Author Archives: Michael C. McGreevy

Daily Writing Prompt – What do you love about where you live?

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Simply put, I live where people dream of going on vacation.

I’m not trying to say that everything about Florida/The Greater Tampa Bay area is perfect. Far from it. Hell, “Florida Man” jokes exist for a reason, and despite heavy Northern influence on the major metropolitan areas Florida will never let you forget that it is, indeed, part of the Deep South. I mean, there is a HUGE Confederate Flag off of I4 right as you cross into Tampa territory.

But…There’s a lot of stuff about this area that is pretty great.

The weather is pretty great. Yes, it’s hot most of the year. Yes, it’s humid. But the thing is, with the obvious exception being the times when a hurricane is barreling down on us, I’ve never heard the powers that be tell us not to go outside because we could die. Ocean breezes keep things relatively livable, even if you end up a sweaty mess. I used to be enamored with the idea of living places that are cold and grey, because I love the rare days we have that are that way in Florida, but I was disabused of that notion by my wife after visiting Chicago in November a few years ago. While we were driving between cities, she turned to me and said “I want you to look around right now. See how everything is brown and grey and wet? See how everyone is sad and depressed? It’s like this for MONTHS AT A TIME.” When we were driving across the Howard Frankland bridge after arriving home that November, I noted the beautiful sunset and the fact that I could see a school of dolphins playing in Tampa Bay and realized that cold and grey days could get old quickly.

The cultural scene here is pretty great, too. We have a ton of local theaters, artists, musicians, museums, and various other ways to scratch your creative itch. Downtown St. Petersburg and Gulfport are two communities that are filled with eclectic people and businesses, not to mention being LGBTQ+ friendly.

Obviously we have beaches, and one of them (Clearwater Beach) was recently rated as the Best Beach in the South. We don’t have waves to speak of, but our beaches are top notch and many of our beach communities are still pretty low-key and chill if you’re just looking to kick back, have a few drinks, and watch some stunning sunsets.

The food scene here has really taken a turn for the better in the last decade or so, thanks in no small part to the efforts of folks like my friends Greg and Michelle Baker. When I was growing up it seemed like the majority of restaurants around here were either chains, dives, or prohibitively expensive. Now we’ve got a wide range of eateries cropping up all over the place, from food trucks to Michelin star restaurants.

I suppose it goes without saying that if you’re into theme parks or cruises you’ve got your pick of the lot here in Florida, and from where I am in West Central Florida we’re reasonable driving distance to all of them. We also have St. Augustine, which is the oldest continually-occupied settlement of European and African-American origin in North America and just a really cool place to visit.

But ultimately? For me? Florida is home. We’re a state made up of transients, and when I was growing up very few people who I knew were actually born here. I wasn’t myself, but I’ve lived here for about 48 years. I live two miles or so from the house I grew up in. I can’t go anywhere in St. Petersburg without having some kind of memory pop into my head. This is where I have my roots, and despite all the reasons to want to live somewhere else I’ll never not love St. Petersburg, Florida. There was a time when I wanted nothing more than to live somewhere else, but the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve realized that it is a pretty amazing place to live.

Where I want to be and who I want to be

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This post was “written” almost a year ago. I was experimenting with using dictation tools to write a post on my morning walk, and the end result was pretty scattered and required a lot of editing. I got about half way done, had to move on to other things, and promptly forgot about it. This morning I stumbled across that draft in progress and decided to finish it up. Honestly, it was rough. I had to remember what was on my mind a year ago, and I went off on some completely unrelated side rant that was about a thousand words long and needed to be edited out. I think the end result here is worth posting, though, so here it is.

The company I work for recently went through a major reorganization. A new department was created for our business unit and our team was moved into a new vertical under a different executive. A VP position was created to head up the new department, and another senior leader was given that position to help align all of our Agile/Lean/Project/Strategic activities.

It’s a lot of change. I was, admittedly, quite shaken when it happened. I’ve had my cheese moved more than once at my current job, but this one felt overwhelming at first. I don’t feel that way any more, and in fact I’m really excited about all the changes, but that initial jolt was pretty big.

