Definite progress

... on two fronts. Firstly, that Powerbreath lark I mentioned a while back is really working - still doing it every morning, and this evening managed a full 1.5k in the pool, which is precisely 10 lengths further than I've ever gone. This, I reckon, is 100% down to the breathing exercises, 30 breaths each morning is all it's taken.

Secondly, the plan's sort of all popped into place, as the Irish client reckons he can take on the BA tasks, so I'm free to go as of Feb 12th, when we go on holiday for about three weeks (more on this later - I'm SO excited). They're not replacing me throughout the remainder of Feb, which will throw up whether they need to moving forwards or not. I sort of suspect they will need to, as the client only actually sees about 25% of what I do, and he's right - that much he can (and should) do, but the less interesting stuff, the stuff that's currently doing my head in, they'll have to get some other gimp to do.

This leaves me free to get on with my life when I get back in early March. Remains to be seen exactly what they'll get me onto, but ooh, that's all part of the fun, eh?

9 days of hermitude

Yes, Facebook users, you read it right. The Kiwi and I have kicked off our annual January health binge. This morning, following a really-quite-pleasant breakfast of some sort of apple & cinnamon porridge which the Kiwi made from scratch (oats & all), we headed off to Tesco and spend just over two and a half times our weekly food budget on five days' worth of food, including a good £30+ on wacky things like glutamine powder and so on.

Seriously, our trolley looked like a Monet painting, all greens, reds and yellows, bursting with good intentions and so on, seeds, sandals and such. For a moment there I could almost hear George Orwell mocking me for looking like one of his 'fruit-juice drinking, bearded, sandal-wearing socialists', so I snuck a bottle of wine in there too to balance it all out, although I won't be able to drink it until next Saturday. We're doing something called the Holford  9-Day Liver Detox, which the Kiwi picked up in Manchester and which, unlike the one we've done for the last two Januaries, seems to consist largely of really nice meals. I'm actually looking forwards to it, in a way.

This should coincide with a renewed bout of exercise and so on, which in my case has manifested itself with me using a Powerbreathe to get my cardio fitness up to a point where I can actually walk to the gym without getting out of breath. The Kiwi is in the pool as I type - I'm not swimming with her at the moment as she's quicker than me and yes, that bothers me enough to swim alone. I'm not proud but there you go...

So we'll see how this goes. The two things that concern me most are the not drinking thing, as I'm kind of used to a glass of wine with my weekend meals, and the lunch thing, as I'm not sure how taking seeds and salads to work is really going to work. We'll see. I do need to do something like this so I'm going to do what I can to make it work.

On the work front, things are moving forwards. I've set in motion a plan to get me off the Irish project and on to higher profile stuff that works better in the context of my short-term career instead. If I'm to be leaving the country in the coming 12 months I reckon I need to consolidate my retail strategy and management consulting creds, rather than learning how to be a business analyst, which is frankly somewhat dull in my opinion.

So I'll be on the Irish thing for about another month, then we're off to the other side of the world for a couple of weeks, then I should be back to work on something else, all being well. The aim is to get into a position where rather than being stuck into one thing for six months at a time, I can get involved in lots of things more lightly. All good for the CV.

So there we are. A shiny new set of good intentions to rival Kathryn's! Right, off to find out what these flax seeds are all about. I'm somewhat suspicious.

Keeping it going

Everything's gone sort of mental this week, and it's been a while since I had a proper rant so here it is. It's the first proper week of building the Irish project, and as I sort of suspected, it's taking the team some time to grasp the relatively complex concepts we're dealing with. Unfortunately it tends to come down to the business analyst to sort all this stuff out. Which is me.

Now, as I've said before on this blog, I'm not a natural business analyst. It's all about detail, translating business and functional requirements into technical tasks and so on. I hate this sort of stuff, and because I'm not naturally predisposed to break things out to the tiniest bit of detail, it's a bit of a struggle for me, and I'm convinced that I'm not doing a particularly good job. To be brutally honest, there are natural BAs in the business who could be doing this job much better. They're the buttoned-down looking people with lots of pens.

My natural role, as colleagues have pretty much mentioned in my reviews, is business consultant - the strategy, business modeling pieces which use my experience to bring context to the businesses we work with. This is where I'm comfortable - the fluffy stuff, basically. Delivering on it is one great big bore.

Add this to the fact that there's still loads of genuinely exciting stuff going on elsewhere in the business that I ought to be involved in, not to mention very real requests for help coming from colleagues involved in projects with very large clients, and you get one rather conflicted blogger.

However, I'm not blind to the fact that beggars can't be choosers and, particularly with a mere six months under my belt, I'm not in a position to go around demanding certain roles, and billable work is billable work. So, I'm buckling down and sifting through the billion pieces of detail that go to make up a website these days, answering the billion tiny (and some massive) questions that the development team have to ask, and all this until Christmas. There's another 5 months to go on this project, but frankly the that thought terrifies me.

