Journal: The more things change...

Hmm... first entry. What to write about?

I'm terrible with keeping journals. I can't "blog" for shit, and in r/l I only keep a paper journal up to date when I'm feeling contemplative. That means, I only write when I'm on the edge of anxiety/depression. When I'm feeling "good" I'm much too busy to bother with writing about the experience. I guess this means... ::sigh::

It's going on 7 months with the new job. Thankfully, things are still 98% positive, but I'm burdended with foreboding. The CEO wants to chat with me to see what's going on in my department.... Normally, I don't have a problem with this, but lately things have been pretty slow on this, the software development, end of the production team. We're in a holding pattern on version 1 product support, and just beginning version 1.5 planning and research. Not to mention that my team is now full of new members who're busy getting their heads around the product and the environment.

I don't have much real progress to show. Lots of paperwork, design work, training work to report, but very few new functional pieces. I don't feel like I'm doing my job very well. I have a lot of excuses about WHY things are the way they are, but really, they're just excuses.

Too bad I couldn't get upper managemenrt to buy into Crystal or Scrum style "agile" project management methods. They want Gantt and Pert charts. They want the paperwork, if only because having something "in hand" lets them sleep easy at night. The documentation security blanket.

I just got out of that style of "big" management IT consulting. I was hoping that it would be different at a startup, but as the title of this entry says...

Anyhow, version 1 is doing well enough. Still not in production, but that's really due to hardware development being behind (they've a much more difficult job to do, so I'm not blaming them by any means). Everyone understands the situation, and the test version is reliably handling almost 100 deployed units, so things are looking very good for the real production environment. I'm happy, the boss(es) is(/are) happy.

I'm just not happy about where things are at with everything else. I'm pretty sure that when the management sees where everything else is at, they'll be in the same mood. Unfortunately, there isn't much we can do about it except get angry.

I need the new members for the next phase of development because there are going to be both development and support activities. So right now they're busy eating up funding and not producing because they're busy getting ready to produce. I can't get them to produce faster because we're still in a test-phase and I'm splitting my time between project management, architecture, and training them on the bits and pieces of the version 1.

Oh whatever...

I'm still 100% happier here than I ever was with my former employer and this team rocks, and is gonna rock harder in the coming months. I can hardly wait to really get into this next production cycle. Busy, busy, busy...

(If things go well, I'm going to reward myself with a new G35X. Black with tan leather interior. Oooh baby...)