One of the reasons it was such a shock to my system is because I was moved into what we are calling the “process” vertical in our organization. As someone who believes in and supports Agile, being in a group that seems to be on the “processes and tools” side of the “Individuals and Interactions” equation wasn’t a look I was happy with. I’m still not entirely keen on the optics around it, if I’m being honest, but I do believe that in our current structure we landed in the right place.

In any case, I was meeting with my new boss on Monday (the above mentioned Vice President of our newly formed department), and we were having one of many “getting to know you” style conversations we’ve had since the change. While we’ve worked together for many years at this point and have a perfectly amiable working relationship, we don’t really know each other all that well so we’re spending some time working on that. In our conversation on Monday, he asked me where I wanted to be in five to ten years.

Now I need to go ahead and state for the record that he knows about my cancer and said right up front that he realized his prepared topic for the day probably wasn’t something that was top of mind for me at the moment. I concurred and stated that “alive” was really my top-of-mind goal, but since I intended to achieve that one it was totally cool to talk about what else I’d like to be doing and we did so. In the time that has passed I’ve thought about it some more, and that was the path I took to starting this post.

When I reflect on my early days in software development, I see a perfect example of how my mind works. My first job was with a company that sold ColdFusion based auction software. The original person who wrote the code did so in a way that was most efficient at the time he wrote it. The internet was slow, and any extra white space in the background of a page could cause longer load times, so he removed any characters that were “extraneous” from his code.

The result, while readable to a visitor of the site, was a solid mass of text that was nearly impossible to decipher on the back end.

As my responsibilities there grew I eventually got access to that code base and was charged with helping to fix/improve the software. Every time I had to access a page, I would poke around in it and make it better. I would add comments where none existed. I would explicitly name variables from x or y. I would tab-delimit nested code. I would update deprecated functions or replace code blocks that were inefficient. What I was doing was removing technical debt, but I had no concept of what that was at the time. I just wanted to understand how the code worked, and I wanted to help make it better.

Which is a perfect example of how I look at the world. I want to understand how it works, and I want to make it better. So when I think about where I want to be in five or ten years, my answer is really just as simple as that – I want to have made the world a little bit better. To do so I need to keep learning. To do so I need to look for ways I can improve the code of the world around me, whether that is in my personal life or professional one. I want to take my experience, my influence, and my knowledge and apply it in little ways to make incremental improvements for as many people as I can.

But, ultimately? I still want to be here.

Daily Writing Prompt – What positive emotions do you feel most often?

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Yes, it’s a new experiment. I’m trying (again) to get back in the habit of writing more often thanks to the fact that I’m reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. I figured I would use the daily writing prompts from WordPress to help out with that.

Ok, so. The positive emotion that I feel most often. That’s a rough one to answer, because the last few years have been dominated so heavily by negative emotions. I’m also back on Wellbutrin right now, and have been for a few months, so my emotional state is for the most part pretty neutral/ambivalent.

I literally just had to search for “positive emotions” to get a list of them to help find the one I’d select, but it worked.

Contentment

Despite all the chaos of our lives, and all the challenges we’ve faced together, I spend a good deal of time feeling very content. In many, many ways I feel we have built a very satisfying life together. It’s not thrilling and filled with adventure, but it’s nice. It’s comfortable. We have good friends, a lovely home, and the ability to enjoy our time together. We have regular “rituals” that we enjoy. We don’t want for the necessities. We can afford to take vacations when the opportunity arises or make the occasional indulgent purchase without worrying about how we’re going to pay for it. We are planning for retirement and confident we’ll be able to when the time is right. It’s a good life, and I’m happy it’s ours.

Whelp

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I got a call from my surgeon about 20 minutes after my last post went live. He conferred with the two surgeons who would be working with them and they concluded that the procedure is too dangerous for me to undergo at this time due to the occluded blood vessel. He’s punting me back to my oncologist for alternative treatments (different types or more chemo, for example).

So I’m back to square one.

On the plus side I met with an endocrinologist for the first time yesterday and we’re looking at some extra steps to get my sugars under control and give some relief to my pancreas. I’m not a fan of being put on insulin, but at this point I feel it’s inevitable and I’m very much looking forward to having “normal” blood sugars. It would be really nice to get a full nights sleep or be able to see a whole movie in one sitting without having to get up multiple times to use the restroom, not to mention dealing with the other diabetes symptoms I’m seeing.

