hero discovers what’s under there isn’t him for a change

It doesn’t take much time at all for the rush to become consuming. After two or three days of urgency always weighing on you, you start checking your email a little more, start pushing people a little more to get back to you. After a week, you’re pretty much at fighting speed all the time, fielding requests, juggling action items and bending time and space in meetings to your need and will. After two weeks, you’ve mostly forgotten what it’s like to not be in a deathmarch.

But now you know where I’ve been the last few weeks. My current project is a big strategic project for my client, a big global company. Which means that there are a lot of people in a lot of geographies with a lot of agendas as to what this actually is going to mean and how much we have to kowtow to whom in order to get the job done. And sadly, the parent company controls the purse strings which means that they have a lot more say than they should in what our regional company does and in how they do whatever it is that they does when they does it.

I’ve been designing. I’m the program architect, so at least within Canada, if there is a technical question or issue, it comes to me. And normally that means that I’m the guy who then has to write it all down, but as I polled my supporting technical people, this time around, I was startled to discover that I wasn’t writing the design. Just like at one point I let go of the coding to focus on the higher level tier, now I have a group of people who are taking my high-level guidance and making it into a detailed design which is then going to be made reality by a larger team of developers. In effect, I seem to have been promoted. It’s surreal.

Don’t congratulate me though, nothing has actually changed, and in the end, I’m still just the top grunt. Instead of doing the design, I was frantically concocting presentations to educate my team and the business users how the new system will work. And now I am the back stop for vastly more esoteric tasks, such as the 10 pages of technical mumbo jumbo that are the longest, most formal “Not applicable” that I can remember writing in a long time. Of course, that ask came Monday morning, and was required by Tuesday, so thanks for that.

And in a few hours, now, we will have a meeting to review the design phase and get management buy in for proceeding with the work from here. And in all honesty, as much as I normally want to be at these procedural meetings simply because it lends weight to the idea of my seniorty here, this time I’m really unhappy about going. This time, the program has so much attention that not only are there going to be Canadian C officers, but we’re also going to get people from Global which means that I’m going to be in front of a whole lot of people that I really don’t want the attention of. Not because I’m the gazelle in the middle of a pride of lions, but because I’m the healthy person in the middle of a plague outbreak. There’s little likely benefit from contact.

So I go through these last few days slinging words like Risk and Plan, once again going through the theatre of somehow describing in minute detail the work that we’re going to need to do for a system we don’t yet know exactly how we’re building. Amounts in the millions go up on slides and they are not tiny things like atoms or bytes, but rather dollars, a threshold that is not entirely foreign to me, but far removed from my daily life.

Because all the material has to get sent out for people to preread, even though few will do the reading, and fewer will understand what they read, the frenetic storm quiesces the day before the meeting, and suddenly I’m left without the next urgent to-do, just the lingering sense of something huge coming, the sickly awe of the review meeting with no more left to prepare and no real understanding of the politics that bring so much attention to the program. For a few short hours, there’s nothing left to do about the stress, except to have faith that people have done what they need to do, and that we have not missed something critically important, and that if we have, we’ve given ourselves enough time to get past the issue.

The meeting will play out, the important people will speak importantly, and then we’ll be given the green light to make things actually happen. Or not, I guess.

We’ll see.