Busy, busy, busy...

Life has been unbelievably busy and stressful in the last few weeks!  Ergo, no almost no posts and not that many comments being left.  Sorry…

So what’s been happening in this neck of the woods?  Well, to start with I have been learning a little about myself. I needed to write my life CV for the VU – something that I am sure enough of you out there have also had to do.

I actually thought that it was going to be fairly easy – after all I had to write it 12 months ago for my therapist, I assumed that all I would have to do was add a bit about all (admittedly a lot) that happened in the last 12 months and email it to the team.  As I say, easy.

Only it wasn’t.  Oh, adding the new section was not that much of a problem – it’s a little in list form rather than a description, but it’s easy enough to do.  No, the problem was that a different person wrote the document last year.  Whilst the text is correct and accurate it I can’t imagine writing like that again.  So I spent a long time editing, rewriting and checking the existing text to get it somewhat more akin to what I would write today.  I failed miserably – the only way I could have achieved what I wanted to do was ‘ctrl-a’, ‘delete’ and start again.  Thinking about the amount of time that I spent on the document maybe that is what I should have done…

I sent it earlier this week, but before doing so I checked the document properties.  Ouch, 24 hours total editing time for 18 pages.  Told you I have been busy!

There have also been big changes in my work over the last week or so.  I couldn’t write about them – and as they were causing a lot of what I would have written about I basically didn’t…  But they are now out in the open.  Two things have happened – a change in management structure, and a change in development teams.

The first means that my two bosses who I have told are no longer my bosses.  I have two new ones.  This is going to be a little of the unknown, I have yet to work with my new boss closely – and he is going to be managing both the developers and the innovation teams.  Ideally we should work as one team, but there has always been an atmosphere of ‘us and them’.  I think that having one manager, and one department, will certainly help that – providing it is handled correctly and not handled as an innovation team with a little IT tacked onto the side.

The team changes are due to a promotion of my tech lead developer to team lead of our second development team (how confusing could I make that sentence ;p).  The fact that he accepted that position surprised me, I was not expecting him to want to take a team lead position as he is a real techy, but I do think that he will be great in the job.  Unfortunately it does decimate my team as I lose the person with the most experience.  In order to maintain a pair of balanced team we have been discussing how we are going to reform them.  We have a plan which is going to be discussed with my new boss today.  Fingers crossed that he agrees.

And it has been a time of, as Jenny puts it, ‘long talks’.  My management structure knew what I was going through.  I did that deliberately, as I don’t think that it is a bad idea for them to know.  However, now that they are no longer my managers I have lost that.  I have spoken to my new boss already, and the new team lead, and have an appointment with my bosses boss (which with a flatter structure also happens to be the director of the company) this afternoon.  Update since I first wrote this post...  My other boss has now been told and took it far better than I was expecting...  So I can start to relax again...

My boss, and the other team lead took it extremely well.  The only fly in the ointment was my boss asking why I was so worried, and why would I think that he would not understand.  He wants a chat to ensure that he is not coming across as a macho man that people can’t talk to.  The other team lead was actually quite funny.  We talked, he wasn’t entirely surprised, and came out with the most intriguing sentence I have heard when having these talks. ‘It’s not the strangest thing I have heard in my life’.  I want to know what is! :)

And…  On Tuesday I had dinner with a  friend and his wife so that they could meet Stacy.  But that will get a post if its own :)

Plus...  I have just noticed that this is my 200th post...  I had not really expected to be able to keep up the writing for this long when I started.  Apologies for the rubbish I have inflicted on the world in that time :)