Weekly Review – Evernote Rocks!
One Thing I’ve Learned
This week in my Everyone Communicates Few Connect training we discussed the barriers that can prevent you from finding common ground with those around you, Assumption (‘I already know what others know, feel or want.’), Arrogance (‘I don’t need to know what others know, feel or want.’), Indifference (‘I don’t care to know what others know, feel or want.’), and Control (‘I don’t want others to know what I know, feel or want.’). Interesting set of perspectives to apply when you start looking at your own behavior and that of those around you to assess why relationships just aren’t developing.
Three Things I’m Grateful For
Evernote – As I move further and further away from paper and pen, it becomes more important to me that the tools I use regularly are platform neutral. Evernote works just as well in the browser (IE – Don’t judge!) as it does on my Kindle or my Droid phone. That’s just well Ahhh-mazing! Of course they’ve recently upped the ante by partnering w/Moleskin to bring us Evernote Smart Notebooks so maybe that paperless thing isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.
Vendor Swag – This week a received a lovely little package in the mail from a data center vendor that contained The Book of Secrets. I don’t often get cool, original swag but instead have an unending supply of lanyards, pens and notebooks so this one was not only unexpected but also a novel way to get their message across.
That people can’t see me roll my eyes when I’m reading emails.
Five Things I Accomplished
Our issue with that oddly stubborn project manager appears to have come to a neat resolution. He’s not going to do what we’d asked for but has agreed to arrange for his own resources to implement his desired plan. Win-win!
My PMO duties now have context, scope and prioritization. I have to say that I am so excited to do this as someone who would always prefer to be part of solving issues over being just subjected to them and was relieved to find that the person I’ll be reporting to is of exactly the same mindset.
We are fairly often thrown projects where the user isn’t 100% sure they want to proceed but are more interested in seeing what the possibilities are. This week I wrapped up a scope on a potential project with two possible roadmaps, I wouldn’t say that the user in this case was happy with either choice but at least they have the right amount of information now to make an educated decision.
Next year I have a huge development project that will take up about half of my resources and will cover the entire year plus maybe a few months of 2014. This week I finalized the scope of the project by completing our data definitions with the new vendor and making recommendations on some business logic that will streamline our operations quite a bit (they were accepted). Both tasks put me ahead of the game by about two weeks so now I have some time to look at the nice to have list.
Taarradhin 