27 Jun 2007 1856H

Wasting away again in . . . oh never mind

Trapped at MCI on account of inclement weather. For those keeping track at home, this makes 12 hours this week spent waiting in an airport. Even after having gotten in at 3AM this morning into Kansas City, it turned out to be a pretty productive morning. It’s a little curious, but when I get to bed super late, I find myself incentivized mostly out of sheer fear to not oversleep. Oh well. At least I get to sleep in my own bed tonight. Knock on wood.

There were two meetings today that I had to be in town for, the first of which went well as a sort of meet and greet over UI improvements to a mass customization job, the second being a lite review of process flows and requirements documents for a new multichannel project. If it weren’t for the fact that requirements reviews and these meet and greets can’t be easily done well over the phone without visuals, I might have punted but since these projects are on a warpath and I’ve been away on another project for a few weeks, I felt it necessary to go the extra mile. There was a little food coma effect from lunch, but part of that was also sleep deprivation. Now we have the docs in hand and we had a bit of talk-through I can pretty much go off and take it from here remotely. So long as we iterate and keep the communications open, I find this works out really well.

One thing I’ve found is that you can’t really do well solely over the phone, though, is deliverable reviews. Basically, I generally don’t feel I have a good grip about a project until I’ve actually met the decision-making stakeholders and interacted with them. I’m kind of letting my clients — some of whom read this blog — know how I behave in these sessions, but, I don’t think there’s anyone who behaves differently. I’m now pretty sure part of this behavior came from martial arts tournament sparring. I find myself needing to verbally stalk around them like in the ring, watch them, feel out what the body language of the client is, test them for various responses, ascertain the different personalities in the room, figure out where they’re coming from, what they are saying and not saying. There’s so much communication that we rely upon that’s nonverbal or even verbal but can only be sensed if you can “feel out” that person or those people. The phone and the internet can only take you so far at this moment. For everything else, you need to be there.

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1 response to "Wasting away again in . . . oh never mind"

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27 Jun 2007 2301H

tim writes:

I find that I tend to respond in a similar way. Even on the phone, I still gesture…

And now it's your turn.

Fire your weapon, soldier. Just be careful of friendly fire. NAME & EMAIL required.

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