interrobang (‽)

After 18 months of development, my current project is finally being implemented at the first of ten scheduled sites.  This being a Warehouse Management project, the site is - obviously - a warehouse. Which means that most of our users are forklift drivers, plus a handful of ‘office-based’ supervisors, and a few gatekeepers.
My training team (three including myself) has been here conducting training for the past month, and this week the developers arrived in force, deposing us from our training room, and generally riding roughshod over everything we’ve had organized since we got here.  Despite having managed to navigate our way around the warehouse […]

What a week. For a minute back there, I thought I’d been human-trafficked.  It all started on Tuesday when I found out (from someone not even on the project) that the next phase of the project I joined only two months ago, and the phase on which I was scheduled to spend much of the next year, had been “indefinitely postponed” - generally a euphemism for “canceled”.  This happened on my last project as well, and was one of the reasons I moved onto this project.  (Now I’m starting to feel like the kiss of death on a project…) No-one […]

I swore I’d never do this, but I’ve been suckered into reading ‘management’ self-improvement books.  Last week I saw a copy of the ubiquitous Who Moved My Cheese? on a colleague’s desk, and scoffed at the ‘wacky’ title.  “Well, have you read it?” he asked.  Um, no.  “Well, it’s about managing change.  As you’re in Change Management, maybe you should give it a go.”  Never one to resist a ‘challenge’ I borrowed the book and dutifully read it. 
And it’s alright… It doesn’t offer any great insights or points of view (how could it in a mere 100 pages of wide-spaced, large type?), but its […]

We had a bit of a sketch at work, recently.  The developers had made some code changes to add new functionality that our users desperately wanted.  The change went in the night before a public holiday, which in retrospect wasn’t a great idea (especially as the programmer who made the change had flown back to Poland for the long weekend).  On the off chance that there might be problems, I went into work the next day anyway.
When I got in (at 7:00 am), I found out that the implementation hadn’t gone in cleanly, and now none of our retail sites (worldwide) […]