Category: Work

I have enjoyed being client side project manager. I suspect it is because a major part of my job of it is reviewing projects against our own standard documents.

As someone who has read game rules for pleasure over the years, such a task is  well trod territory in my synapses. Furthermore this practice has helped me quickly recognize potential grey areas in my documents, as well as play out viable interpretations.

In all, it has been surprisingly fun so far.  But much credit must also go to my bosses who have made the commitment to follow the standards consistently, and also avoided overloading me with too much work, doing this type of work takes a particular type clear headedness to do well.

In trying to plan out my schedule, the one thing I need to keep in mind is that its never just the task.  There is the preparation before and the cleanup after that sucks up time.

The most glaring example is a meeting.  It’s a set amount of time, but there is the lead up to it, preparation and a commute, and then return to the office and often a few things to do items that were not previously anticipated at the start of the day.

So how do I account for this fuzzy time?  In private practice, it was relatively easy – I was always tight on time, so there wasn’t much I could do about it.  But now as a client, I’m often processing items which take just a short amount of time before the ball is passed off to the next party.  So sometimes a task that seems daunting, resolves itself (at least my portion of the responsibility) much quicker than I would have expected.

I guess it’s just a matter of practice and experience.  But I wonder how to speed up the learning curve.  Maybe it’s time to pull out the Pomodoro Technique again.

When I think about innovation in the office, one of my touchstones has been shortening the feedback loop during a project.

At my previous job, I borrowed and instituted the idea of post mortems after every major project issuance to discuss what went well, what went wrong, what did we miss, and how do we improve.

With this current gig, there are three potential avenues of increasing feedback between me and my consultants.

1. Initiate a practice of such post mortems for each project after each issuance.
2. Develop a submittal review form, a checklist to judge the quality of the issuance that was provided.
3. Create a weekly project update form for the design team PMs.

All these ideas are still preliminary – just as I am to my current position. The most important thing is to develop trust with my teams so that such conversations are actually useful, but beyond that baseline, the next step may indeed be to tighten up the feedback loops.

I woke up this morning and started working on a project for the office.  And then the kids woke up. Before I knew it, the day had begun and I hadn’t done anything I wanted to do when I first got out of bed, like this blog, or the dishes, or exercise.

It would be nice to have a set routine in the morning, but it always crashes against the messiness of reality when I wake up.

Waking up earlier to get more time isn’t the answer.  Even though that’s not a problem for me as a morning person, an early rise means an early sleep the next night, which really leaves my wife high and dry with two children running around.

Neither is caffeine, since that is just living on borrowed time, which I pay back with long naps on the weekend, abandoning my family again.

So it goes back to tradeoffs.  What good things am I willing to sacrifice so I can do better things?  It constantly returns to being an absolute hawk over my time, especially the alone time in the early morning and at the office.

 

I’ve always had an odd fondness for spreadsheets.  It seemed to model the world in an interesting way different from the usual tools that architecture students typically use.  Unlike more graphical representations of the world like models and drawings, they are easily manipulated with potential major changes with literally a couple keystrokes.

I have been spending some time reviewing some spreadsheets at work and it’s become clear, they can also confuse information as well as the opposite.  In that way, the world has come full circle, as I find myself obsessing over the graphics over a spreadsheet to ensure the information is clearly displayed, just like an introductory architecture student.

So after trying to track my life / work, I’ve now put Toggl on pause.  It was more of a chore to keep track of things than just inputting my time usage on a text file at the end of the work day and I felt that I wasn’t getting any useful data out of it.

Now this might be a “me thing not a you thing”.  It may be highlighting the fact that I am jumping back and forth between my projects too quickly in an inefficient way.  Or maybe my task categorizations are not properly set up, which is why I’m not getting useful data.

In any case, it’s now on pause and I need to rethink my toggl strategy before getting back into it.

This was a concept I originally learned about the office environment.  There are people in a company that have authority via the official titles, but the firm often has informal lines of power where things really get done.  As a participant in the office environment, the key is to navigate both terrains simultaneously. 

Now that I’ve been on client side for about four months, I still think about the concept quite a bit.  Due to my job title, I have quite a bit of authority.  It’s nice to know that I can drop the hammer when necessary, but I don’t ever want to do that.  I want to empower my consultants so they enjoy working with our agency and will keep coming back to work with us.

Beyond getting the job done, and getting it done well, our goal is to do it in such a way that all participants come out of it believing that they have been enriched for having gone through the process

I once had a buddy who got stiffed a hundred bucks on a freelance gig for a guy who was starting up his own firm.  Not a huge deal, my buddy grumbled about it, and kept on scrapping his way through the recession.  A decade later, I just found out the dude who stiffed my friend is now in a lawsuit with some former partners at that firm he founded.

It can feel quite unfair to hold someone against their worst moments, especially if its over small things, but it may be prudent to stay wary.

Earlier this month, I was tasked with programming one of the larger buildings in our inventory.  As such, we met with decision makers in  twenty three departments of our state.

Needless to say, it was quite a revelation for a noobie in government.  What I saw were a lot of people who were working hard to get their work done with the limited resources that was allotted to them.  That should be obvious after a moment’s thought, but given decades of anti-government propaganda, its not the first thing you think about when you hear “government worker”.

Furthermore, a significant subset of those folks served directly under the elected official in charge of their department.  As such, many of them were uncertain whether they would even be at their job in the coming year.  Even so, they took on this extra task on top of their already packed agenda and helped collect the detailed information we needed for a project which will come to fruition in five or six years.

It took me several years in architecture school to have the blindingly obvious epiphany that every single object we have around us was designed and crafted by a human being.  This exercise similarly revealed that every single thing that is done in government (for better or worse) was designed and is currently executed by a person, a full person with all the strains and stresses that comes being human.

So I wish all the best those who are polishing up the customary letters of resignation this morning at the end of an election season, especially for those who know their letters will be will be accepted.  Being caught among the detritus of a government transition is part of the game when you play at those higher levels, but I doubt it makes it any easier.