Just one of those days

Today I was quite tired from spending two days in HQ Zürich on international application access and the user provisioning, authentication and authorization to go with it. Before flying home yesterday evening, I took the time to buy a few presents for my wife and kids.

At ten o'clock, I went into a meeting to help define a process that is needed for the e-business project. There were quite a few issues, and some of them I didn't even know about. We tried to solve them all at once, and when the first was halfway solved, somebody came up with a new one and everyone felt like they needed to respond or to help out, and we were all trying to get attention for ourselves. This didn't work, needless to say. For the first time in my life, as far as I remember, I got so fed up of not being able to add any value, that I literally walked out of the meeting, until the same gentle person as in my previous post, actually came to get me and we all took a break. This was brilliant psychology, and we actually did solve a few issues after the break. Not all of them, but we made a hopeful progress.

As a result, I missed a lunch appointment with a former colleague. In the afternoon I could do some useful stuff for the lean six sigma project that our team of 3 is doing for education and real life at the same time, help out one of the colleagues on UML tools, help out my CTO on end user computing etc.

At 17:10 I attended the steering of the e-business project, and hoora, even more issues I wasn't aware of popped up that needed to be discussed.
At 17:50, while the meeting was still going on, I told everybody goodbye. The agenda point that I especially came for wasn't treated (as an architect, I don't attend all project steerings, this was a special occasion).
In the hope of getting home by 19:00, as I promised my wife who took care of the kids while I was in Zürich.

But the ordeal wasn't over yet. The train was delayed by 15 minutes, so I missed my connection in Leuven, and the next train out of Leuven home was late by 8 minutes. Total delay: 55 minutes.

The architecture lesson here is that in discrete processes, the end-to-end service level is not some kind of linear sum of individual service levels. Although each train was only slightly late, the end result was rather seriously late because of the missed connection. How am I going to make up for this to my wife ? Any suggestions welcomed.

Taking the trouble to communicate

This morning, a colleague, who I've not known for so long, because I recently accepted another work challenge, called a meeting. I'ld describe him as eager to move the company forward, competent, experienced, gentle and kind.

The meeting was on an e-business portal project he used to be a project manager of, and whose role has now been taken over by someone else. Voluntarily, I might add, as he saw his value to the company would be greater in his new role. Anyway, since I work there, we've had together:

• one informal meeting on the project,
• one workshop on portal user administration, answering portal user questions and publishing processes with all of the management of teams concerned, and
• two formal meetings with the management, specifically to organize and decide on answering portal user questions.

All except the first meeting were properly prepared and reported. Nevertheless, in this mornings meeting, I noticed some communication problems. We were not aligned on how to position the portal in the company, and on the meaning of the decisions made earlier. While I could understand his arguments, I was very surprised not to learn about them earlier. Somewhere along the way, I'ld lost him in the communication process, probably too busy.

How could that be ? Still trying to figure out ...

Not a problem anytime soon, but as an architect I tend to think on a 2 to 3 year time horizon. I must re-establish communication and align ourselves within the next few months.

Intentions and red tape

Why blog ? Will I actually write something worth reading on here ?

The truth is I don't know yet. And up for you to judge, so your comments welcome. Don't hold back, I can take a punch or two.

I intend to use this blog for writing about enterprise architecture, IT governance, process and quality from a practical viewpoint. With the same intent, I'll add a personal touch now and then from the everyday experiences I come across.

Now I'm off to corporate communications to get the red tape that'll be needed.