Moving right along

Things were moderately hectic & fast-paced again today, but aside from a candidate interview that took a significantly larger-than-expected chunk of my day, things were again quite productive. We're tracking well towards the end of my involvement in this first project and actually chopping off scope creep and late feature definitions without lengthy deliberation. I received the greatest email from a product/program manager ever:

"PUNT."

Love it.

Towards the end of the day I was actually invited to the kickoff meeting for my next big project. I've learned so much in these brief weeks that I can't imagine this next project going anything like the first. First off, I pray, I won't have a death in the immediate family right at the beginning of it. Secondly, far fewer process-related issues are going to take me by surprise. I hope to take this one by the balls early on and try to steer us away from making mistakes that I'm now familiar with. It's also a completely different project team, so I'm sure there will be new challenges due to that (not a bad thing).

I've started to get a sense of the extreme importance of the personal progress reports we have to do for HR every so often -- I guess what you're able to convey in those determines whether you stay in one place for your entire tenure or soar to great heights of management and salary. With this in mind, I've begun keeping a log of things I've done that I believe to be above & beyond the call of duty. It's just a little Word doc, for my own reference, so that when the review process catches up with me and I'm on to my nth project, I'll have something to jog my memory about what's been going on and what I've accomplished. It's all in shorthand, but already almost a full page.