August 22, 2007
Dear Everyone:
This morning was supposed to start with a meeting in “Hobby” at 8:00 am Central Time. That’s 6:00 in the morning for us West Coast people. Fortunately, just before I left work last night, they sent an update, changing the start time to 9:00 in “Hobby”, which is 7:00 here. Starting work at 7:00 is almost normal for me, so getting up a few minutes early was not a problem.
The meeting started out right on time. The subject of the meeting was something like “Site Provisioning mini-workshop.” The purpose was to figure out what needed to be figured out to start setting up sites in the new working environment that would be GIL 3. (Everyone remembers that GIL 3 stands for Global Information Link, version 3, right? The new-and-improved hardware and software combination that will put Company light years ahead of the competition.)
I was
asked to attend the meeting as a delegate for the leader of our File
Plan team, as she is in
Part of my job is to create instructions for other people to show them how to use the File Plan in the new system. Trouble is: I’ve never seen what the File Plan looks like in the new system.
It’s sort of like trying to explain to a blind person how they are going to paint the interior of a house when I’ve never seen the house myself and don’t even have a copy of the floor plan. “We think the garage is over here on the right. Oops! That might actually be the bathroom. Watch your step.”
I was hoping that I might come out of the “mini-workshop” with at least a floor plan. I was wrong. Right off the bat, a couple of programmers started squabbling over whether this should be about “site provisioning” or “site collection provisioning.”
There is still a lot of confusion over who is going to do what. There is a role called the Information Management (IM) Coordinator. This sounds like a management position. Then there’s the IM Custodian, who might report to the IM Coordinator; the IM Custodian would be the person who does the actual work.
In addition, there is the IM Deployment Coordinator (IMDC) who is none of the above. What the “mini-workshop” was supposed to do was identify all the questions that the IMDC would need to ask to get the answers that would drive how the site would be built.
The real reason for the “mini-workshop” is that they’ve already hired a small army of IMDCs who are standing around with nothing to do. So the Powers That Be told someone to start them collecting data, long before anyone is really ready to deal with it. So what data should they be collecting and how?
There was a lot of “we’ll stipulate that we’re making an assumption here and move on”, but they never moved very far. At one point, someone asked if a lot of these questions weren’t the same as the ones that we used to ask when a group was moving into the document management system that I used to do training for. And wasn’t there already a template for that? It was stipulated that there might actually be an existing template, but no one wanted to take the time to go looking for it. Instead, we spent four hours reinventing the wheel.
In the end, a lot of “good stuff” was discovered and the group decided to meet every week to work the problem. Whether or not I’ll be a member of that group depends on the team leader who sent me to the “mini-workshop” in the first place.
Bottom line: Still no floor plan. Which is why the kitchen walls will end up Chartreuse instead of Buttercup Yellow.
Love, as always,
Pete
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