Bits and Pieces of Work « Baltimoremick.com

Bits and Pieces of Work

Being a contractor, I forgot about the magic of expensing things. I can do that now as an employee, and it is nice. While I am not going to go “hog wild,” I really forgot how this basic thing is quite nice.
Getting access to places and applications is a fairly easy process, but I miss being the provisioner. It is nice to know how these things work, but sometimes I miss being the guy who “made the magic happen.”
Since I am effectively “middle management,” I have discovered the perils of that area. Last Thursday night, we had a rather major installation that needed to be done, and while I was not actively playing a role, I was monitoring it remotely. Of course, the work took longer than expected and I did not go to bed until 3:30 AM Friday morning. We got the work done, and it was less disruptive the following morning. There are still a couple of things that we need to resolve that we are discovering in the last few days, but these appear to potentially be related to a race condition when it comes to login scripts.
Change Management has its moments. Sometimes, it seems as though I am just the messenger for other things going on. At other times, it seems as though I am really taking things a bit head-on. I did get a good compliment today about throwing the brakes on a change earlier this week, so I have to admit that I do see value.
There is the middle management part, though, that comes with the territory. Meetings have been filling the last two mornings for me, and I am fairly confident my day tomorrow has some meetings as well. It’s not that bad, but it can make managing email and other tasks a bit harder sometimes.
The worst part of my week, though, was presenting to a room full of developers what is effectively an easy task and listening to them complain about how complex it was. Effectively, the process is run a batch file, copy and rename a log file that batch process generates, then run a second batch file. Apparently, this process is much too difficult to understand for this group of developers. I have been in lots of meetings in my day, but I have never so wanted to just smack some people around following a meeting.
I need to become a bit more familiar with SOX than I am now. It is going to be painful, but I have a lot to deal with on that front as a result of my change management role.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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