2007/01/09

One helluva worklist

This is my first work-tuesday since november. (last tuesday counts as a work-monday since monday was a holiday) Last night, I realized I had forgotten how draining this work stuff is. I'm glad I have a supportive wife at home.

Met with $PHB yesterday from 3:00-4:50 for an hour-long meeting. Discussed what's happened since I was last in the office...

The company is going with ScaleFarce for CRM. This was a surprising turnaround given the (admittedly fourth-hand) account of the negative reception of this deal the first time. And in order to make it easy to integrate "their" systems with "ours", we're going to implement MS BizTalk as a inter-middleware layer.

Did I mention we have no experience (as a company) with MS BizTalk? And that my group is expected to deliver a production-quality landscape (including DEV and TEST systems) by early march?

Also, $COWORKER{"leftcoast"} is moving up the coast a couple of hours to work in a sales office (rather than in the building with the datacenter) And since he wants to be on a management track (he even has an MBA), he's going to be given lots of responsibility. $PHB wants to virtually split his org between "Systems Infrastructure" and "Application Infrastructure" (but since there's not enough people, everybody gets an SI hat and an AI hat)

He wants me to (long-term) sit as technical advisor/architect atop both teams. I'm probably going to be saddled with (short-term) technical team lead responsibilities over the SI hats. I think I agree with the long-term plan, but I'm not so sure about being a "team lead". I definitely don't want the administrative headache of being a real manager (with a box on the org chart), like salary, reviews, budgeting, HR issues, etc. not to mention the endless "IT Manager Meeting"s

After discussing history, we went on to list the team's major projects (as we see them) for 2006. The list filled the whiteboard. It's going to be an interesting year.

Catching up on sudokus:
1/2:
132548769
478296153
695173842
913425678
784619235
256837491
567981324
321754986
849362517
1/3:
354629718
621857394
879314526
186732945
297485163
435961872
713546289
948273651
562198437

--Joe

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