Still, I’m incredibly frustrated that, yet again, there is no clear cut path towards treating my tumor and my entire life is going to continue being ruled by that uncertainty for the foreseeable future.

I need something to look forward to other that just surviving from day-to-day. One of my major motivators in that regard was my acting career, but I’m feeling more and more lately like that’s over. I’m being over dramatic, of course (which makes sense…because…you know…acting), but it’s how it feels.

Anyway, I just wanted to put that update out here for the one or two people who may actually still be reading my blog now that I’m not really advertising it anywhere.

Not making it up

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It’s been a while since I’ve had the energy or motivation to post an update here. It’s not necessarily through a lack of desire, but whenever I think about doing so I’m usually away from my desk and when I’m at my desk these days I’m generally working.

Excuses, excuses. Not like I was filling this blog with tons of content in the first place.

I’ll start by copying and pasting an update I sent to my immediate family recently…

The tumor did not respond to chemotherapy. This was kind of expected, as the type of tumor I have (Islet Pancreatic Neuroendocrine Tumor, or PNET) tends to have very thick cell walls that the chemotherapy medication has a hard time penetrating, so this isn’t “bad” news. My doctors have concluded, however, that there isn’t much point in continuing down this path and we are moving on to the next step which, most likely, will be surgery.

The major complication to the already complicated surgery I’m having is that one of my blood vessels has been blocked (occluded) by the tumor. They are going to have to do a lot of work to correct that, and it may require them to take my entire pancreas along with my spleen instead of just removing the head of my pancreas (something known as a Whipple procedure). If that happens? I get promoted to Type 1 Diabetes and become insulin and enzyme dependent for the rest of my long, natural life.

I don’t have any dates yet, but the goal is to have me in there relatively soon. When it happens I’ll be in the hospital for at least seven days, and it will be six weeks or more before I return to work. Due to the protocols still in place since the Pandemic and other health factors I won’t be able to have any visitors while I’m in the hospital other than Lisa.

I’m not sure where I’d be in all this without Lisa, and not only from an emotional support standpoint. She’s been an absolute champion in terms of keeping me on track with my medications, handling all the different logistics of coordinating with multiple medical facilities, and generally making sure I can focus on just resting and saving my limited energy reserves for keeping up at work. When I get through to the other side of this, her involvement and support will have played a major role in my success. Hell, I wouldn’t even have known I had this if she hadn’t encouraged me to talk to my doctor about why my blood pressure and iron was so low every time I went to give blood. I mention all of this in particular because, right now, there’s nothing we really need or that anyone can do for us. Keep us in your thoughts, keep yourselves happy and healthy, and understand that if you don’t hear much more about this until after the fact it’s because things are moving fast and we need to focus on making sure we take care of everything that needs to happen to make it a success.

On the one hand, I’m thrilled to be off of chemotherapy, because chemotherapy sucks. I didn’t have it as bad as folks who have to go into a hospital setting five days a week, but I absolutely had side effects from the treatment that were really rough to live with. The worst was just the general lack of energy. I was tired all the time, regardless of how much sleep I got every night. I also lost my fingerprints at one point (a very odd but incredibly common side-effect of one of my chemo medications), had occasional bouts of chemo mouth (metal taste in my mouth that ended up making me decide to use nothing but plastic silverware), and all sorts of fun gastrointestinal issues. The fact that I won’t have to deal with that any more is thrilling and a cause for great rejoicing.

But then there is that whole surgery thing.

I’ve spent a lot of time feeling like I was being melodramatic about my cancer over the last year. That because it was “only” stage 1 and wasn’t in and of itself a particularly lethal type of cancer it was wrong for me to make such a big deal out of it. That’s really messed with my head as I’ve tried to navigate all the ways in which my life has changed since the diagnosis. Was I using my cancer as an excuse? Was I just trying to milk sympathy out of others that was undeserved? Was I being a cancer fraud?

Yep. Even when it comes to cancer I’ve got imposter syndrome.

