August 16, 2007
Dear Everyone:
I’m back. I was in “Hobby” all last week for a File Plan Workshop (more about that later.) I got back last weekend, but today was the first day that I spent in my own “office”. This is because we spent the first three days of this week in a different office park, taking part in Electronic Records Management (ERM) training. And the odd thing was: I kept seeing the same people this week in “Pleasanton” that I saw last week in “Hobby”. It’s very busy around here.
I flew to “Hobby” Sunday morning (8/5/07), meeting a co-worker at the baggage claim carousel and sharing a cab to the “Hobby” hotel. The workshop began Monday morning in the Camellia Room at 8:00 am. This meant that I could sleep in as my “commute” was less than 10 minutes from my guest room to the meeting room.
The meeting Monday lasted 13 hours. As did the meeting on Tuesday. And so on through the week. It was sort of like working like a dog while simultaneously being in the lap of luxury. Each day began with breakfast, supplied by the hotel. At 10:00 someone took away the breakfast food and laid out the mid-morning snacks. At noon, we had lunch, then mid-afternoon snacks. Around 6:00 they got us menus to order dinner from room service. We almost never left the Camellia Room before 9:00 pm.
Then it was back to the guest room for a bath, do some ironing for the next day, watch a little TV and go to sleep. And then repeat the next day. Actually, watching TV was something of a level-set. All the shows I would normally watch would be over by the time I got out of the tub (everything starts an hour earlier in Central Time Zone.) So I would watch CNN. This would remind me that, although I was working especially hard, I wasn’t trapped in a coal mine, nor did I have to worry about suicide bombers walking into the Camellia Room.
Did I mention the masseuse? I think it was Tuesday that they had arranged for everyone to sign up for 15-minute “chair massages”. Like I said: Lap of luxury. Working like a dog.
The reason for all this was because Wednesday, 8/8/07, was the deadline for File Plan version 2.0 to be released so that it could be used in the upcoming “Full Pilot” testing of GIL3. (Any questions? Does everybody remember that GIL3 is this huge company-wide project to replace over 50,000 computers and introduce an entirely new way of working and storing electronic records to everyone in 180 countries around the world?)
We are currently in the “Limited Pilot”, where only people who work for the Information Technology Company (the computer geeks and Information Management people) are testing the new systems. We wanted them to test the File Plan as well, so we pushed to release version 1.5 in time for this limited pilot.
The “Full Pilot”, will involve a lot more people, although they are still trying to limit the participants to “embedded” Information Technology personnel in other operating companies. In other words, they’re still stacking the deck with geeks. The Full Pilot won’t start until October, but they need a lot of lead time to set everything up, which is why we knocked ourselves out last week to complete File Plan version 2.0.
2.0, by the way, is less than half of what the File Plan will be when it comes time to begin the actual Deployment, which is slated to start next February. So we will have plenty to keep us busy for the rest of the year.
Especially me as I’m supposed to come up with the instructions on how to actually use the File Plan. Since the “File Plan” currently consists of a single spreadsheet that most people will never see, I’m kind of spinning my wheels at the moment. But I have some ideas. We’ll see where they lead.
Love, as always,
Pete
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