And you thought that was sleep depravation...

OK, so I was tired the last time I posted. Well, nothing's changed. It's 2:32 CST and I have had two hours of sleep in the last 33...yes, that sucks. But enough complaining, we are implemented! We have successfully gone live with Ariba Buyer 8.2.1 SP 11.02, and I am feeling like a proud papa (which you should know I am...but that's another posting).

I once heard the phrase 'If it's not hard, it's not worth doing'. By that logic, this was definitely worth doing. I have learned many lessons, and I think I've grown as an architect in this whole process. Between managing the different personalities, handling the problems and challenges that came up, and managing upwards (something that I've never been that good at) I feel I have learned a lot.

The Bible says 'as iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens the countenance of another man' (rough Mert translation). I feel I've been being sharpened over the last couple of months. I've been tested by fire, and now it's time to cool down. So I am on call this week, but not going to be in to work. It ended up being good timing, I think, to go live on Thanksgiving week, fewer users, less stress. At least that's the thought.

Anyway, time to wrap up here and get my stuff and start thinking about getting home. Yeah, looking forward to home.

Sleep Deprivation

OK, yes, I will admit it, I'm tired. I worked from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM on Thursday, then tried to go take a nap at the hotel for a few hours. Keyword: tried. At 8:30 PM I finally gave up and just went in to the office. I worked from 9:00 PM to 2:30 PM the following day before going back to the hotel for about 5 1/2 hours of wonderful, glorious sleep. I was up at about 9:15 PM and back in the office at 10:30 PM, where it is now 5:30 AM and I am still working.

While this is important, I am not sure this is the best way to handle this type of effort. I am feeling a little sluggish, certainly not as crisp as I would hope I would be at this point. I am not seeing any blatent errors being committed, nothing major at this point, and my goal is to overthing everything at this point to try to make sure nothing happens. But I certainly see the risk.

Anyway, it's taken a considerably long time to get this written, so I'm going to wrap it up with this...

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ........................

Lessons Learned - Expectations

OK, it's after midnight, I'm sitting here babysitting a system upgrade implementation (absolutely the biggest project I've worked on, and I'm the technical lead...some nerves are in play here). So I thought this would be a good time come out and ramble on a bit about something...so let me think of something.

OK, I've got it, let's call this a lessons learned posting, and I'm sure there will be many more to come.

This lessons learned posting encompasses expectations. I have learned the very hard lesson that both setting expectations and understanding those set for you is much more of an art than a science. For some people being explicit in setting expectations is perfect, they want to know exactly what you expect from them. They want to know what, when and how, and aren't overly concerned with why. Give them the task, steps required to execute the task, a deadline, and expected results and they go about it. Some people are offended with this type of detail. I am one of those. I am a professional, give me the task and the deadline and I will get it done. If I have questions I'll ask them. Then there are people who none of this appears to work for. Give them detailed information and it seems to overwhelm them, and they just do what they think they should regardless. Give them a minimum amount of info and they do something completely unexpected.

I am beginning to understand the first, I am most comfortable with the second, and I am eternally frustrated by the third. This will likely be one of my biggest areas to work on, is how to manager (in the technical sense, I am not a manager) this type of contributor. As someone who will, hopefully, be a technical lead on many more projects, I need to come up with a pattern or process for managing this type of person. I believe there will likely always be one, if not more, so being prepared is my best option. By all means if you have any suggestions for me, hit me up with a comment.

In the beginning...

So the title sounded like promising...after all, that's how the Bible starts and God did pretty well with that one. To clarify, I am a Christian, so God's OK with a joke now and then, we've talked about it.

I have been doing my blog on Yahoo! 360, but it really does too much...I just wanted a place to blog...put my thoughts down, have my voice heard. OK, I'm conceited enough to think that people actually want to hear my thoughts and know what I'm thinking, and I just didn't like the format on Yahoo! (talk about conceit, could imagine adding a ! to the end of your name...Hi, my name is Mert!...just seem obnoxious to me).

If you read this post with any regularity from this point on, you will quickly see that I like to talk, so just sit back and enjoy.

So to start my voyage on this new site for expressing my thoughts, I'll like to quickly lay out my life...

I am 32 years old, married to a wonderful woman. I have two beautiful children, Connor is 3 1/2 and Alexis is 14 months. I am an application architect with First Data Corporation (if you want to know what we do, look us up: www. firstdatacorp.com). I am a martial artist, I practice Martial Science, which means to build personal character through the study of martial arts. Specifically, we study Judo, JuJitsu, Tae Kwan Do, Kenpo and Tai Boxing. I'm currently a red belt. I am a cigar and beer aficionado, and I love to read and write.

So, enough about me...HA! You thought you were going to get off that easy! Not a chance. However, for tonight, that will probably do it, I need to get some sleep, I have a very long day tomorrow into Friday and possibly Saturday. Good night!