Thursday, January 03, 2008

It's done and dusted for another year

Yep, that's right, the party season is over, it's time to sit down behind the computer and get back to the hard work. Projects don't finish themselves. Actually, this is what my post is about. Projects not finishing themselves.

I often find it ammusing how often I find myself on the critical path of a project, not that I find this a problem, quiet the opposite. I find I work best under pressure. For me, this is the one thing that keeps me motivated. However, working as a team lead, I often find that more and more of my time is taken up with meetings. You know the type, talking to project managers, talking to busniess reps, talking to BAs. It's the communications.. All projects need communications.

The problem though is this. I spend more time communicating and less time coding. Sure, others in my team are still busy working away, yet my work seems to be getting left behind. This leads me to believe that there is a problem. I don't think that there should be less communications, I just think that I need to find a more effective way to communicate with all the other people in the project. Meetings are a nice break, but I'm sure they are not the most effective way to communicate...

Anyway, I'm going to post more about this over the next few days, but lets jsut say that it's not going to be easy considering the tools I have at my disposal. Stay tuned for all my fun adventures...

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Sounds like you need a work tracking system :)

Then you can minimise the meetings because all the information is stored electronically.

Checkout the TFS-specific stuff in the VS2008 Training Kit:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8BDAA836-0BBA-4393-94DB-6C3C4A0C98A1

Eddie de Bear said...

lol grant, you crack me up.

Yes, TFS would be lovely. Personally, I am a big fan of TFS. I see it as much more than just a replacement for source safe. The problem is, not many other people do.

Aside from my personal feelings though, sometimes getting TFS up and running on client sites is not practical/economical. It's a large departure from the way they currently operate, and it can be a massive cultural change.

I'm looking at something a little less invasive... I'll let you know when I work out what that is :D