Wednesday, December 03, 2003
We went live today, very peacefully (which is a good way to go live, neither bang nor whimper). Several of the inevitable bugs occurred but by now I have several crack fix teams* trained up and by the end of the day we had squashed them all. To celebrate I honoured a bet I made long ago and wore my kilt to work. This generally went down well, but walking around at lunchtime it was very hard to keep a straight face as there was so much jaw-dropping. I had to go to the Bureau de Change and walking back with 5million (meticals!) in my sporran it was quite good to have the deterrent effect of sheer confusion (one guy actually asked if I was a boy or a girl) to ward off pickpockets.
Anyway, despite the smoothness of the switch-on, there will be momentous consequences - this day the worm really began to turn. For several weeks now the contrast between our neck of the woods (energetic, productive and almost 100% mozambican) and certain other parts of the project (not sure what they're doing but no software is coming out the end) has been causing rumblings. Today these came into the open. There is a frantic effort starting to 'mozambicanize' some of the teams but apparently all the new starts want to work in our team because its reputation has spread.
This is very gratifying but runs the risk of overexpansion - we can only digest so many new people at once without losing our magic formula, so tomorrow I will speak to a PIP (Pretty Important Person) to gently put this across. In fact I suspect he is a VIP in disguise, on the road to becoming a EIP, but he's also very sorted and today realised that he has definitely been 'backing the right horse' with us so it shouldn't be too hard to find a happy understanding.
*crack fix team - nothing to do with cocaine arrangers, rather a group of people who are good at working together to resolve errors in software applications
Anyway, despite the smoothness of the switch-on, there will be momentous consequences - this day the worm really began to turn. For several weeks now the contrast between our neck of the woods (energetic, productive and almost 100% mozambican) and certain other parts of the project (not sure what they're doing but no software is coming out the end) has been causing rumblings. Today these came into the open. There is a frantic effort starting to 'mozambicanize' some of the teams but apparently all the new starts want to work in our team because its reputation has spread.
This is very gratifying but runs the risk of overexpansion - we can only digest so many new people at once without losing our magic formula, so tomorrow I will speak to a PIP (Pretty Important Person) to gently put this across. In fact I suspect he is a VIP in disguise, on the road to becoming a EIP, but he's also very sorted and today realised that he has definitely been 'backing the right horse' with us so it shouldn't be too hard to find a happy understanding.
*crack fix team - nothing to do with cocaine arrangers, rather a group of people who are good at working together to resolve errors in software applications
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