T O T K a t

It's been a long old 10 days since the Tuesday back after the bank holiday. I've worked all of them (though only really a tiny bit on the Sunday in the middle).

Since I started this job, I've been working towards two migrations: one for the test, part of development and the documentation environments; the second for the mail, file, print and domain services for the company. The former is hosted on hardware we own and run, but in our ex-parent company's data centre. The latter was wholly owned and run by our ex-parent company and that's what was migrated this last weekend onto our own, new hardware and services in a new datacentre. It was delivered 2 months early, under budget and with only a few snags to tidy up afterwards.

I am proud. Yes, the implementation work was done by my staff, but I put in months of planning, preparation, budgeting, recruitment and procurement to get it all in place. Yes, I publicly praised my staff, named and thanked them in an email to the whole company. Yes, various very important people in the company took the time to reply to that email, copy in all of my staff and thank them for the work and praise them on their professionalism. Yes, I am proud of my staff. Yes, I'm proud that it went really very well despite the lack of access and control we had over some parts of the work because those parts were related to infrastructure we don't own. But yes, I am also proud of what I did.

I'm still glowing from the 10 seconds the CEO took, to say thank you when I was making tea in the kitchen in the office earlier today.

Now there's a lot of work to be done to improve the state of what's been handed over to us and to make things better for the corporate systems.

Not to be forgotten is the other migration. It's as important, but less visible to the company as a whole. There are really only two people working on that, and it is very much more complex work than the corporate migration because of the time scales involved and the increasing extra demands being put on those people and the existing systems have killed all of the contingency that was built into the project plan. But once that is done, there's going to be lots of work required to improve the test and other services environments. And then there will be a whole lot more useful things I'd like to do for the company to make things better, especially for the developers, as well as the potential for more new projects coming my team's way. I'm so excited about it all!

And... still glowing!