And Now For Something Completely Different

Monday I'll go to work, answer some questions, sametime a few friends, have a couple of meetings, then shut down my laptop and end my career at IBM.  On August 8th I will become the newest Project Manager for the Digital Media division of National Geographic.

Photo of the Day: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/

I suppose it's tradition to pick apart my career at IBM and explain why I chose to leave, but I don't want to.  I wouldn't be the person I am today without my IBM experiences, both good an bad.  Instead, as I pack up to leave, I can't help but think about a few important things I learned at IBM.

The highlight of my career was my Corporate Service Corps experience in Tanzania.  You can read about my team here (Tanzania 1).  No one knew this at the time, but this was such a dangerous program to send me on.  Here, I got a taste of what it would be like if I were doing something I loved and making a difference in the world.  I got to scale Mt. Kilimanjaro with Nathan, and watch the wildebeests move in unison across the Serengeti plains.  Yes, my love of travel, culture, language, and environmental change all swirled around and met in one place.  I wish I could have found a similar opportunity within IBM when I returned, but such amazing jobs probably don't exist.  I will be forever grateful for this experience because from it I was able to hone my life goals and begin forging a career path that would make me truly happy. 

I don't think Nathan would be a Park Ranger today (his undeniably perfect career path) if it weren't for IBM's flexibility.  They allowed me to work remotely from several parks, to take days off and work weekends, to basically do whatever I wanted as long as I got my work done.  Surprisingly, with that kind of flexibility, most IBMers end up working all the time and it took me years to figure out how to create my own balance.  That is a priceless skill and one that I'll be using for a long time.  Thanks, IBM!

Finally, I had some fantastic customers and some that made me glad they were located in another state.  I've worked on highly successful projects and disastrous ones (let's just say that I know how to keep my cool when a Vice President is yelling at me).  In spite of some real trials, our team was always able to pull off the impossible.  Of everything I gained in the past six years, the most important thing was confidence.  The confidence to trust my gut, the confidence to push past daily issues, and finally the confidence to do something when I realized IBM wasn't the right spot for me anymore.

It's been an awesome six years.  I'll miss IBM a lot, but instead of "Building a Smarter Planet", I'll be "inspiring people to care about the [amazing] planet" they already have.

Smarter Food Supply & Aid

I've been working on an idea to simultaneously solve the issues we have with wasting food in the developed world and getting the right nutritional food to the places that need it most.  The idea has quite a ways to go, but we recently got it published it out on ip.com.  Check it out: http://priorartdatabase.com/IPCOM/000192686.

If you have ideas to make this better or ideas for getting the system up and running, let me know.  We're currently working with several groups inside IBM to see if we can't get them to produce this as a product!

Genocide

This week I've been maintaining a newly-restored prairie on the Rochester IBM site as part of a group that got the site its Wildlife Habitat Certification last year. I'm proud to say that I've been intensively involved in a dramatic prairie genocide and I take my job very seriously.

The Sweet White & Yellow Clover are native to Europe & Asia, but have since made it over here to wreak havoc on our prairies - most of which have already been destroyed by us. Each year until we're able to exterminate them, we need to become shovel-wielding warriors, systematically extinguishing the weed lest it overcrowd much prettier native species like these Black-Eyed Susans.

Black-Eyed Susans with Big Blue in the background

I was a little nervous when my friend, Rebecca, recruited me for the task this week, having flashbacks to the 14 days straight of hiking I did in tick-infested North Dakota. However, I LOVED trudging through the prairie. I don't know what it was - being closer to nature, knowing I was doing something good for the environment, finally discovering my inner gardener, or just making sure that my hiking boots got a little dirtier (there's nothing worse than a clean pair of hiking boots!). Who knows! All I know is that killing that Sweet White Clover was the highlight of my week!

Scene of the Crime...and you thought Civics were too small to haul anything!

Into the Wild

It's back to the hustle and bustle of the "big city" for me again. Every time I end up in Rochester, life gets a lot crazier. Work is far too hectic due to the "resource action", which left our team one person short (although, you could argue that was an "addition by subtraction" situation [Bonus points for naming that quote's TV show!]). In addition, we just lost another person who is out on medical leave for an undetermined amount of time (who I truly hope feels better very soon!). In my blog intro, I mention that I hardly ever talk about my day job. However, I feel that I need to for one post so the kids out there graduating from college and not getting jobs know exactly what they're missing. If that's you, I promise it will make you feel better.

A Day In My Current Life
This day was my actual Thursday, I picked it to outline because it is very typical of how the rest of my week went.

