April 2007 I started my new job. I was staying in the same federal agency, but switching from a contractor role to a federal employee job. I went from a recruiting/hiring role to a straight data analysis type position. I think some of the first things my boss told me was to "learn VBA coding and SQL syntax". Um, what? So yeah, the first few weeks was basically me feeling like an idiot for 9 hours a day. no.fun.at.all.
But slowly I picked things up, and I think I have a pretty good grasp of things now. But back then, I was still pretty lost. Its your typical "new job idiot" feeling where you're learning where the bathroom is, and who in the hell can help explain things for you. I HATE that feeling, and its one of the main reasons I'm happy with a slower career path that doesn't require me to jump jobs all the time.
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We're getting off track here. Sorry. Back to The Project. One of the first big events after I started was our annual Management Conference in June. For this year's meeting, we took all our managers and put them in 15 different teams with the task of highlighting each section's current procedure/policy/workflow, and to recommend changes and improvements. I got put on two teams - one I understood and one I did not. But being the peon of the "management circle", I had to write the powerpoints for both our groups.
The conference is about as exciting as it sounds - all day, 15 powerpoint presentations, and "team building" activities. Like 95% of the people there, I found it incredibly boring and only retained about 5% of the material presented. Lucky for us we were given a binder with all the presentations - a tiny little book of about 280 powerpoint slides.
Fast forward to August 2008. One of our high-level managers wants to create a "management reference guide", basically they want the binder from the Management Conference updated to show the current procedures now - what changes were made either by our own internal actions, or broad changes agency-wide. The Project gets passed down to someone higher up than myself. She's quite swamped with other projects, so she passes it on to me. Again, I'm still the low man here, so there's not really anyone I can pass it on to, and I've got a lot of other shit on my plate as well. She says there's no real deadline right now, but they do expect to see an end product at some point. I really did mean to start working on it, and I even read through all the old stuff, made notes, and noted what I needed to get updated.
I just didn't know how to get started. If I had some direction or even offering to provide me some help, I might be able to get some stuff done. But since it would require a.) all the material to be updated, and b.) a complete re-formatting of the information, WHERE THE HELL DO I START?!?!
So while I'm pondering this, other projects come up that take higher priority or need immediate action. This project gets put on the side for awhile.
Cue to two Mondays ago. Same woman who pushed it down to me says "Hey, can you have a first draft of The Project ready by the end of the Fiscal Year?"
"You mean, like in two weeks?"
"Yeah, why, is that going to be a problem?"
"Maybe. I haven't really had much time to get started, and I have a lot of other stuff going on right now as well."
"Well, we need a draft by the end of the FY."
Me, to myself - "well....fuck me."
Keep in mind...this is 15 separate group's work, from 15 months ago. And we're coming up at the end of the Fiscal Year, which is always extra work for managers.
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I'll spare everyone of the details of how I got it done, but I will say that I work with some really great people who really helped me get these updates done. And other people were willing to take the time and let me bug them with questions.
So tonight, after 2 weeks of working on it every night and all day on the weekends, I think I'm done with my first draft for review. I was able to shrink down 280 powerpoint presentations to 20 pages of flowcharts and narratives of each step in the processes.
And I really hate bragging or tooting my own horn, but I fucking rocked it. I'm so proud of what I was able to do with this.
And I really think starting this blog right in the middle of working on it helped. After 8-10 hours a day at the office, coming home and working 3-5 more hours at home for two straight weeks, I was starting to get a little crazy. Thoughts flooded my brain and I needed a way to get them out, because I didn't have the space to keep them up there while trying to wrap my head around The Project.
So thank you.
Hopefully now that I have a bit more time on my hands, we can hang out more often.
1 comment:
Oh, I love that you got that project done AND that blogging helped you w/venting.
That all kinds of rocks.
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