Small victories

I've been working on a project at work that has made little to no progress the entire time I've been working here. There's little that's more frustrating for a program manager than something like that. The trouble goes both deep and high and I've been banging my head against the proverbial wall for what seems like an eternity. My boss has been extremely supportive of me, but there's only so much that he can do also, and he's working on it.

There's another, more interesting and high profile project that I picked up about a month or so ago and I've been able to enjoy the feeling of accomplishment through it here and there, but nothing really major.

But TODAY...today, I had a major breakthrough. We've been feuding with a partnering team for the past month and it dawned on me during a meeting yesterday that they had a lot of misconceptions about the work we were planning. I decided it would be good to have a good old fashioned meet and greet along with a demo of some existing products. My day today was spent mostly on the details of this and that and my last meeting of the day was this demo meeting. I kind of went into it with a slight sense of dread, but was practically walking on air when I left. The product owner from the other team agreed that they had not had a proper understanding of our product and those misunderstandings had caused a lot of heartache. He apologized for their team and thanked me profusely for pulling us together. He was happy to see that we were already on top of all the issues.

What a great feeling. In a world of inertia, I saw things moving in the right direction again. And it was because of me. This is why I love what I do.