Saturday, September 03, 2011

More Of Whatever The Hell It Is I Do All Day

Because I don't feel I've bored you enough, I thought I'd post more about my job, starting with some of the acronyms I encounter on a daily basis:

PMO
OSS
VSS
CMDB
CMTS
ORT
UAT
EMS
PMS (No, not that kind)
RNOC
TOC
EOC
RACI
BTS
BPS
OMSE
SLA
MSA
SWOT
KPI
MARS
...and so forth.
Are there even more than that?  Oh yes.
Do I know what they all stand for?  Yes, actually.  (To make matters even worse, some of them stand for more than one thing.)
Do I find that sad?  What do you think?

He Who Laughs Last Department:
Post-reorg, our group has been trying to focus on quantifying the work we do in the form of easy to understand metrics, in part to show how overburdened we are.
As part of that - and to help better align the enterprise-wide processes, and to account for our new responsibilities - we're putting a major emphasis on definining our processes and requirements, and requiring other groups to adhere to them when they engage us.  (It's actually a major victory to have them engaging us at all, and even moreso that we're getting them to engage us before new products launch.)
Towards that end, we're looking at ways to streamline the engagement process and to make it easy for external groups to know exactly what we require and to provide it to us, and, in my estimation, the best way to do that (right now, at least) is to put our Entrance Checklist online on our SharePoint site, so that people can have a single location where they can go to fill out the Checklist without having the confusion of e-mailing files around and running into version control issues.
Unfortunately, our current deployment of SharePoint is...not great.  So while it's a workable (in theory) solution, it's far from ideal, but our only option is to turn the Checklist into a survey.
A new project was recently announced, and my boss and I agreed that this would be an ideal time to (finally) get the revamped Checklist online and start directing people to it.
So that's what the hell I was doing all day yesterday.  Well, for most of the day, at any rate.  I also rewrote and revised some process docs.
I ran into some problems - due to the limitations of our SharePoint site - right away, so the whole thing took longer than it should have, and finally I had to tell my boss, "Yeah...let's just send them the actual Word doc version of the Checklist; I don't think I'll have this up and running today."
However, I kept working on it until the bitter end.  Or at least close to the bitter end.
A bit before 2 my boss came around and said, "Get out of here, willya?  Go, have a good weekend.  I'm not stressing about the Checklist."
I wasn't exactly stressing about it either, really, but I had come to feel that the survey was mocking me.  I could hear its derisive laughter.
Still, I don't argue when the boss tells me to leave early...especially considering that I had to leave early anyway because I had an eye appointment.
On the way to my car I had something of an epiphany, and realized that I'd been approaching the survey all wrong.
So I thought, "We'll see who's laughing come Tuesday morning, survey!"

Technically Incorrect Department:
Boss:  You're more technical with that than I am.
Me:  Yes, I'm more technical than you in general...which is bizarre, considering that you have an Engineering degree and I have an English degree.

At The Movies Department:
On Tuesday my department had a joint "team outing' with another department, which involved going to the fancy new theater here in Leesburg and having a catered lunch, and then taking in a movie.  We each got to choose whatever movie, playing within the outing timeframe of 11:30-4, we chose.  I opted for Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
It was okay.  It was certainly better than being at work, and it was free, so I hardly have anything to complain about.
Plus I worked from home in the morning, as it hardly made sense to drive in to work for a few hours, then turn around and drive back to Leesburg.

1 comment:

Merlin T Wizard said...

::snore::
::snort!::
Huh? Whuzzat?
::lipsmack::
::snore::