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...

Freeloading, weekend, tentatively satisfied

I'm not sure if you can quite make this out, but it's a photo of the handwash stuff from the men's loos in the Saatchi & Saatchi building on Golden Square. I've posted this purely as it seemed hilarious that after looking up to said organisation for most of my professional life, I found myself on Wednesday night spilling beer and eating more than my fair share of canapes in the foyer whilst Rudy used their lovely plant pots to knock the caps off beer bottles. What class and suaveness.

Anyway, the reason I was there was that a thing has launched recently called Voeveo, which is basically a global platform for sharing and selling content through one's mobile. So anyone who owns anything digital, be it music, video or whatever, can upload it to Voeveo and anyone in the world can buy it and download it. Very interesting stuff, mostly from a financial and back-end point of view which I won't bore you with here. They're from New Zealand, which generally makes them all-round good eggs in my book.

Apart from that, things have been reasonably quiet of late. The rugby finished on Saturday with a fairly limp game on the whole, which the Kiwi and I watched in the Temperance as usual before going home early and going to sleep more or less instantly. Sunday was more eventful; we had lunch with some friends who're not only heading back to NZ for good soon but pregnant as well. Despite one of our party being with child we managed a fairly long lunch and returned home tired and emotional at about 8, I think. Fortunately my rule of going ugly early on a Sunday worked and I have been hangover-free all day.

Last week was project management week, our PM being on holiday. I've refrained from posting on the subject whilst it was all going on, so I could give an overview of how it all went, and I'm pleased to report it all seems to have gone off pretty smoothly. The week wasn't without its learnings, suffice it to say, but on the whole much better than last time, which is good. #

And another thing - I'm only 30% of the way to my target, so dig deep, people. So far, Melvis, the Kiwi and the Milkman have all successfully bought my favour.

Flying

There's always something a little unreal about travelling to Dublin like this. I think it's got something to do with getting up at 0445 and stumbling dreamlike through the passages from home to tube to plane to bus to office. It doesn't entirely leave one in a suitable frame of mind for presenting complex multi-million Euro business models.

This morning, though, has been unusually calming. I've found that as I've got used to the journey (although I've not been too much lately), I've started to notice littler things about it which sort of take the edge off - the example this morning which prompted me to get out the laptop and document it before coming back down to earth was on take-off.

London was covered in thick fog this morning, the resultant gloom confusing the mind into thinking it was earlier than it was. Surging off the runway, the Airbus 321 broke through the fog within 10 seconds or so, into glorious sunlight and clear blue skies.

I don't think I'll ever get bored of flying. I know it's quotidian and mundane to many of us these days, but there's something about the seeming impossibility of getting off the ground, travelling so fast and ending up in a completely different country (and in Dublin's case, a completely different century) that never ceases to fascinate. You'd have to be pretty dull-minded not to marvel in childish wonder at it all, you really would.

Anyway, today's the last day of this sprint. The Irish project is still barrelling forwards, alarming some and exciting others. The Project Manager, with whom I'm getting on much better now I'm more comfortable in my role, is on holiday next week, leaving me to pick up from him and drive the project forwards into the next phase. Hopefully this time I'll be able to get a proper handover and won't end up feeling like the idiot I did last time.

And tonight - the perennially amazing Maximo Park at Brixton Academy. I've not seen them since the release of their last album earlier this year and, although I've seen this lot more often than any other act, I'm still so looking forwards to it - it's guaranteed to be brilliant.

Update etc

So, you've probably noticed that it's been a while since my last entry, and so it has. I've not got bored of this blogging thing, I've been alternately manically busy and avoiding getting online for non-work purposes in a kind of 'laptop brings pain' sort of way. So here I am, with a rare Saturday to myself and in a bit of a communicative mood. Work is finished for the day, having spent this morning trying to get something right that's been plaguing me all week.

On that. One of the major frustrations I'm finding at the moment is that whole thing about just not knowing stuff. There are things that are expected of me which I'm just not being told about, and of course when it turns out that I've not done whatever it was, I end up looking a bit rubbish. There's also the annoying thing about knowing what it is I need to say or communicate, but not knowing the 'proper' ways of doing it. These have been a recurrent themes over the past week or so and have been getting on my nerves somewhat. I think we're almost over the worst though, for now.

