It’s for real.
Tomorrow we have our training day for the data developers (the people doing all the donkey work on this project). Wednesday they get real files to play with. (We hope.)
I want to get very drunk. But I am going to be a Good Girl and have an early-ish* night.
…
* i.e, it’s not midnight yet.
…
UPDATE
I survived, just.* I’m not sure whether they did. I have this fear that whatever I said just made what’s already pretty complicated even more confusing. I don’t think I’m very good at explaining things I already know to people who don’t. I find it really difficult to slow it down and think about how something looks from a position of complete ignorance. (Another reason why I don’t think I’ll ever be a very good teacher…)
*But there have been two pints of beer and a glass or two or whatever of wine since.
4 comments on “On Work (or: F***!!!!)”
Sounds rough! I’m sure it was much better than you thought.
Good luck with this. I’m really looking forward to the project being finished.
I started my own history blog this week, so that’s another one for the blogroll. I’ve even got an OBP related post lined up.
Ah, you’ll be OK. Are any of the developers veterans of the old OBSP team?
My experience of a mega-project like this is that the real killer is getting all the data people to make the same choices: big an insoluble problems arise when one person’s Furniture Broker is another’s General Dealer. The key isn’t to pretend that the complexity is not present, but to make sure that everyone knows where to turn when they are confronted by it. I imagine that wikis help immensely here. In fact, the whole process could be described in similar terms to open-source software development. Perhaps.
As it happened, on Project X we were spring-loaded to record the maximum number of furniture brokers, owing to the fact that it worked through a set of 5-letter codes and some wag had deemed that theirs would be ‘FUKER’. Innocent pleasures.
Yep. There are more than twice as many people this time around as on the Old Bailey project and this time they aren’t sharing an office. So communication is the key issue and that’s where the wiki seems to be working well. We’ve got ‘official’ information for the data developers as well as a channel for them to post queries when something is unclear and we can respond quickly. Once things are a bit more settled, I’ll hopefully blog a bit about the process.