Remembering What I love About My job
It’s not often you get to revisit a postponed or worse yet, cancelled project. Business is typically a forward looking enterprise. Like a truck on a one way road, there’s almost never a chance to circule back and revisit a previous decision.
I just got to revisit a previous decision. My company has multiple sites all across the United States. I started when we just opening our first site in Salt Lake City. We’ve now grown dramatically.
Each time we move to a new location, there’s a ton of work that needs to be done. Building plans need to be drawn, approved and premitted. Equipment has to be ordered. People have to be hired and trained. The entire operation takes weeks of work. Typically it takes about three weeks more than the schedulers give me, but we’ve always managed to bring the project in on time.
A couple of years ago we decided to open a fifth location in southern Georgia. We informed me of the location and we got to work. We built our project plan. We did the build out, ordered the equipment. We flew out to Georgia several times.
In fact, we were all ready to start hiring people when the needs of the business changed.
The Georgia site has been cancelled.
I fall in love a little bit with each site we build out. I spend hours working on the site. I spend days on site. I spend months thinking and planning for it.
The Georgia site was the first time we had built out a site and then abandoned it. Some other client moved into it. For months afterward, my team would describe bad news as “Georgia.”
After years of rapid growth, after Georgia we went into more of a maintenance mode. We added additional people at various sites, but
no new sites.
Building out a new site is a very stressful and time pressured process. It’s work I have to do on top of my normal job as well. But, there’s something exciting about building something new. In fact, it’s one of the most enjoyable parts of my job.
These week I got an email:
We have decided to expand into the Georgia site.
The email was a day ago and we’ve already had multiple meetings. We have plenty of questions we still need to figure out. We have people to assign, project plans to build. The initial GoLive date was months away. And then, the schedule is was shortened to about three weeks less than we need.
I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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