Good busy

We've been busy at work lately, but it's a good busy. We've got an enormous amount of work to do in a limited amount of time, and we've had to draw up a battle plan for how to approach it. Each of the projects we're working on has to be thoroughly worked over by each of four sub-departments, then assembled by another and QC'd by another. If we approached this wrong we would have conflicts and delays as different sub-departments tried to grab the same projects at the same time. I worked out a schedule to avoid this and developed a plan for carrying it out.

Of course, the plan is falling apart. Plans almost always do. Some sub-departments are moving faster than I expected, and some are taking more time. We have had two critical equipment failures, one of which was resolved almost immediately and one of which has reduced functionality of a sub-department by more than a third. (UPDATE 10/14/2005: Make that three critical equipment failures, two of them in a single sub-department, cutting its functionality in half. And we had a network failure that resulted when somebody randomly pulled some wires. What fun.) We have critical personnel leaving for long-scheduled vacations, and unexpected emergency projects elbowing their way to the front of the line. I am trying to toss these projects back to the end of the line, but as it is they are mostly removing themselves as they turn out to be missing critical components.

But any plan's nads are ultimately in the hands of the customer, who needs to supply all of the raw assets for the project and needs to approve the project at various stages of completion. Our customers tend to be laid-back Californians who don't understand high-strung Type A folks from DVD Authoring studios on the East Coast. Getting them to cooperate tends to be the bottleneck in any project.

So we're busy, but it's a good busy. I hope we can make it through this with a minimum of pain.