Its been a while since I have published anything so this blog is starting to look more like an archive of my old ideas rather than a regular window into my musings and ideas.
But there is an explanation – My most recent project has been consuming more of my attention than expected.
Project New Baby (Or since we normally use acronyms in IT – “PNB”) involved the development and delivery of the next generation of peopleware for the King household (ie a baby).
Since the project was run by my wife, who is an exceptional project manager, the project delivered earlier than promised, which sounds good.
But there is a thing called project Karma that came into play on the delivery date. I have delivered a lot of IT projects in my time and have sometimes been guilty of saying “We can do that in warranty support” when I encounter things that could delay delivery of my project. I have even managed to deliver a project early by shifting some of the work into the forthcoming production releases.
The down side of deferring things to warranty support meant that the issues left behind were dealt with by a shocked looking and under-prepared production support team.
Beyond the short term impact though, the theory of project karma states that the luck you have on your future projects will be impacted by the good and not so good things you have inflicted on others in your previous projects.
So it should come as no surprise that although my wife delivered PNB earlier than expected, the warranty support team of two (my wife and I) found themselves under-resourced and poorly trained to support the new baby in production.
Consequently, I have been in a state of perpetual chaos for the last month or so, dragged away from other endeavours to support the new release.
On the plus side though, PNB has exceeded stakeholder expectations in customer satisfaction and other key indicators.
James King 