Sat, 24th Sep
Today, AJ, my team lead had taken a day off. Being the only other person in the team who was not a new joinee, I took over as the acting team lead for the day.
Being the boss has its advantages. You get to decide who does what. In effect, you decide to do nothing, and offload all your pending work to your underlings. I had been pretending to work on an assignment of documentation the whole week that AJ was there. Painting screenshots on user manuals isn’t what one would say “interesting work”, but having that on my worklist meant that it prevented AJ from handing me over any other “issues” that came up regularly. Hmm.., I thought, this work should get completed today !
Called over PM and asked him how he was loaded today. He was working on the specifications for a development that was high priority. What exactly is “high priority” ? Part of the fun in playing the boss is that you get to decide the priorities of everything. “Have you explained this report to the development team ? No ? Do that. Let them start working while you work on the written specs, no need build in linear dependencies. Documenting the specifications you can do later. That’s low priority. Now there’s this list of user manuals that need to be delivered positively by 4 p.m. today. You need to describe the processes in this list with appropriate screenshots. Start on this, and complete this by 3:00 so that I can review these before submitting..”
……..
Being the boss also has its drawbacks. All issues are routed to you. However, Saturday is normally a light day in office. Only one issue sprung up the whole day.
A mail routed through finance arrived after a number of forwards, saying some user in Baroda wanted :a new cenvatable condition type in import PO's to handle the new Govt levy - Additional Countervailing Duty". Whew . What a mouthful. I sometimes are amazed what sentences people can think up, given some leisure time.
Anyway, couldn't make head or tail out of that line. So, I sent back a mail to one of the guys in finance:
"Please provide the following details:
a) The rate of the duty
b) The cases/conditions where this applicable
c) What is the price basis of this duty
d) Will this be applicable in conjuction with Countervailing duty. (well, I had no idea about that, either, but I guess since he wanted "additional" duty there was some original duty in the first place ;) )
e) Whether the condition was to be made available in OBYC, if yes in what form; if no then what is the alternative to be followed. ( This was a technical term and absolutely irrelevant, but I knew that this would flummox the user and it would be quite some time before he would think up of an answer to that one :D )
We will look into this matter and make the suitable software modifications once this information is made available to us. "
The original mail was sent three days back before it reached me. I guess they would take a similar amount of time in getting back with the answer. By that time AJ would be back, he would know how to handle it ...
Ah, well ! getting to be a temporary boss is fun !
Today, AJ, my team lead had taken a day off. Being the only other person in the team who was not a new joinee, I took over as the acting team lead for the day.
Being the boss has its advantages. You get to decide who does what. In effect, you decide to do nothing, and offload all your pending work to your underlings. I had been pretending to work on an assignment of documentation the whole week that AJ was there. Painting screenshots on user manuals isn’t what one would say “interesting work”, but having that on my worklist meant that it prevented AJ from handing me over any other “issues” that came up regularly. Hmm.., I thought, this work should get completed today !
Called over PM and asked him how he was loaded today. He was working on the specifications for a development that was high priority. What exactly is “high priority” ? Part of the fun in playing the boss is that you get to decide the priorities of everything. “Have you explained this report to the development team ? No ? Do that. Let them start working while you work on the written specs, no need build in linear dependencies. Documenting the specifications you can do later. That’s low priority. Now there’s this list of user manuals that need to be delivered positively by 4 p.m. today. You need to describe the processes in this list with appropriate screenshots. Start on this, and complete this by 3:00 so that I can review these before submitting..”
……..
Being the boss also has its drawbacks. All issues are routed to you. However, Saturday is normally a light day in office. Only one issue sprung up the whole day.
A mail routed through finance arrived after a number of forwards, saying some user in Baroda wanted :a new cenvatable condition type in import PO's to handle the new Govt levy - Additional Countervailing Duty". Whew . What a mouthful. I sometimes are amazed what sentences people can think up, given some leisure time.
Anyway, couldn't make head or tail out of that line. So, I sent back a mail to one of the guys in finance:
"Please provide the following details:
a) The rate of the duty
b) The cases/conditions where this applicable
c) What is the price basis of this duty
d) Will this be applicable in conjuction with Countervailing duty. (well, I had no idea about that, either, but I guess since he wanted "additional" duty there was some original duty in the first place ;) )
e) Whether the condition was to be made available in OBYC, if yes in what form; if no then what is the alternative to be followed. ( This was a technical term and absolutely irrelevant, but I knew that this would flummox the user and it would be quite some time before he would think up of an answer to that one :D )
We will look into this matter and make the suitable software modifications once this information is made available to us. "
The original mail was sent three days back before it reached me. I guess they would take a similar amount of time in getting back with the answer. By that time AJ would be back, he would know how to handle it ...
Ah, well ! getting to be a temporary boss is fun !
