The joy of Compliance Projects ...
"Interesting times" indeed. Both wx and work.
A major project deadline was officially moved forward from mid-July to mid-June. There are very sound, solid business reasons behind the move. And it's nice that the world won't end if we miss the new incredibly highly ambitious everything-must-work-perfectly-the-first-time deadline.
The downside is that one of my deliverables was to produce a suite of tools by that deadline. Now I have just over a week-and-half to design, write, test, and validate an entire suite that I *thought* I had five weeks to do. As of Friday, I had just started to dip my toes into the design and overall architecture, in between meetings and other tasks. In other words, I'd barely started.
This can be done. It's not horribly difficult work, but it *is* persnickety and requires intensive attention to detail and validation of -every- -single- -microscopic action- and -step-: since these are used to validate other outputs, a mistake here can mean a bug gets into production and costs the client millions. I've had to deal with _60_Minutes_ calling me at the office before, at a previous job; I'd rather not wish that upon my successor, you know?
This is on top of my regular Environment Management/Change-Prevention-Bitch workload. I talked to my boss -- I have a blank check as far as billable hours go. Our discussion was peppered with phrases like "Use-your-judgement-on-priority" "We-don't-need-EVERYTHING-by-then" "we-have-four-more-weeks-of-parallel-to-finetune-results" and "don't-worry-about-hours-we-need-results". How sweet it is having a supervisor who is reasonable, I've missed this guy.
I'm trying to declare this weekend 100% work-free ("enjoy my last day of freedom!") but my inner INTP is already munching away on the project, forcing me to stop now and then and write down a scribble of thought or chart out a batch flow or do something other than finish my breakfast and morning surfing. It's been so long since she was let loose on a juicy assignment.
Doing 60-80-100 hour weeks on almost no notice doesn't sting as much now that I'm hourly, y'know?
A major project deadline was officially moved forward from mid-July to mid-June. There are very sound, solid business reasons behind the move. And it's nice that the world won't end if we miss the new incredibly highly ambitious everything-must-work-perfectly-the-first-time deadline.
The downside is that one of my deliverables was to produce a suite of tools by that deadline. Now I have just over a week-and-half to design, write, test, and validate an entire suite that I *thought* I had five weeks to do. As of Friday, I had just started to dip my toes into the design and overall architecture, in between meetings and other tasks. In other words, I'd barely started.
This can be done. It's not horribly difficult work, but it *is* persnickety and requires intensive attention to detail and validation of -every- -single- -microscopic action- and -step-: since these are used to validate other outputs, a mistake here can mean a bug gets into production and costs the client millions. I've had to deal with _60_Minutes_ calling me at the office before, at a previous job; I'd rather not wish that upon my successor, you know?
This is on top of my regular Environment Management/Change-Prevention-Bitch workload. I talked to my boss -- I have a blank check as far as billable hours go. Our discussion was peppered with phrases like "Use-your-judgement-on-priority" "We-don't-need-EVERYTHING-by-then" "we-have-four-more-weeks-of-parallel-to-finetune-results" and "don't-worry-about-hours-we-need-results". How sweet it is having a supervisor who is reasonable, I've missed this guy.
I'm trying to declare this weekend 100% work-free ("enjoy my last day of freedom!") but my inner INTP is already munching away on the project, forcing me to stop now and then and write down a scribble of thought or chart out a batch flow or do something other than finish my breakfast and morning surfing. It's been so long since she was let loose on a juicy assignment.
Doing 60-80-100 hour weeks on almost no notice doesn't sting as much now that I'm hourly, y'know?