Myth has it that ‘Kilroy was here’ was the mark of a shipbuilder before/during WWII, and that it was picked up by Servicemen who found it amusing that the mark was made in supposedly unreachable places. They then spread the mark elsewhere, as locations around the world were liberated.  I love this concept, because I’m not a fan of limitations — I’m an avid gamer, but I rail against games that don’t let you stray from the path. There is no variety, or replay value because each time you have exactly the same sequence of events.

Many hopeful web developers fall into this pitfall as well. I was reading http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/2009/10/27/desire-lines-the-metaphor-that-keeps-on-giving/, a(nother) look at a metaphor called ‘desire lines’, that has similarly important lessons for the web2.0 community. You can’t force people to do what you want. The lesson is simple and played out all around us, you can set down a path, but you can’t make people want to use that route. A good designer will probably preempt a lot of what people will want, but not everything, and the overnight success that all of us are searching for is a bit hit and miss. Plenty of good ideas are out there, but finding something that people actually want, and then getting the word out there that you’re product is there is tough.

Or something like that.

It’s been almost a month since my last post, disgraceful. While I have the will to maintain a blog, I certainly don’t have the time. We’re currently in the thick of a large Documentum deployment, which means that there are bucket loads of new users that each have their own issues with the system.

I have learned SO much over the last few months, hopefully I’ll have a chance to sit down over the next week or so and distill some of that wisdom. Until then, keep safe.

I’m back from leave this morning with mixed feelings. I got paid today which put me in a good mood (I get paid monthly so its a bigger deal). I’m not usually a rollercoaster of emotion, but I find myself both loving and hating the place that I’m contracted to work today. On the one hand I returned to find voicemail messages from the managing partner (sent firmwide), expressing the fact that they we’re moved by the tragedy that had struck Victoria in the form of the bushfires.

More importantly promising money from the firm and exhorting partners and employees alike to contribute to the appeal. I felt moved. I know that there is a certain amount of publicity in giving and responding like that to the bush fires, but in real terms they’ll be unlikely to rate a mention on the news. There has been a flood of support for the bushfire victims (as there should be), and the firm responding to that need is touching. Indeed one of their Victorian employees died in the firestorm that has engulfed Victoria, so it is personal on another level for the managing partner who spent time talking to the mother of the employee.

What I don’t understand is how they can be so caring on one hand, and so callous on the other. It wasn’t long after I got in that I spoke to my project manager, to catch up on everything that’s happened while I was away, and discovered that an Executive Assistant had been made redundant. It would not have touched me so much had she not been involved with the project.

To be fair the person that she was working for had relocated to Hong Kong? as part of a strategy where he was to play a bigger role in the Far East as well as being the CIO for Oceania. So her role may well have been redundant considering her boss was no longer close. The question I have though is *so what*. People != Roles, you can make a role redundant, but does that mean that you need to kick the person out the door? No.

Sure there are times when employees need to be let go, if they’re not performing for instance. Truthfully though, there is no reason that the employee in question couldn’t have been moved sideways. I think, I believe from the brief time I spent working with her, that she was competent. She was certainly pleasant to work with, and had a wealth of knowledge. So why let her go? The firm is tightening its belt with the financial crisis being in full swing, an understandable descision even though its more proactive than reactive action.

Truth time; at a certain level businesses don’t care about people. The actions inside the business speak truer than the public actions that the business takes. You can give all the money you want to people that are suffering, but when your employees become nothing more than numbers, and what you do is about making money and nothing else then you’ve lost your way. Money is great, money is neccessary, but its the people and relationships that count. The dynamics of the people I’m working with at the moment have changed, and not necessarily for the better.

I feel slightly dirty for being so happy about my pay.  I’m not happy to be dependent on it. In some ways the company that I work for is better than the business that I’m contracted to. It’s smaller, they haven’t fired anyone, or let anyone go since I’ve been there. I need to remember that while I know the name of everyone that works at my company, they’re still in the business of making money first.

This word can mean a lot of things. The reason its currently in my headspace is ongoing discussions/actions to do with the amount of resources that are devoted to the project that I’m currently working on. My background is one of just getting things done, I do things as quickly as possible and then move onto the next item on the list. This occasionally gets me into trouble as I overtax MY resources. Not only this but pushing to hard also causes my collegues issues.

At the end of the day you can only get so much done, feeling stressed all the time because you’re pushing to hard doesn’t necessarily help you get things done faster it just burns you out. So yeah, make sure that there are sufficient resources allocated to a project if you have to meet a given deadline, and if there isn’t then its important to talk to the client and make sure more resources are allocated.