This particular phase of this project has slipped by a week, which isn't great news. The Project Manager came back from holiday on Monday (my 30th, incidentally, more on that later) and predictably was appalled by how random it'd all got in his absence. Personally I reckon that properly briefing the team and formally appointing a de facto team leader might've helped, but there you go, what do I know? One more week to go, looks like a bit of a week of absolute hell to me, most of it spent in Ireland with nowhere to hide.

On a more fun note, I turned 30 on Monday, which was horrifying. I'd never really been that bothered about it, but all of a sudden towards the end of last week I was starting to feel like I'd really not got to where I wanted to be in general by this age. I reckon I was being a bit too hard on myself, but it got to me a bit all the same. The pain was eased slightly by an afternoon in the park with some friends on Saturday and lunch at the River Cafe on Monday, which was absolutely tremendous, something I'd wanted to do for years.

The Kiwi, continuing her trend in buying me potentially lethal gifts (last Christmas she had me thrown out of a plane at 15,000ft), has bought me a first helicopter flying lesson. I'm really looking forwards to it - one of my life's ambitions has been to learn to fly a helicopter, so she's done well, I'm amazed and so touched that she's picked up on it. I suppose the only worrying thing about it (apart from the fact that there's no reason to be found in most schools of physics why something like that should actually fly) is that having wished for it for so long I turn out to be rubbish at it. We'll see. I'm bracing myself for my Christmas present, which will no doubt be a 'Beginner's Lion Wrestling' course or something. She's ace - always helping me push my boundaries.

Speaking of continuing trends, I've discovered that for the first time in my life, I'm actually getting fat. This is truly horrific. I've always been slim, and yes, sometimes tended towards a little beer belly, but I've never actually noticed wobbliness. Until now. I've cut out beer (sob), bread (making finding lunch more tricky) and I'm trying to get some exercise in where I can. Which reminds me - must go for a swim. In fact, I think I'll do that right now.

Must... blog...

Very quick one, as falling asleep on keyboard. Somehow wearing self out without seeming to be terribly productive. Hotel was lovely, lunch today at Tate Modern was too (albeit rushed), going to Manchester this weekend hooray, only in Dublin for a day trip next Thursday hooray again, mind leaking out of ears due to uncontrollable heaving beast of a project - booooo.

More comprehensive stuff next time, promise. When I've had some sleep. And maybe some of that EPO stuff that gets cyclists to the top of hills. Should be able to get me to week 5, I reckon...

Tales of Mayhem

This week's been one of those which is a bit like crashing whilst snowboarding. You're careering along at a fair pace and all of a sudden, nothing quite goes wrong as such, but for some reason the world's going upside down and round and round and things are hitting you from all sides and everything's white and then it stops. And you think 'Am I still alive?', before gingerly picking yourself up and doing it all again.

There's a few reasons for this. One is that the whole project is gathering pace, and now we're properly into the thick of it. Once you get into the detail you tend to find out a lot about the people around you - how much they're really involved, whether they're actually bothered about delivery, how good they actually are at their job, what their personal expectations from this are and so on. Can be a tense time.

The other reason is that the Project Manager went on holiday yesterday and that sort of puts me in that position. Which is fine and all, but to continue the analogy-fest, it's a bit like being in the passenger seat of an 18-wheeler and looking over to find the driver's jumped out. I'm intending that when he comes back in two weeks' time he'll find himself surplus to requirements, but I'm not sure I can quite pull off that sort of coup just yet.

So the past week has been productive, tiring, a fair bit of fun and generally ok. Thought I'd share with you the view from our office in Dublin, too. It's rather nice, can be distracting sometimes. I've also managed to upgrade our hotel slightly, possibly a bit further than I thought: one of the chaps who came over last week asked me to get a better hotel next time, as we'd been relying on the client to sort that element of the logistics and although the hotel's alright, it's not great. I gently mentioned this to the client, who said that they only had an account with the one we'd been staying at so we might as well sort it ourselves. I found the next closest hotel on a map and asked our travel elves to book it for me, which they did.

Turns out it's Bono's hotel. Well done me. Thought I'd get a bit of stick about this but apparently it's a sort of thing they do at our place. The thinking being that if you're being forced to spend time on your own, in a foreign city and away from your loved ones etc, you ought really to at least be able to do this in a pleasant environment. Round of applause for my employers, please.

In other news, everyone should check out www.wefeelfine.org. It's ace.