It’s Project Crunch Time

There are so many things besides answering pre-sales questions we do that sometimes it gets mind-numbing trying to track every take-away you owe to everyone on everything. [takes a deep breath]

Over the course of this week, I’ll be trying to finalize the RFP tracking application I’ve built for the coordinators across the Software Techline organization. I need to change some fields, do some finetuning – basically, find a way to implement every teams’ requests so the tool fits everyone’s way of dealing with RFPs (everyone’s unique, aren’t they – you figure that out quickly as a wanna-be developer).

Then, there’s the matter of finishing this report I’ve been working on with a peer workgroup over the last few months to change some of the internal processes within our team. Yup, we’re process-driven for many aspects of our work. But I think that’s a good thing. It ensures that many people across different teams, supporting different products sets and clienteles, actually work in a similar fashion, so that metrics reporting can be done, which of course, ensures we know where we stand and can then take measures to improve ourselves. Yeah, control-averse individuals may not like it, but this is a business, and we need ways to ensure we can deliver on our commitments, as an organization (man, I’m starting to sound like an executive, ain’t I…)

There’s also, on my backburner, this 400-question knowledge base I need to review, update, overhaul and basically put back into working shape to be deployed on internal servers. This knowledge base contains question/answer pairs that help us answer frequent questions faster and with more consistence, so we have more time to spend on the tougher, more complex questions that come our way.

Finally, I’ve got a few deliverables I owe to a colleague, so we can offer something fun to our team members throughout the hard work we put quarter in, quarter out (can we modify the day in, day out expression this way?)

So, 12-15hr days are in effect all through this week, as I try to clear the plate, since I’ll be attending an eSTEW next week. What’s that, you say? It’s an electronically delivered (Powerpoint, Sametime, Conf. Call) Sales Technical Enablement Workshop. It’ll be about our recent announcement of WebSphere Process Server V6 (and this is the first link that pushes you to my new wiki – hey, I’ve been working overtime, told ya!)

So by the way, the wiki now contains information, which is sorta fun. Feel free to participate, if you find something inacurate or incomplete. I’d say this page is probably a good starting point, as it’s got the most material (especially the WebSphere area), but you can also visit from the frontpage too.