“The sky looks different when you have someone you love up there” (Unknown).
I started chitchatting with the employees as well as consultants at Canada Post. They told me where to park my car and to pay a few dollars to the church, which was rather convenient for me. At the same time they suggested using the restaurant across the road where most of the folks from Canada Post went for lunch.
The first day I tried a Steak Sandwich which I thought was quite good. It was a Greek restaurant and was being managed by a Greek couple. The husband was the cook and the wife was managing the restaurant with a couple of waitresses. Service was excellent and they had created a very friendly and cheerful atmosphere. I became a regular for lunch and they noticed the size of tips I used to give, which helped me get good service.
From time to time I used to treat folks from Canada Post to lunch simply because I always hated to eat alone.
Gradually other folks started coming to see me in my small office, to talk about technology or other things. I found out that Ron was the guy who kept mentioning my name, encouraging those folks to chat with me.
I was still going home on the weekends but my time at my own office was shrinking by the day. I figured that David and Mike were not going to do anything about finding someone else to mind the office. I promised them I would train somebody to be in the office during the day to do some marketing.
I discussed this with Lynda in detail. She said maybe I should try to get out of the contract as they were not living up to their obligations.
I didn’t rush to finalize anything as I was grateful to them in so many ways. At the same time I wasn’t going to let them use me like this.
I decided to write a marketing plan explaining what needed to be done to get the business going in Ottawa. At the same time I offered to train people before I left the company. It took a while for David and Mike to realize that I meant business before they started acting on the marketing plan that I had written for them. As promised, I trained people for them and then said goodbye.
However, I stayed grateful to both of them for allowing me to work with them.
My work at the Post Office was going well except I didn’t have any responsibility for deliverables. I was enjoying spending time in various departments talking and explaining what our function in the organization was, nothing but marketing exercise.
I had Lynda and Adam come to Ottawa in May and spend some time to see how they would like the city. Then I started looking into renting a house as Lynda was totally against the idea of owning. I knew sometime she might change her mind but right now I had to find a reasonable place with access to a high school, as Adam was going to complete his grade 12.
I looked around almost everywhere before I decided to focus on Barrhaven.
The Barrhaven Community Association (BCA) was formed in the late seventies. There were two members of the community who were very involved. Paul Horne, a local schoolteacher, was the president. George Galbraith, a local businessman, served as the vice president. Some other key members were Jan Harder, Doug Collins, Tom O’Neil, and Gus Este. The BCA was sustained by voluntary household membership fees of $10.00 per year. Its mandate was to be a liaison between the then Township of Nepean under Reeve Andrew Haydon, which shortly thereafter became the City of Nepean, under Mayor Ben Franklin.
Another role was to create activities for youth in the community, including sports, library services and social events for all of Barrhaven. Some of the first events took place in the only school that was available at the time, Barrhaven Public. Others took place in Larkin House which was quite tiny; and some held by the City at the Mowat Barn. Once the Walter Baker Centre and the Barrhaven Mall were built, the BCA and other groups became very active.
When I came along to check out the community, I found farms everywhere except one street called Greenbank Road. Right after passing Fallowfield Road going south, there was a small plaza with a grocery store, Shoppers Drug Mart, and a store with all kinds of East Indian bits and pieces.
Going further south, there was a plaza under construction with CIBC, which was about to be opened. At the end of the mall there was a restaurant called Barrhaven Broadway Restaurant.
In any case, I found a house to rent across from the Walter Baker Centre and not too far from the mall. It was a three-bedroom house located on Atrick Drive.
Lynda and Adam came on the weekend to take a look at the house and they liked it. I went ahead and signed a lease. What we didn’t find out until it was too late was that living in that house, Adam wasn’t allowed to go to the local high school. He was supposed to go to Bell High School to finish his grade 12, which were a few miles from the house. We weren’t located on the school bus route. Therefore, Lynda had to drive Adam to school every day.
We moved at the end of June 1989.
This was our 11th. move (5 Houses that we owned and 6 rented). At the same time it was Adam’s 8th school.
My contract with Canada Post was going reasonably well. Ron, my boss, came to me one day and said – Mike Wallace, Director of Applications Development, is looking for a senior project manager. I thought you would be the right candidate for that position. He said I am not trying to get rid of you but at the same time I believe that this will be an appropriate assignment for you. I said I don’t have a great deal of experience in developing and implementing applications, Ron.
He said if I remember correctly you had done “Requirements Specifications” for the consumer sales tax system for the Government of New Brunswick. He said perhaps you should let Mike decide whether or not you have the right experience for the assignment.
I met with Mike Wallace in his office. He was a huge man, more than six feet tall, with long hair. I was told that he liked to drink Coke all the time. I noticed that he had a can of Coke in his hands. He offered me a chair while he was sipping a Coke and browsing my resumé, which was given to him by Ron.
Once he was done, he said – very impressive background, Mir. You worked in almost all aspects of data processing. He continued – I am very much interested in what you did for the Government of New Brunswick. You had a very complicated assignment: to develop requirements for the Consumer Sales Tax System for the Province of New Brunswick.