Well, when we met with my surgeon last week all of those feelings went away. The scope of the procedure I’ll be undergoing is huge, and the recovery from it is going to be long. When it’s over, I’m going to have to learn how to navigate the world in a completely new way. Considering the size of the tumor, the fact that I have not developed liver cancer is, as described by my surgeon, “weird.” The occlusion of my blood vessel is a Really Big Deal which, thankfully, my body has corrected the best way that it can but that is not sustainable in the long term.

Reality hit me hard last week, and the speed with which this is all going to get very real is intimidating.

On top of all that I’ve been dealing with some other very personal stuff that I won’t go into detail about publicly but that has had a tremendous toll on my mental health on top of everything else. So much so that, combined with the cancer shit, my therapist and I decided I should go back on Wellbutrin for a while. I haven’t been on anti-depressants since I got divorced back in 2000.

I got sick (again) this last weekend and it took a day or two for me to fully recover. For the first time since my diagnosis, I really felt like I had something wrong with me.  That I was ill. Prior to that I was putting it all on the chemotherapy, but that’s out of my system now. I’m not well, and it’s not all in my head, and it’s a Big Fucking Deal. The fact that it is “little c” cancer doesn’t change the fact that I have a giant tumor in my abdomen that needs to come out and that the procedure to do so is incredibly invasive and will have life-changing effects on me. The fact that it is “little c” cancer doesn’t make the impact to my health any less significant.

I’m not making this out to be more than it is in my head. If anything, I have not fully respected the magnitude of what I’m facing.

I meant what I wrote about Lisa. She’s been amazing, and so very patient with me. She’s turned her life upside down to make sure I have the best possible outcome in this scenario. I’ve also been lucky to have great insurance, wonderful doctors, and the means to pay for them. I’ve also got a great support network of friends who have been understanding of our inability to commit to plans and our need to frequently change them when we do.

It will be ok in the end. I believe that.

But things really are kind of hard and scary at the moment.

And that isn’t all in my head.

Fail Whales

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It’s been a week since I deactivated my Twitter account, and I don’t miss it.

I suppose that’s not a 100% accurate statement because if it was completely out of mind I wouldn’t be writing a blog post about it, but I can honestly say that I haven’t once been tempted to reactivate my account or even go to the site. I have, in fact, actively avoided doing so and have even been reluctant to follow people on Mastodon who are using the @twitter.com instance to post content.  

Shortly before deactivating I ruminated on some of the reasons I was hesitant to do so, and one of the biggest hurdles I had to get over was accepting the fact that my decades-long pursuit of wealth and fame through the internet was over.

Like many members of Generation X, I grew up with the internet. I evolved with it from email to local bulletin boards, to AOL, to IRC and beyond. I had a LiveJournal account with a pretty decent following (a few hundred followers at one point, which at a time when internet access was a luxury and computers were still prohibitively expensive for most was pretty great I thought). As online content became more of a “thing,” I also just assumed that since I was already generating such awesome and engaging content I would one day become a wildly successful content creator, rewarded with fame and financial security just for sharing my awesome opinions with the rest of the world.

I have been seriously disabused of that notion, mainly because I’ve seen firsthand the amount of work required to making a living by being an online content creator through several professional and personal relationships. Not to be too overly dramatic about it, but I’ve seen some things that will curl your toes my friends. Suffice it to say that for most of the people I know the amount of time, effort, and stress involved in just trying to make the equivalent of a 40-hour per week job with no benefits at minimum wage is so overwhelmingly huge that many of them have said that simply getting a job at the local Wal-Mart would be more financially rewarding. Many of these people loved what they did and the intangible benefits often outweighed the financial ones, but I learned a LONG time ago that I didn’t have the entrepreneurial spirit or fortitude required to make a real go of it. Especially because I had a family to support. People who relied on me for health insurance, food, lodging, etc… Much like acting, I had to put the desire to be a professional content creator on the back burner because of my responsibilities. I do not regret this at all. It’s simply a fact of being a parent and part of a familial unit. Over the last 30 years I have tried to make several goes at generating income through “side gigs” that included web development and content creation (blogs, videos, and podcasts), but none of them every amounted to much because I didn’t have what it took to stick them out. The most successful effort I was part of was getting some friends together to write a health and fitness blog for geeks, and the most that netted was a few paid posts for other sites, some pocket change in advertisements, and some nifty free swag (the best being Wii Fit controller and game). This was only after months of daily content created by our team (and predominantly two of us on “staff”), all of whom also had paying jobs and other commitments.