So this gives me three weeks to engineer my way out of this and onto something more interesting. Watch. This. Space.

Grumpy, stress, but some good news

Ooooh something of a day of contradictions today. On one hand, the Irish project I'm on is becoming somewhat tiresome, with fiddly bits of detail bothering me slightly and those who know me will know that I'm so not in the detail. So this is bothering me. I'm also seeing things going on in the business that I'm sure could benefit from my input but instead I'm here counting servers and adding up license costs.

Bah.

Anyway, if I'm seeming a little bit ungrateful and unwilling to do the necessary grunt work to get ahead career-wise, that's because I am. I reckon I just need to get my head down and plough on through it for a month or so before pulling the 'been there, done that, now show me something interesting' card and we'll see what happens.

That said, I am learning a ton of stuff at the moment, not only in terms of the techie stuff I'm being forced to read up on (who knew how useful an MVC Model could be?), but also in the whole project management, business analyst sense. Much though it galls me to say. It's a bit like muesli - you know what I mean, good for you but no fun.

On the other hand then, I've passed my six month probation period, which means I'm now officially an employee with rights and everything. The feedback I've had has been really quite good too, and constructive, so I'm feeling an odd mixture of massive smugness and huge inadequacy as I make my shoddy attempts to write technical specifications.

So woo for that. And for my Kiwi, who despite her monthly headache, presented me with a pretty good-looking bottle of wine as a well done present. No drinking in the week right now mind... GOD I'm so dull right now. I'm going to have to have a moment of irresponsibility soon, I can feel it coming on...

And here we go again...

Another 0430 start tomorrow, shudder. It really does leave you feeling a bit dislocated all week, that sort of thing, and dropping out of my normal routine does tend to leave me somewhat ruffled. I'm sure I'll learn to deal with it in time, the rest of the team seem to manage ok.

Given the relative silence from me this week I've decided to jot a little entry down now (whilst telling the Kiwi that I'm working, which I sort of am. Sort of.). You see, we have but one ethernet connection in the Irish office, between numerous people, and the connection in the hotel is appalling, so my opportunities to do interweb stuff are a bit limited. I'd hoped to be able to give nightly updates or something, but there you go. Oh, and if you think I'm doing this from my phone, stop right there. It took me 20 minutes to write an email the other day.

On the whole it's been a productive week. I'm fortunate enough to be working with a very experienced Project Manager who's giving me a fair bit of guidance, which is great as I've not worked as a Business Analyst before. There's a certain discipline to it, which seems to be aimed at coaching people for whom analysis doesn't come naturally through the whole thing. It's a case of putting fairly rigid processes around what for me is a pretty natural way of thinking, so once I'm through the learning curve of understanding those processes I should be ok. End of next week, I reckon. It's sort of fun, in a challenging kind of way.

One of the things I'm having to learn about at the moment is unions. See, as a child of the Thatcher era, I know nothing of unions in practice. All I know about them is that getting rid of them left a lot of working people rather exposed but meant that more senior people could make more money, or something like that. Anyway, the unions are alive and well in Ireland, and one has to tread extremely carefully when entering a business to potentially effect change. I've horrible visions of the Irish fondness for kneecappings and the like, but I'm told that doesn't happen nearly as much these days.

I did actually write a big long blog post last week, typing it into Notepad and intending to paste it in when I next got online, but I decided not to expose you all to what was a fairly downbeat entry about how bored I was and how over this whole working away from home thing I was. True, I was getting a bit sick of crap TV, no swimming and no Kiwi, and any city's pretty much the same old boring nonsense when you're there on your own (as I was for much of last week, effectively), but I decided in the cold light of day to count my blessings etc. I went for a run the next morning south through the canals of Dublin, with all the hedges sparkly with dew and the morning sun just starting to warm up the cobbles and everything sort of popped into perspective.

Flying back into London on Thursday was a real eye-opener, can't tell you how good it was to get back to this city which, despite all its failings I really am starting to love. Was truly amazing to walk out of the tube later that day into the Kiwi's arms and get back HOME, where there are unthreatening pubs and normal money and decent food and reliable internet connections. She made a brilliant paella on Friday night too, fantastic thing that she is, having batted those lovely lashes at the fishmonger in Notting Hill and come home with some of the fattest tiger prawns I've ever seen. I'm a very lucky chap.

So, lunch today at the best pub in West London, the Temperance just by Putney Bridge with some friends of ours who've just announced that one of them's in a family way, and then an early night and doing it all again next week - we have pivotal workshops Tuesday and Wednesday, including dinner out on Tuesday which apparently might stand a chance of changing my opinion of Dublin cuisine. Presumably this means it's not in one of the thousands of kebab shops which seem to be the cornerstone of Irish foodiness. Here's hoping...