I’ve been Away for a While
It’s been a while since I’ve posted last! I apologize for that. I have a semi-legitimate excuse, though: I’ve been billing.
A part of my current role is that I provide some quantity of billable hours, and that’s where I’ve been for the last eight weeks. This project was a bit of a doozy: a lot of coordination with many (sometimes competing) interests from the client side, and trying to wade through the caconophy of voices to find the root problems that the customer needs to have solved. I tend to dive in head-first when I bill, and when combined with my poor multi-tasking skills, I ignore a lot of my other responsibilities.
So why is it important that part of my role is to be billable in the field?
Zero-thly, I am a part of a services organization. Services organizations make money when their people bill their customers. I have to create some services revenue for the department. But I don’t like to focus on this reason, because it makes it sound like billing is a chore as opposed to an opportunity.
Firstly, it keeps my skills fresh. Just like physical fitness, my technical, facilitation, and consulting skills all need to be exercised to stay on the top of their form. Even if its a relatively short engagement, I have the opportunity to pair program, or to lead an event storm, or to just manage the conversations that are a part of kicking off any engagement. The less I do these, the harder it is to come in and do them when I need to. I have to keep those skills sharp.
Secondly, and I think this is the best reason, is that it lets me meet and work with people on my team. If our engineers are having problems in the field, its very hard to capture and understand those in simple conversations done outside the context of an engagement. They can come from the day-to-day conversations we have. And when I have the real data from the engineers in the field, it gets me out of the ivory tower where I imagine the problems and the solutions: I can get real problems and pair to come up with real workable solutions for them (even if those solutions are implemented in a general sense well after the fact).
This engagement is wrapping up; I should be back to my full-time leadership role after this week. I intend to write up some of the challenges we faced in this engagement (redacting the customer-specific information of course) and get back on a regular cadence of writing these posts again.
