Work – 16th March

This week K asked me to start work on a large project. She wanted a procurement toolkit that would allow the university to quickly asses the sustainability aspects of their procurement practices. In practice this meant a large spread sheet with a lot of information given to the user as well as entered by the user. I was asked to create the framework, with all the buttons, categories and other features ready to go. I started by have a long conversation with K about what she wanted from the spread sheet and how it should work as a document. Once again I started a little over-ambitious with the level of complexity I wanted to add. K toned my aspirations down; it’s only necessary to add a feature if it will dramatically improve the end product. I was effectively trying to put a lot of features on something that K wanted to be a very simple product.

Having planned what was necessary K left me to get on and do it. Several of the features we had agreed turned into more effort to add than I had thought. I had to become more familiar with programming macros than I was; this learning process caused me to make a systematic error throughout the project than I then had to correct. This cost me quite a lot of time and the spread sheet was not as far on as K had hoped for; I felt that I had lead K to believe in the best possible case and not delivered. This was a lesson I need to learn – more accurate goals and to give the potential ‘slippage time’ on a project, not just the ideal finishing time.

I did feel that I managed to produce a good start on the project, especially given that I had to learn some of the techniques for the first time. The buttons and macros I programmed really did make the sheet more usable and improved its functionality. I feel I did the right thing in recommending that they were included, but should have been more open about the time that they would take. I also felt that I achieved a lot in a short space of time; some of the interns that shared my office commented that I was working hard. I feel that I enjoy hearing such praise and that this motivates me to work harder. I feel that my work ethic has been a key factor that persuaded the department to continue to offer me work. Although my time-keeping skills let me down, I have learnt to work very hard to compensate for this. It also helps that I often stay in the office after most people have gone home. This presents an excellent image to people who observe me staying late even if it is somewhat undeserved as I don’t start at the same time as them.

I feel this afternoon’s work presented me at my best and worst; I learnt and applied new skills, understood a brief and worked towards that, but I also let down K on the time it would take to deliver what she wanted.