5:30am - Shower, I don't have time to workout this morning because my first meeting is at 6am.

6:00am - Corporate Service Corps South Africa Meeting - I'm mentoring IBM's first CSC team going to South Africa. They are just learning the basics of the organizations they will work for in Mpumalanga. It all sounds very cool and I'm pretty jealous that I can't go with them this time. The 6am meeting is a little hard, but this is the one part of my job that I really love, so I am happy to put up with it. I find out that the next few meetings will be at 4am central time, which, by the way is 3am in Medora. *Sigh* the pleasures of working with a worldwide team.

7:00am - Grab breakfast while my environment upgrade scripts are running. Each morning this week I have to upgrade our test environment with the latest fixes so our team can continue testing. This is not normally my job, but somebody has to do it now that we're short-staffed.

7:45am - Quick brush my teeth and dry my hair so I can make it into the office for my 8am meeting.

8:00am - The team does an excellent job of figuring out how to do a test upgrade of our largest customer environment. It's pretty amazing how we all came together to pick up the pieces on a job we always relied on our genius on medical leave to take care of. Right now, I couldn't be more proud of my team.

8:30am - A customer pings me in the middle of my upgrade meeting with a problem he feels is urgent, but is not. I remind them to use our problem reporting system. This is the fourth time he's pinged me this week. I think about blocking him from sending me sametimes (IBM's brand of instant messenger), but I don't, he is a customer after all.

9am - A meeting about the future of tooling - at least in our department. I can't afford to go. Today is the last day to make fixes and I haven't even had a chance to start yet. The future will have to wait - I fix one defect and feel like I've accomplished more than I had all week so far.

10am - On Monday, I'm taking part in a Culture Panel Q&A session for the entire site. Most people will be there since right after the panel discussion, one of our Senior Vice Presidents, Jon Iwata, will be speaking. We don't get a lot of visits from upper management here in Rochester, so it's a big deal. His schedule is planned out down to the minute and I found it very interesting listening to the amount of contingency planning that goes into an event like this. As I complained about my week to Nathan, he sweetly reminded me that someday someone would be planning my schedule down to the minute for me. I'm not sure that is really any consolation - this guy, I'm sure, is much busier than me.

11am - A free half hour! I fix another defect, read two of the 100 emails in my inbox, then rush off to heat my lunch before my Project Management Study Group.

11:30am - I'm studying to get Project Management Certified (PMP) and there is a group of us that meets each Thursday over lunch to go over another chapter in the PM Bible (a.k.a. PMBOK). This was my week to present the topic to the rest of the group: Human Resources Management. I liked this chapter - it's the one that actually encourages you to set-up Happy Hours with your team.

1pm - And now a meeting to discuss the next release's requirements. We're not even sure we'll get out of this release alive yet.

2pm - Interlock with our administrator team. This is one that I can pay selective attention to. During the meeting we all email and sametime each other, trying to solve the latest problems coming in from our production machines. Recently, we're having a lot of problems with performance. We have no one to fix them, so our customers will have to be patient.

3pm - Our meeting got done early and I have a half-hour before my 3:30pm call - I fix two more defects. Four total was my goal, this is a miracle.

3:30pm - My meeting was canceled! This is the best feeling - I get a couple more emails answered, but I think the number in my inbox has meanwhile gone up to about 150.

4:00pm - Team scrum - short meeting where our small team gets together and quickly tells each other what we accomplished today, what we'll try to get to tomorrow, and what our blockers are. We got done early - another small miracle.

4:30pm - I start my second upgrade of the day. Our official regression testing starts tomorrow and the China team needs the environment ready to go by 7 or 8pm CST tonight. Our test manager always pings me right before I'm done. I wish just once I could beat him to the punch.

5:30pm - Thank goodness for my friends! Without our planned "Beans & Fajita Night", I would have worked all night. Instead, I close up and leave with enough time to get home, change into jeans, tape The Office & 30 Rock, and head over to their house.

6-10pm - Fajita Night - While there, we watched a video about Dick Proenneke, who moved to the Alaskan Wilderness in the 60's and taped himself making AMAZING things all by himself - log cabin, moss-covered refrigerator, chimney, etc. He was just up there surviving on his own for 35 years next to a beautiful lake surrounded by mountains and nature.

With the week I'm having, it's no wonder why a life of struggling to survive far from the rest of the world and technology sounds so appealing. I feel the call of the wild, if only I could find a clone of myself to leave with my team.