Work Bosses Redux

Work bosses redux - what the hell?

A few months ago, I had written about accomplishing one of the biggest milestones of my work career, finishing the biggest project I had been involved in to date. It was pretty bumpy after it all but the good thing is is that it was done, we moved forward and made changes along the way.

Where we are now a few months after that whole thing went down, I wanted to write a little bit of a follow up on some of the stuff that helped me in the wake of that whole thing. One of the really big things is the concept that Galen had talked about in one of his posts around that time: "Work, Don't Worry" and I think that really resonated with me!

The concept of "Work, Don't Worry" is that yeah, shit may be brutal and all kinds of things may have gone wrong or be going wrong, but one of the best things that we can do is try to not focus on being scared, mad or any of those negative emotions. We are at our best when we are able to put those silly things aside and just focus on what we know, which is the work that we are doing. I will say that it's not easy to do that and I've certainly gotten some times during all of that where I didn't exactly embody all of that mantra but at the end of the day, keeping focus on the work and not worrying about those other elements of it is huge.

The stress of it all was brutal but it was one of those things that you experience, learn from and take away that you should do your best and improve the situations in the future so that you aren't putting yourself in those positions again, to the extent possible of course. I was able to keep my nose down, attention focused on the tasks at hand and gathering the people around me to help get things back on track and in the right direction.

This has recently been all wrapped up in that I am fully disconnected now from the project, documented everything that I can as far as issues, path forward, lessons learned and next steps. The typical things from a project management perspective. Doing these things has really wrapped the whole thing up in a bow, but most importantly helped me in figuring out how to do something as big as this was, better in the future.

I think one of the best things that we can do in a given difficult situation is figure out how we can approach things differently and better the next time. The idea is to approach it differently, it doesn't always mean that it's going to go the way that we would like it to, but that's not exactly the point. If we can get it heading in the right direction from the getgo, it is a bit easier to make course corrections along the way instead of starting wildly in the wrong direction then having to make significant course corrections later on. This goes both ways for sure, but if we can do this stuff in the beginning it not only improves it for us, but for the customers and end users as well.

The funny thing about this all though, is that notion of "those who do good work are cursed with getting more work". I don't shy away from things, in fact I lean into them but sometimes we want to take a little bit of a step back after such a grueling task and take one on that's a little bit lighter. No such luck in this case though! I went from one big one to the next big one, and I am certainly going to apply a lot of these concepts that I learned in the last one, to the new one!