The End is Near

The end, that is, of two things. My stint in Louisiana, which ends October 29. I began working here last December (2004) on a four-month contract. Project problems - or challenges or opportunities - postponed the first big deadline twice. I agreed to stay on. But I made it clear that after Halloween I had other commitments that I could not change.

That first big deadline is changing again. Rumors have one or two months from the most recently agreed upon date. The rationale lies entirely on the technical side: getting software to address business issues as desired, anticipated, and needed. Training can always be ready, almost whenever the starting gun fires. And training can always be made better. We serve at the pleasure of the business.

Also at an end is the preparation for training. We have materials, policies, a training system (a model of the working system), and we nearly have an instructional design. We could use a lot more examples and exercises. We're training experienced employees. In other classes for other business units, they're learning quickly. They're getting it. This is likely to mean that we start training well before participants will begin to use new skills, and that we'll wrap up early.

Today, the plan is to deliver the four weeks of training, wait three to eight weeks, provide a largely unstructured refresher, and drop people into the hot water of the new job. I think it's irresponsible. I'm going to argue that the training design must be changed to keep participants learning from any given starting point until production begins. The horse-pill of new policies can be swallowed, but only if live ammo drill and practice follow the hothouse practice in the classroom. And I bet I'll lose the argument. But as I said weeks ago, you hope to show clients new ways of doing things and enable them to succeed. You try to tell them the truth.

Finally, my consultant manager has been virtually AWOL. Let's call her the C.M. You try to tell the truth. We'll see where that gets me.

Low and dry

I fled Baton Rouge on Friday in spite of having planned to stay the weekend. That is, a few days ago I was unwilling to spring an extra $600 to change my ticket from Boston to NYC, where my girlfriend has been working for the past four days. But as the women I work with tracked Rita, it moved North, slowed down, got stronger, and generally looked like the source of a week of electric-free living. That means food gets scarce, except for what you grill, which is in too great a supply - where do you keep it when the fire goes out? And a cheaper ticket popped up on my travel site. So I took off.

New York had perfect weather for walking the city. We did. Between fits of TV watching and web surfing to find out whether the South central US would shut down again for a few days. I'm glad that so few people were hurt during Rita and that it didn't hit property harder. But I'd have been very glad for a couple of days working from a NY hotel room. Besides the kind of typical incompetence one expects from airlines, the return at o'dark thirty Sunday morning was uneventful.

Baton Rouge gasped with traffic. And like Katrina, God's own leaf bag was shaken out everywhere. Here and there a downed tree. From those who stayed, the report comes that power was on and off for a twelve-hour period. The freezer stayed cold. Humidity soared yesterday afternoon, or maybe that's just the contrast to the Northeast. By five it felt normal again.

This week I relocate my cubicle to the building about six miles down the highway where the training rooms and staff are located. One week until the start of classroom training.