Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations

Sunday, February 18, 2007

(had to break this up into two posts due to the Journals 25,000 char limit - Read Part 1 here)

Wednesday Feb 14, 2007

7:00 a.m. – Home

 

Woke up to frozen roads and ice all around outside. Schools are closed and on checking my email I discover that the AOL campus will officially open late today as well (at 11 a.m.). Decide to work from home, I reschedule some of my 1-1 meetings for Thursday and Friday.

 

8:00 a.m. – Home

 

I make some tea (chai) and work on clearing my inbox sitting by the fireplace. Mailcount: 86. I reply to quite a few and whittle down my inbox to about a dozen or so left which I need to follow-up on before replying. I look through my calendar for the day and jot down some notes on tasks for the day.

I hop over to cricinfo.com to check the score for the Pakistan vs South Africa match. Pakistan is in dire straits. They’ve had a bad run lately and I hope the team can pull up for the World Cup next month in the Caribbean.

 

9:00 a.m. – Home office, Conference Call with AOL Bangalore

 

At 9 a.m. we have an all-hands with the Publishing staff in Bangalore and the leadership team. My boss, VP of Publishing Technologies, leads the call. This was supposed to take place in “Telesuites” conference room at AOL which has state-of-the-art video conferencing system but due to the weather everyone in the US had dialed in and we shared the deck via web conference.

 

11:00 a.m. – Home

 

Take some time to de-ice our cars and remove/break-up some of the ice in front of the house. The layer of ice is thick, extremely hard, and slippery.

 

12:00 p.m. – Lunch

 

1:00 p.m. – Home

 

I go through a draft design document for one of our projects and give some feedback to the team on the architecture to ensure we have the basic framework correct so that the customer’s requirements can be met. This starts a good email debate about using a push vs pull approach for data transfer.

 

2:30 p.m. – Home

Another conference call.

 

4:00 p.m. – Home

 

I work on updating our roadmap for 1H 2007 based on feedback from team members.

 

6:00 p.m. – Home

Mail inbox is looking good!

 

7:30 p.m. – Verizon Center, Washington D.C.

I had planned to take my family to Disney on Ice in D.C. The roads are much better by now but still lots of ice around. The show is great and we all enjoy it especially my daughter.

 

Thursday Feb 15, 2007

 

8:45 a.m. – My desk, AOL HQ

 

Roads are better. I grab coffee from the cafeteria and plug-in at my desk. Thursdays I have my bi-weekly staff meeting but this week was theoff one. I send a quick note to the team to send me their latest schedule updates that I can use in the roll-up status.       

 

9:30 a.m. – 1-1 with a Team Member

 

I have a 1-1 with a team member and we catch up on his projects.

 

10:00 a.m. – Conference Call

 

I get on a conference call about a new project that business is requesting. I jot down some of the high-level requirements. The team agrees to meet weekly while this seemingly large project gets underway and we are able to do some proper scoping and get it added to the plan of record.

           

1:00 p.m. – My desk

 

For most of the remainder on the day I work on updating our integrated program schedule. I use our enterprise project management tool (Primavera) to find out some details and also use the status reports from the project and development managers. We are not formally using Earned Value Management but my team has a good handle on schedule performance and cost (runrate) of their projects.

 

2:30 p.m. – Boss’s office

 

Its annual review season at AOL and I have my 2006 review with my boss. Even though I was reporting to another VP for most of last year we discuss my performance and goals for 2007. My boss suggests we do a SWOT analysis for our team which will help refine our goals for this year.

 

3:00 p.m. – Conference room

Now it is my turn to conduct an annual review one-on-one with one of my employees.

 

4:00 p.m. – My desk

 

I reschedule a regular 1-1 with one of our Chief Architects for next week and focus on finishing up the integrated gantt chart and roadmap. With input from project managers and other team members, I send out an “upcoming milestones” report for all the projects in our program. This is a weekly report.

 

5:40 p.m. – Head home

 

Today was so busy that I didn’t get a chance to go to the gym :(  But then I had skipped lunch as well.

 

Friday, February 16, 2007

 

8:00 a.m. – My desk

 

Feel like having a soy misto (café au lait) today instead of the regular drip. I get in a little earlier to catch-up on email and finish up the roadmap.

 

9:00 a.m. – CC2 Conference Room

 

Detailed deep dive with our Dublin team on their development process or rather, workflow. We brainstorm ideas on how to shorten the time-to-market for the products using iterative development concepts. But to be fair, theirs is a particularly complex domain and the work --analysis to design, coding and testing-- is quite time-consuming.

 

The meeting runs a little over.   

 

2:00 p.m. My desk

 

I prep for a couple of annual reviews scheduled back-to-back for later that afternoon with my team members and continue to make progress on the roadmap.

 

4:00 p.m. – My desk

 

I’m done with 5 of the annual review 1-1s with my team and there are two more to go next week. I send out the final draft of our roadmap and integrated schedule to the leadership team.

 

I submit an expense report for the NYC trip via our SAP portal, complete some project admin stuff in Primavera and work on clearing out my inbox – new mailcount: 6. woohoo!

 

5:15 p.m. – Heading home

 

It was a productive week and I have a couple of things to finish up over the weekend (Monday is a US holiday – President’s day, but I need to catch-up with the Dublin team). But other than that I look forward to spending some quality time with the family and making some headway into my reading list.

 

 

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