What Colors the Steel Sky Blue

My experience in project management has left me quite disgruntled about the whole team dynamics, communication patterns and people in general. It seems that though people are smart, productive and constructive on their own when you put a bunch of these people into the same room all hopes go out the window.

I am not sure where my hopes went as a project manager; surely not out the window because our windows were sealed shut as we were in a fancy high rise building: 800 Congress in Austin Texas. My coworkers and I from Top Marks Productions(TMP) had been moved to this partially empty office filled with bitter memories of HC's first cut & clear project failure of mass proportions: the Smart & Big prototype. It was a proof of concept project made for a educational software publisher startup. I am not too familiar with all the intimate bitter details of the engagement but let's say the couple broke up before they were able to conceive any kids with the correct count of chromosomes.

So here we were in this fancy new office space, and it seemed like our life had immediately improved. Most of my coworkers spent their days surfing the net and plotting what they would do with the pay-increase. I was re-assigned to a huge project working closely with Ally Jackson, my boss from TMP.

Working with Ally was great, and we understood each other. However, Ally and I were the only TMP members on the project team, the rest of the team which by Fall 2000 had grown to more than 15 people were HC'ers. It seemed that HC'ers were taught to disobey project management, misbehave in meetings, just rebel against authority with or without reasons at any given time. This was almost a core value that was respected and encouraged in HC; the employees always had the right to throw a hissfit or if not that a 3 year old tantrum.

The whole six months I was on that project, I spent less and less time with the team and more and more time with my estimation sheets, paper trail, the contract, meeting with Ally. Some of this was the demands of the project, but I must admit most of it was my general fear/hatred of having to deal with the childishness of the HC people. So the rift between the project management and the team kept growing and I just could not bring myself to admit I had to do something; I thought I was fine, who could blame me? And if they did they could look at the tens of excel spreadsheets, the Microsoft project files, the 30 page client contract and admire my work.

The truth was out there, no matter how much paperwork I piled on it. I sucked as a project manager and what was worse was I did not feel the need to actually make it better. There are moments in our lives where we realize we're doing something we CAN do but is not meant for us to do; and we want to stop. We want to stop and pull out, pick the train up from the track and move it to the adjacent one; hell, sometimes I want to put the train on the green slopes without any tracks and see what happens...

I was nearing that point, I was dreading showing to work every day. I was dreading asking a team member to do something for me; mostly because every time I asked them to do something they would always come up with an alternative but not necessarily better and/or more efficient method of doing it and kept insisting on it until I caved. You see it was not about getting work done, it felt like they were trying to break me.

While my life at work seemed like it was completely falling apart, my life outside of work was as good as it had ever been. I was in an amazing relationship with someone who did not ask all the wrong questions, did not answer all the wrong questions. He could truly be counted on; he was someone who could actually calm me down. It is my personal belief that he has got to be the human equivalent of a deserted misty pine forest on the skirts of Zigana (A peak located on a series of mountains in North Eastern Turkey).