Keeping the Cray-Cray at Bay: Wed/Thu
Thursday, 26 July 2018, 8pm
Running along the edge of craziness, trying to keep on the sane side, continues this week as I'm working a customer POC that keeps threatening to go off the rails in various ways big and small. As I noted in a previous blog, the first two days this week were dominated with problems caused by rough edges in our product and its documentation, plus also a few customer IT problems. The past two days it's been about the customer not having their stuff ready to go. Here's a rundown.
Wednesday morning we scheduled an in person status & planning meeting with three of the stakeholders at the client. I emphasize in person because there's way more communication value there than in a remote meeting, plus only one of the stakeholders has attended the remote meetings. Forcing an in-person meeting got the others to focus on understanding the situation. It cuts them off from saying, "I didn't know...." Now we know that they know, and they know that we know that they know.
Anyway, at Wednesday morning's meeting we reviewed the status of what we've done so far, to ensure the client team are all up to speed on it. I drew diagrams on a whiteboard to explain it. That was really key, and that's an example of something that's hard to do via web meeting. (Yes, there are scribble apps, but they're clunky compared to what a handful of professionals can achieve clustered around an actual whiteboard.)
Whiteboarding also helped us form plans on the largest remaining task in the POC, building one of the customer's main software projects in our POC environment. We aligned on what to build, what servers we need to build it, and what software config information we need. It was a case of good news/bad news, though. Getting in alignment was the good news. The bad news was that the config info and servers weren't ready- and would require assistance from people in Taiwan, who (because of timezones) wouldn't be available until the end of our workday.
That all seems not too cray-cray, right? We just wait for the information. But the crazy-making part of it is that we're trying- my colleague and I are trying- to wrap this project by Friday. If we don't we fear it will jeopardize the client's timeframe for buying. So we are constantly eyeing the schedule. The loss of a day of work, in an already short project, is maddening.
Wednesday afternoon the systems we needed still weren't ready yet. One lost day was threatening to turn into two! But I did circle back with my technical counterpart for an hour online to knock out one of the smaller tasks on our list of 11 objectives. But the big one stil remains.
Wednesday night it was no rest for the wicked for me. I had to rush from wrapping up the late afternoon technical work session to attending an executive networking event staged by my company at a swanky hotel over on Sand Hill Road. (Read: where all the Silicon Valley venture capitalists are.) It was a good event, but I was fading rapidly by the time it ended at 9:30. I drove home and went straight to bed. Then I slept shittily for no apparent reason.
Thursday morning I was glad my POC customer has been distracted by other work instead of putting in solid 8-hour days on it because I was not at 100%. I slept in 'til about 8 and then wasn't firing on all cylinders until 9. I used the customer downtime to prepare demos for two of the remaining objectives, so it was time well used.
Thursday afternoon we reconvened with the client at 5pm. Yes, 5pm. Because Taiwan. A guy in Taiwan gave us access to the machine we needed. But as we started trying to connect it up to the others we found its network configuration was bad. That meant another trouble ticket and another day delay. ...That would be no sweat if we were billing by the hour, but it's crazy-making when we're trying to get this project wrapped by Friday!!
To keep the day from seeming like a total loss I did walk the client through one of the exercises I'd prepared earlier in the day. My main counterpart is a hard person to read- especially in online/phone meetings- because he speaks very little. Argh! Can you imagine how crazy it is to have phone meetings with someone who doesn't like to talk??! But my colleague and I coaxed him out of his shell enough to get confirmation that we'd crossed off at least one more small item from the list of objectives.
We wrapped this evening at 7pm. I turned off my monitor, said, "Yeah, I'm done," and went out for dinner. The prospectus for tomorrow is... try to finish everything else. Without Taiwan available to answer more questions (it'll already been the weekend for them). We'll see how crazy that gets....
Running along the edge of craziness, trying to keep on the sane side, continues this week as I'm working a customer POC that keeps threatening to go off the rails in various ways big and small. As I noted in a previous blog, the first two days this week were dominated with problems caused by rough edges in our product and its documentation, plus also a few customer IT problems. The past two days it's been about the customer not having their stuff ready to go. Here's a rundown.
Wednesday morning we scheduled an in person status & planning meeting with three of the stakeholders at the client. I emphasize in person because there's way more communication value there than in a remote meeting, plus only one of the stakeholders has attended the remote meetings. Forcing an in-person meeting got the others to focus on understanding the situation. It cuts them off from saying, "I didn't know...." Now we know that they know, and they know that we know that they know.
Anyway, at Wednesday morning's meeting we reviewed the status of what we've done so far, to ensure the client team are all up to speed on it. I drew diagrams on a whiteboard to explain it. That was really key, and that's an example of something that's hard to do via web meeting. (Yes, there are scribble apps, but they're clunky compared to what a handful of professionals can achieve clustered around an actual whiteboard.)
Whiteboarding also helped us form plans on the largest remaining task in the POC, building one of the customer's main software projects in our POC environment. We aligned on what to build, what servers we need to build it, and what software config information we need. It was a case of good news/bad news, though. Getting in alignment was the good news. The bad news was that the config info and servers weren't ready- and would require assistance from people in Taiwan, who (because of timezones) wouldn't be available until the end of our workday.
That all seems not too cray-cray, right? We just wait for the information. But the crazy-making part of it is that we're trying- my colleague and I are trying- to wrap this project by Friday. If we don't we fear it will jeopardize the client's timeframe for buying. So we are constantly eyeing the schedule. The loss of a day of work, in an already short project, is maddening.
Wednesday afternoon the systems we needed still weren't ready yet. One lost day was threatening to turn into two! But I did circle back with my technical counterpart for an hour online to knock out one of the smaller tasks on our list of 11 objectives. But the big one stil remains.
Wednesday night it was no rest for the wicked for me. I had to rush from wrapping up the late afternoon technical work session to attending an executive networking event staged by my company at a swanky hotel over on Sand Hill Road. (Read: where all the Silicon Valley venture capitalists are.) It was a good event, but I was fading rapidly by the time it ended at 9:30. I drove home and went straight to bed. Then I slept shittily for no apparent reason.
Thursday morning I was glad my POC customer has been distracted by other work instead of putting in solid 8-hour days on it because I was not at 100%. I slept in 'til about 8 and then wasn't firing on all cylinders until 9. I used the customer downtime to prepare demos for two of the remaining objectives, so it was time well used.
Thursday afternoon we reconvened with the client at 5pm. Yes, 5pm. Because Taiwan. A guy in Taiwan gave us access to the machine we needed. But as we started trying to connect it up to the others we found its network configuration was bad. That meant another trouble ticket and another day delay. ...That would be no sweat if we were billing by the hour, but it's crazy-making when we're trying to get this project wrapped by Friday!!
To keep the day from seeming like a total loss I did walk the client through one of the exercises I'd prepared earlier in the day. My main counterpart is a hard person to read- especially in online/phone meetings- because he speaks very little. Argh! Can you imagine how crazy it is to have phone meetings with someone who doesn't like to talk??! But my colleague and I coaxed him out of his shell enough to get confirmation that we'd crossed off at least one more small item from the list of objectives.
We wrapped this evening at 7pm. I turned off my monitor, said, "Yeah, I'm done," and went out for dinner. The prospectus for tomorrow is... try to finish everything else. Without Taiwan available to answer more questions (it'll already been the weekend for them). We'll see how crazy that gets....