I know I bitch about work a lot here, but I don’t generally bitch specifically about the way my organization does things. Today I’ll make an exception, names concealed to protect the guilty.

As I said yesterday, I’m travelling out to the midwest for a day-long Dog and Pony Show/Kick-off meeting for a big, multi-million dollar, multi-year modernization project of an ancient business system. This kind of thing has actually, totally by accident, kind of become my career, as anybody who’s a regular reader here probably knows.

It’s safe to say that I know a little about how to make one of these things work.

Going over the agenda for tomorrow’s meeting, I noticed that the discussion of “Change Management” has been stuffed into the dead zone right at the end of the presentation, where everybody’s watching the clock instead of paying attention to the material.

If this is any indication of the relative priorities of the program, I’m a little worried. Change management (the process of getting everybody in the organization, including those folks doing the modernization work, invested in making things work, and getting everyone excited about the effort) is the kind of thing that makes or breaks a project like this; if the organization isn’t invested in making things happen, and leadership isn’t giving their all to sell the idea, the effort’s going to wither on the vine and the project will fail.

This is especially important for a project like this, that failed exactly that way about a decade ago, largely because those doing the work weren’t “on board”. I really hope they have priorities in order. I’m not in charge of this one, though I work pretty closely with those that do, especially the guy at the top; anytime I get their ear, I hammer on the change management stuff first (even before I start telling them where my actual systemic priorities are), because it’s the most important.

This agenda doesn’t fill me with confidence that my message has been received.

I really don’t want to be worrying about this, especially when there’s all kinds of other cool stuff going on in the world, like this teaser trailer for the Doctor Strange movie:

Astral Projection! Eff Yeah!

This looks pretty great. The Doc’s one of my favorites. Cumberbatch’s “Doctor House” voice is a little weird, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it.