Well I have been busting my behind since the last time I wrote in my journal. It has been a time of agony and dispair...
During all this I remembered a conversation I had with my old colleagues and fellow Perl mongers about projects and project work, and I asked him why the project where we had been working a huge amount of overtime has been so much more fun?? - and he said that the difference was that we where the driving technical and architectural force and it was done in Perl.
Well I code in Perl now (among other things), but most of the time I don't code, I coordinate, make phonecalls, go to meetings and write emails...
So I tried to look at the two projects to find out what there differences were. Apart from what my friend has added and the fact that it is another company and we are still on schedule I found out that it is all about motivation.
You can actually get people to go great lengths if they are motivated, and by motivation I do not mean your occasional team-spirit meating, I mean when people care about what they do and they take pride in what they do.
Following the days of dispair and agony - I decided to approach things differently - instead of being escalating every task and subproject which me and my group could not handle (every time these are reassigned something else pops up), I made a queue, working on priorities, so when not one (me), but 10 developers went to the project managers to complain they actually started to listen, and additional resources where allocated with taxi within 20 minutes... heh fantastic
So my change of mood was one from caring, which would eventually wear me down, due to stress over not being able to cope, to one of not-caring, and actually I have found the joy in my work again, I am only using my two hands and two feet and 8 hours a day and I care about each single task, but one day at a time and one task at a time - if the project management aren't satisfied with the output they have done something wrong.
They regard me as a resource, well so do I - a resource or uncaring machine if you like.
