A Very Busy Summer!!!
Aug. 2, 2007 by ravishan
I keep hearing from everyone how busy a summer this has been…. And I see it! We have many projects that all of us are working on, Outlook, Xythos, PeopleSoft upgrade, Cisco Clean Access, Online directory and Usdan Center projects to name a few. Thanks to you all, we are managing them well and where there are problems, we are attending to them head on – for example, by adding resources.
I have been pretty busy myself… Filling in for Mike has taken significant time but I am really enjoying it. I am getting to know first hand some of the things that are going on in academic computing and have had a chance to interact directly with many faculty members. I have been working with the library, HR, ATAC and academic affairs to finalize the job description so we can post it by Aug 15th.
I have also been trying to organize an annual report. This is a very difficult task – trying to get everyone to contribute to the report, organizing them, linking them to the strategic goals of the university… In addition, I have to prepare the ITS presentation to the new president, Michael Roth, scheduled for later this month. I am off to Portugal and Azores with Nalini from Aug 12- 22. To add to all this, I have an important thing to do on the 8th that I don’t want to write about here. Come and see me if you are interested…
I have been playing golf a fair amount this summer because our sons Vivek and Varun have taken a keen interest in the game. They are both doing so well. This is their second year of serious playing. Golf is such a tough game that every time I play I learn so much from it… What appears to be such a simple game is so complicated in reality. So many things have to come together for that perfect shot or the putt. It is like any project we do. They all appear simple at the outset, but nothing ever is… So many things have to come together for it to be successful.
Take the Connect ED project for example. It was endorsed by the business continuity group, the price was right and the bridging of the data was accomplished relatively quickly. Or so we thought… the devil is in the details. Interpretation of the Emergency contact numbers that we have been collecting turned out to be not straightforward. The data was not clean and the data on parents were incomplete. We still had 200 or so students listing Wesleyan phone numbers as the contact numbers. If we let Connect ED dial all those numbers at the same time during an emergency, it will overwhelm all incoming lines to Wesleyan… a bad idea when you have a local emergency. So, a project that we thought would take us 2 months to implement is still in progress. But, four months into the project, we ran a limited, but a very successful test.
Accept that no matter how well you plan your tee shot, sometimes the ball finds the other fairway or the rough. As long as you successfully get out of the jam (by taking advice from those trusted colleagues playing with you) and get to the green in reasonable number of strokes it is fine…
Even professional organizations with huge resources make mistakes, just like the golf pros. We are small and lack of resources many times is our handicap and we are working extremely hard on each project to minimize the handicap. Almost everything we do today is collaborative – either we work with other ITS colleagues or with functional offices. It is like playing a 4-person scramble. Take advantage of the collective strengths of all participants – forget that you don’t have a monstrous tee shot, but be thankful you have someone else to do it for you; you have that perfect touch for the best pitch shot. Just so you don’t feel left out, some of your tee shots will be counted with very encouraging words from the others.
Finally… when you head into that “19th hole” and take that first sip of cold beer, it makes you feel so good that all the bad shots are washed away and you take home the good shots. And you start planning that next round of golf – challenges, frustrations, successes all mixed in…
Have a great busy summer… And don’t forget the “19th hole”… Take a break once in a while and recount all the accomplishments…