After getting word a few weeks back that the huge project I’ve been working on for the last two years was having it’s go-live date bumped to the right…again, with a vague “July…maybe?” indicator for when we’d finally deploy this new functionality, over the last week or so, the general tenor of discussion around the project has taken a much less optimistic turn; it’s still unsaid at this point, but there’s not really talk of “when” any longer. I’m not sure we’re at “if” yet, but I know it’s on people’s minds.

Today’s Monday status meeting was largely about tying up loose ends and putting the whole thing in stasis, to be picked up later once the folks in the rarified air of the senior agency and department suites decide what to do with us, but all indications is that it’s going to be a long wait. The meetings are being canceled until there’s something to report. Given that the last date was July, no realistic date is expected until after the fiscal year changeover. Of course, to get to that point, we’ve got to go through budgets, contracting and resource allocation, and all that, so really, who knows.

What I do know is that the back-end guys are rolling our test box back to production condition, and there’s talk of, in the meantime, working on smaller production fixes that were going to wait until after the changeover. I’ve kicked up the possible impacts to my friends in Washington who are shepherding “my” pet project (since nobody around here wanted to pay for it) to simplify this whole business; that one was building toward a post-deployment landscape; now adjustments have to be made which is probably going to hose that up too. Plus, I’m kind of pissed that we’re kind of on the edge of having wasted the last two years on something that’s now uncertain to happen at all.

Combine this more gradual shift with the sudden, unanticipated release of some HR information before management was ready to talk about it (a bunch of “common use” IT functions are getting bumped up to the department level rather than across agencies) thanks to some errant email traffic, it feels as if some significant changes might be on the horizon, especially given the low-level rumors that my agency may not be long for the world (which are starting to feel a little more solid), I don’t really like the uncertainty.

That said, as a two-decades’ member of the public sector workforce, if circumstances seriously change, the powers that be will find a place for me, even if it might not quite be a place I’d choose for myself; I’m better off that certain people who would find themselves completely out of a job if their project was suddenly canceled.

Even so, these circumstances aren’t particularly conducive to worry-free living, with no anxiety about what might be coming along next.