Ugh. October, can you make up your MIND already?! I cannot continue with this 75-degree-100%-humidity-one-day-55-degree-and-windy-the-next cycle. Seriously, my sinuses are in /wrist mode with all of this atmospheric fluctuation.
This has been somewhat of a slow week at work, with the exception of a pretty embarassing SNAFU by yours truly yesterday afternoon. It's been a bit of a stressful start for this new job (which I guess isn't really all that new anymore), having to assume project management on the implementation phase of multiple Pharma web presence initiatives. Not being involved from the start of design means that there are required elements to pushing development into production that I just don't know about. Regardless of how many handoff/status meetings I have with the previous owners of my current responsibilities, knowledge transfers are never complete.
Anyway, a marketing email for a popular drug was supposed to drop yesterday, and I thought everything was in order. I had the final meeting with my business technical contact for the brand, and assured him that we were good to go. On sending out notification to the communications team to initiate the delivery of the email, I was returned the following response:
"We cannot send this email until tickets 27406, 27757, 27770, 27269, 27047, 27022, and 26859 have been pushed to the productin environment."
(Quick explanation: I work with web/graphic developers, and we use a ticketing system to submit and track active development. Each element of a website is tracked in it's own ticket by the program we use, so this means that SEVEN pieces of the website still needed to moved to the live domain.)
Weeeeeeeeeeeell, crap. You'd think it wouldn't be so hard to move a bunch of files from one network folder to another (which is essentially the difference between test and live environments). At my previous job, a small development company, this would have been no problem. Just copy and paste, right? Eh, here it's a bit more complicated. Big company = many departments = multiple avenues of approval.
I had to go back to the BT and admit my mistake, which was made to suck even more because he is out for vacation for the rest of the week. "My fault.", I say. And that's fine, for now. But the expiration on my new guy card is coming up pretty soon.
In the end, I learned a valuable lesson. Not that I need to be more diligent about covering the entirety of a project's scope, regardless of at what point I have been given ownership. No, something much more valuable.
What happened late yesterday was may fault. It was caused by my actions, or rather, my inactions. But the developers and back end quality control team (who are ultimately responsible for pushing development to production) were more than willing to put forth some extra effort to help me get the situation right. They stayed late, helped me gather the requirements I had missed, and kept me updated as tickets were closed (which means they were verified as working on the live website).
I learned that my colleagues are not only reliable to, but are willing to help each other out in order to accomplish the goals set forth unto the information systems team.
THAT is enough to make someone enjoy coming to work everyday.