I said I only had enough time to finalize the specs before I was promoted to do something else, which had nothing to do with the application development.
He asked if I had the opportunity to validate the requirements for the users of the system.
I said, indeed, I did. I also incorporated the changes that came out of the sessions I conducted with all user groups including the auditors, as they were the major users of the system.
Mike said could you walk me briefly through what you did to define application requirements.
If I remember correctly, I explained to Mike the following:
- Identified the stakeholders as individuals or groups who have a vested interest in the project. I made sure that everybody on my project understood clearly that the input of stakeholders was crucial to defining the application requirements;
- Defined the scope of the project. The scope clearly defined the boundaries of the project and included everything that would be delivered as part of it;
- Drafted functional and non-functional requirements. Functional requirements are those that describe what the software should do. Non-functional requirements are those that describe how the software should work;
- Prioritized the requirements. That helped to ensure that the most important requirements were addressed first in case there were limited resources or time to complete the process; and
- Finally, validated the requirements with stakeholders. This helped to ensure that the requirements accurately reflected the needs of the stakeholders. It also reflected the commitment from the user community.
Mike said perhaps the validation of the requirements is the most critical part of the total development cycle. I said I agreed with him.
Mike said Ron speaks very highly of you, Mir. He also said you are very good with the users.
I said Ron is too kind to me, Mike. I hope you don’t believe everything he said about me.
Mike smiled and said if I made an offer to you right now, would you accept it.
I would be delighted as I have heard only good things about how you manage your department. It would be my pleasure to work with you, but I will not accept any offer until I get to talk to Ron as I am still working for him. I hope you understand that. Mike.
He said he understood it perfectly, and appreciated my loyalty to Ron.
I asked Mike if he would need my references.
He said, no, Ron’s reference is good enough for me.
I asked Mike if he could explain to me what would be the responsibilities associated with the senior project manager assignment.
He said he was looking for somebody like me who could handle more than one project, to initiate and define the functional requirements with the help of the stakeholders.
I remember saying – I think I can handle that. I hope I am not going to disappoint you, Mike.
He said don’t worry about disappointing me. I believe that you have the skills as well as the relevant experience to make things happen.
I said let me go back and have a meeting with Ron. Perhaps I should get Ron to let you know.
He said it makes sense.
As soon as I got back to my office, Ron popped in and asked what the good word was.
I said –Lunch, if you are available.
He said he would meet me at the restaurant in 15 minutes.
I had a nice lunch with Ron and briefed him about my meeting with Mike.
Ron said why you didn’t accept Mike’s offer right on the spot.
I said I wanted to talk to you before saying anything to Mike. I wanted to know if you had any plans for me before I accepted Mike’s offer.
He said once again I am not trying to get rid of you, Mir. I could continue to use you for what you have been doing for me.
He continued – you have been a great “Sounding Board” for me and I would like to continue to meet with you now and then to “chitchat”, if this is okay with you.
I said that would be my pleasure. However, when do you think I should consider moving to Mike’s department?
He said perhaps next Monday would be a good date.
I said would you mind letting Mike know. Ron said he was meeting with Mike right after lunch on something else and he would be delighted to let him know.
I started working for Mike Wallace as a senior project manager (PM) with the responsibility for multiple projects on the following Monday. He had a cubicle for me which was a typical office for a PM.
He had 4 other senior project managers reporting directly to him. The full team of project support staff included a secretary as well as a couple of other admin support personnel.
I was curious to know what kind of background Mike had. I tried to pin him down for a meeting to chat about his background and his vision about his department but it wasn’t easy to get him committed. He had mentioned to me during my first meeting with him that he had worked in Saudi Arabia on an assignment for a little while. I wasn’t sure about his experience here in Canada. All I knew about Mike was that he was one of the new hires since the new guy (Ken) took over the IT function at Canada Post.
I finally nailed him down by offering him lunch at the restaurant where I used to go every day. He showed up on time and started talking about the management meeting that he had attended before he arrived. He said what a waste of time. Listening to my boss and other directors for more than two hours was a lost cause.
As usual the wife of the owner showed up and took our orders.
She came back after 5 minutes and said to Mike, please take off your jacket.
Mike was shocked and said why?
She said because your jacket needs fixing on the left shoulder. I can’t let you dine with Dr. Ali with this jacket on.
Mike was stunned but he stood up, took off his jacket, and verified that it did indeed need fixing.
She spoke to Mike directly and said she used to be a seamstress in her previous life. She decided to come and work with her husband in the family business, managing the restaurant.
Mike was looking at me nervously. I said you will get your jacket back before we have finished our lunch, Mike.
He handed the jacket to her reluctantly.
We got back to our discussion as I was keenly interested in finding out his vision.
After listening to him, I made the observation that apart from being a nice guy, Mike had no real qualifications to manage the total development activities for an organization the size of Canada Post. Nevertheless, I thought I should try to help him as much as I could.
