Recently in Work Category

OK, this is not the animal I’m talking about. Just a little bit of Capital One lingo - I’m now a full-time Associate and off the contracting path. After nearly 6 years of contracting at Capital One over the past 8 years, I now have been assimilated.

I’ve already been thrown into the fire, with 2 critical projects thrown into my lap. (Yes, I’m still a project manager.) One is a 4-month project that needs to be done by the end of the year (you do the math - it is doable, if I’m lucky). The other is a pretty cool enterprise-wide collaboration tool we’re starting. (That’s all I can/should share for now.)

It’s been a while since I’ve been out of the contracting/staff augmentation role, but I’ve been looking for the right opportunity. I’m still with the team I have been with for the past almost 4 years, so I think this might work out. I’m sure it will be a wild ride.

Or not. Just a couple of random thoughts for this weekend. It’s been a crazy weekend of college football so far, with at least 4 Top 10 teams losing, a couple of huge underdogs (Navy, Maryland) winning, and my alma mater Rice scoring 77 points in a game (they won this time). Even Duke won an ACC game (yes, the one that earlier argued it was the worst football team in America). Yup, this is why I like rooting for the underdog (at least, most of the time — I’ll still root for Rice if they are favored).

But I also wanted to leave you with this note. I’m working on a very large program (over 9-figure total expenditure) at my current place of employment. The program manager (a good guy) has posted one of those demotivator posters near his cubicle, hopefully as a joke. The poster is shown below. The punchline is that our program is actually nicknamed Pyramid.

(This was copied from my previous blog...)

Well, last week Dilbert captured some of the frustrations of being a project manager. These rang very true for me. Hope you at least get a chuckle out of them.

• 15 Feb 07
• 16 Feb 07

5/4/08 edit: Turns out the old links no longer work. This one pulls up the two strips.