Planning for X1

This week is the kick-off meeting for the steering committee. On Thursday, the China project is expected to cross the so-called X1 milestone. Afterwards, the project team can proceed to solution development. I plan to travel to the northeastern plant to kick-off and meet the local team. I hope it will go well. The phone conference meeting yesterday with the head office team and the Thailand business owner did not go well. It was a bit aggressive and tiresome. I guess I should get used to this kind of situation. No sense of working in harmony as one gets involved with people on a higher level. The teeth and knives come out and often seems to be a free-for-all brawl.

The other upstream project that I am working is on now has some troubles. I getting tired of receiving the issues from the users. We had given them enough time for testing a few months back and it is only now that we are getting feedback. It is very sad and sometimes I feel that I should leave. It is difficult because the support team is not turning over their work to the new outsource company. Their development servers have been shut down already and they will try to work on their local computers. So it will take some time before we can reply to them in detail. I sometime think that I should forget my troubles in the office when I leave for home and I am getting to be good at this trick.

We met this morning with the project office staff as well as my new boss. I liked the meeting because I was able to express my self. This is my main challenge to find my voice which is the 8th Habit of Steven Covey. I feel that I should have contributed more in the discussion yesterday. But I have some time to offer my thoughts. So I think I should try to offer my comments via e-mail but in a more politically acceptable manner. I did not have this problem in the past and used to rely more on my own reasonable arguments. But as one grows older one realizes that my voice is only one point of view and that I should learn to accept other's point of view. It is not really about accepting other's views but more on working on a plan of action or work towards another plan against my inner wishes.