I suggested that I could look around and try to gather some documentation on both the applications that he wanted me to organize and initiate projects for. I also suggested that I should go around and meet the users of those two applications to understand their status before I began drafting a project plan for each application. Mike liked the idea and kept telling me to do what I had done for the consumer sales tax for the Government of New Brunswick.
By the time we finished our lunch, the owner’s wife brought his jacket back. Mike looked at the fix on the jacket and thanked her profusely. At the same time he asked me how I get these things like happen. I said they are just kind people who care for their customers.
Mike put his jacket on. While we were walking back to our office building, he said he had two kids and an ex-wife. He lives alone in an apartment and nobody’s there to look after him.
I kept myself busy with the collection and reviewing of the relevant documents. After that I started chatting with the folks who were responsible for managing the current applications. However, I found it difficult to meet with Mike to discuss anything as he was all over the map. When he didn’t show up for a scheduled meeting he was always complaining how busy he was with everything else. I thought the best way to manage Mike was to give him an electronic scheduler. I bought one from the computer store before it became Best Buy.
The scheduler was sophisticated enough to do more than schedule meetings. It was also designed to issue notifications and reminders. Mike hesitated to accept it from me. I said it was not a bribe, Mike. Nobody has to know about it. I remember telling him that he missed three meetings with me during the last two weeks. If I asked other project managers, they would agree with me that they had similar experiences.
He said you got me there, Mir. Unfortunately, I am not known for punctuality.
I told Mike that perhaps he would be better off with an electronic scheduler compared to the appointment book that he carried all the time. The book had no capability to tell him that he could not schedule more than one appointment at the same time. He laughed and said Mir you were supposed to manage projects, not your boss.
I said unfortunately I could not manage any project effectively if didn’t know how to manage my boss. He said touché.
Once Mike had his secretary enter his meetings in the scheduler, he took it with him everywhere and followed it accordingly. It didn’t take too long for people to say that Mike’s showing up on time for his meetings.
Mike started feeling comfortable with me. From time to time he asked me if we could have lunch at my favorite restaurant. They knew that Mike was my boss and they welcomed him wholeheartedly, regardless of whether I was with him or not. Mike told me that once he went there for lunch with his boss and as soon as he entered the restaurant, he was treated like a king. His boss asked him how the heck he managed to do that.
One day I was talking to other project managers. They were saying that having a scheduler helped Mike to better manage his meetings; but still it required discipline to allocate time for each meeting, and to not overrun or overlap meetings. Plus they were complaining that they didn’t get to see Mike as much as they needed to. I suggested that the timing of meetings and following the scheduled meetings are very personal. It would take some time for Mike to control them. In the meantime, perhaps we should get Mike to meet with us every week to brief him about what we are working on and where and when we need his help to deal with the politics.
Everybody liked the idea. They said perhaps I should take the lead to get him to agree to meet weekly.
I thought about that before I asked Mike to have lunch with me. When we met, I briefed him about my activities. He appeared to be very happy with what I was working on.
When he mentioned that he was really grateful for the idea of using the scheduler for his daily activities, I thought this would be the right time to mention the need for a weekly management meeting. I remember saying that while things seemed to be more organized; I thought there was a need for us to have a weekly management meeting with all PMs. I told him I had discussed this idea with the PMs. They thought it was an excellent idea and they authorized me to discuss it with him.
Mike sipped his Coke and looked around before he began to talk.
He said he didn’t like the idea of having meetings as he believed that they are usually just time-consuming and accomplish nothing of significance. For instance, he continued, all we directors have a weekly management meeting with our boss for almost three hours. All we discuss is politics and stupidity which doesn’t help to get things done in our real world.
I had to be very careful about how to respond to his comments, which were totally valid. I finally said I understand that, Mike. Still, we cannot neglect the fact that weekly meetings will help boost morale of the project teams, and it will help provide updates on specific projects.
He said do you want to know what else really bothers me about our weekly meetings with our boss. I said shoot.
He said he takes telephone calls during the meeting. While he’s on the phone, everybody else is looking at each other and doing nothing.
I came very close to say your boss is an idiot but I bit my tongue.
I said here’re the following suggestions:
- I will organize a weekly meeting starting on Monday at 7:00 AM to be finished by 8:30 AM. That will allow us to be in the office on time and continue our routine activities;
- I will arrange and pay for everybody’s breakfast so that there won’t be any telephone calls during the meeting to interrupt us; and
- I will prepare an agenda, coordinating the content with other PMs. I will monitor the meeting so we stay within the time frame.
Mike said – WOW. Mir you cannot do that. You have been very generous with your time and money with me. I really appreciate that, but there’s no need for you to continue to spend money on us.
I said my total focus is to facilitate a weekly meeting where all PMs get an opportunity to get your direction for their projects.
Mike said I don’t have any problem with making a commitment to meet with you guys every week and spend time to listen and provide some directions as you suggested. But I am not too sure if letting you pay for the breakfasts is the right thing to do, Mir.
I don’t know any other way to make sure that no PM will have an excuse not to show up for the meeting, Mike.
Mike said let me think about it, Mir.
