Motivation

Over the past few months at work, I've been involved in an IT project with an immovable deadline.

As it turns out, we (a few hundred dedicated and many more part time resources) have managed to get the work done and we'll be implementing it at year end. (yayyy us! :)

It has been a long, hard slog for everyone involved though. Ask anyone in the hallway and they'll respond with something like "I'm just glad we're near the end."

One of my roles on the project has been the "wiki-master". (We use a fine product - a wiki written in Java, from an Australian company).

Early last week, I was approached with a request to take something (system health checks) that had been mocked up on a spreadsheet and put it into the wiki. The main reason was the perception that the spreadsheet could run into sharing issues, while with the wiki there should be some way to keep that separate for updating, while still showing a consolidated view. The idea was to have something that shows the state of our systems while we proceed with the project implementation.

"Sure, I'll give it a try", said I.

A couple of days pass during which I think about the health checks from time to time. My thinking goes something like: "Man - I'm never going to be able to get something that looks like that spreadsheet by including pages on the wiki....". Thursday morning comes and at my sub-teams morning scrum, I'm asked about it and I reply "I just don't think it's going to work... We'll just have to use the spreadsheet". At this point, I'm told to make sure I tell the PM that asked me for it.

One of the other features of our project is that the CIO holds a weekly standup Thursday mornings. This Thursday was the penultimate meeting, so there was a lot of information about our implementation and how it would proceed and be communicated.

The last line on the last slide read:

• There will be a wiki with the health checks for our systems

It is amazing how motivating it is for the CIO to promise something to a roomful of 250 people :)

So, naturally, I had a working version of the wiki built and ready to go that afternoon.

Looking back, I had two issues:

• I was tired and didn't want to think. (Not motivated)
• I was focusing on the presentation (i.e., must look like a spreadsheet), rather than the need (Must communicate the systems health effectively)

The CIO presentation fixed the first one :). The second one followed naturally once I had the motivation.