It is just a weird coincidence that the last post and this has the same title pattern.
Today, Andy (aka my boss's boss's boss) sent me a mail to congratulate me of my sixth year in the company. Wow. Isn't that "grant", as some of my Irish colleagues always say.
The last twelve months have been really challenging in terms of mental stress and some physical stress. Let me do a quick recall of the last twelve months.
My mom suffered severe back pains last September, and i came back to Singapore for about 3 weeks to just rest and relax with the twins. That was after I've attended the AVAR conference in Tianjin, where i bought a handful of 1 US dollar webcam for use by my nephew and myself. Apparently these are of better quality than i thought!
The system i was managing was assigned an overhaul. The primary goals of the overhaul were something that i was never able to agree to, and they most probably were concocted by folks that were not in this space at all.
With a tri-factor relationship between my team and the partnering groups, and with me being the single voice of reason and truth, it was a very tedious few months for me as we marched towards the rollout of the system. At certain points during these months, I've almost made up my mind.
Amidst these, Terry joined the twins and we now have three grand-niece/nephews to love! He kinda announced the start of the world cup, which helped to distract me from the issues that i was seeing.
The overhaul of my primary system didn't go too well initially (as i have predicted), and is still quite a piece of art these days, but it's not longer something that i am bothered with.
Though now that my management have acknowledged that my arguments and doubts of the overhaul are valid and with foresight, this did not do anything to me in terms of morale. Like Costello screaming to Abbott.. "so what?!". We're still stuck with it, and my customers are stuck with it, and my team is stuck with it.
With the expected volume of work that will be coming in the next few weeks/months, we have staffed up to way over pre-E3 headcounts (wink wink), with vendors and FTEs. My system is now monitored by the Tier 1 team, which helps to reduce the need for myself and Andrew to constantly look at the system and allow us to focus on some projects to drive the service even further.
Hector, my new boss, came in right in the middle of the biggest breakdown of the new system. What a welcome that was for him! He has some long-term vision of how the system will go, and we do have our discussions and arguments about how certain developments are going with our partnering groups.
I'm glad that Andrew has picked up most of the remaining work, and has started his focus on the current system patches and rollouts, and allow me to start writing up some basic framework or vision on how the service can continue on. This has also created some time for me (after work of course) to do my own research and writing. Definitely it's not going to be as easy as my Live Spaces blog, which I've created just for fun.
Stepping back as the first positive outcome from the overhaul for myself. I've recently started to step back even further, to the point of giving myself a goal of ten work emails a day, Andrew/Hector not including.
Most of the time, i was able to achieve this goal. Pretty cool ain't it?
Let's see how the next twelve months go. I hope to see big changes along the way, as our main products are released.