For the longest time I still held out the vain hope that someone would recognize my wit, charm, innate writing ability, and intellect and that I would gain instant overnight internet celebrity.

My Twitter account was the last vestige of that hope. Outside of this blog it was my most prolific public-facing internet presence, with fifteen years’ worth of my tweets. All of that amounted to a small handful of people even acknowledging when I announced I was shutting it down for real (including someone who trends dangerously close to being a stalker at times). My last few tweet storms were, in my opinion, some insightful commentaries on Elon Musk and Twitter, but instead of going out with a bang my final contribution to the bird site was nothing but a whimper.

It is entirely possible that I could have turned content creation into a full-time, well-paying job but I didn’t have what it took to make that happen. Most don’t. Like many careers, the apparent ease of making a living as a content creator (“I love playing video games! All I have to do is record myself playing them and people will throw money at me!”) hides a very grueling reality – Content creation is a grind, the odds of making a decent living at it are infinitesimally small, and one of the worst contributions that the internet has made to the world is the notion that “going viral” is a viable business plan.

I am not bitter about any of this. Honest. This is simply the reality that I had to accept, and in doing so I feel honestly liberated to go back to doing what I was back in my “glory days” on LiveJournal – Writing for a small group of people who engage with my content and vice versa. Doing this because I love doing it, not because I think it’s going to make me rich and/or famous.

Now watch this post go viral…

And then I was 50

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I really did not have a master plan in mind when I sat down to write this post. Because it is me, I knew I wanted to write a post to mark my 50th birthday. I also felt that I should put an update out there around my cancer status. These two things are Big Deals in my life right now, so they got mashed together into what is going to be a very stream-of-consciousness type of post.

Let’s begin…

I will start with the health stuff. Last Wednesday I met with my new oncologist at Moffitt. For those of you who skim the headlines for the important details, all the testing I have had done since July has reaffirmed my original diagnosis. I have a well differentiated neuroendocrine tumor on the head of my pancreas. It is approximately 13cm by 11cm by 2cm. It has been growing for a very long time, has not metastasized, and is not posing an immediate threat to my life. In fact, if it had not been discovered during an unrelated ultrasound of my circulatory system, I still would not know it was there. This is not to say that it would not eventually become a health risk. These types of tumors release lots of hormones that cause other health issues (in my case it may be the cause of my Type II diabetes), and they can eventually grow to a point where they start interfering with the functions of the organs they are coming into contact with (also something I have run into, but I was unaware of why).

The meeting I had on Wednesday was primarily to determine how to go about getting my body ready for the surgery necessary to remove the tumor. There were two options on the table – radiation and chemotherapy. The goal of either option was to shrink the tumor so that there was less contact with the surrounding organs. Radiation would have been a more aggressive type of therapy, but (for reasons that I am not entirely clear on and ultimately do not matter) I am not a candidate for that type of therapy. My oncologist also does not feel it is necessary to put me through intense chemotherapy that would require a port to be installed and multiple visits to a medical facility. What I will be receiving instead is pill-based chemotherapy I can do at home that is minimally invasive with few major side effects. The tumor is made up of two different components. There is a hard, “solid” tumor that is surrounded by a larger, fluid-filled one. The chemotherapy should shrink the hard tumor, and a procedure will follow to aspirate and drain the fluid from the larger area. All of which is designed to make it easier to get the entirety of the mass removed surgically.

Which is all wonderful news. Unless you are me.

This type of therapy takes a long time to be effective. In setting my expectations for what I am facing, my doctor said it could be up to a year before we know if the treatments are making a difference. This is, honestly, not the answer I wanted.

I want this to be over, friends. I’m tired of being tired. Tired of worrying about how this is going to impact my life. Tired of every plan I make having a big asterisk on it that indicates “depending on how I feel at the time.” Tired of feeling like this whole situation is a huge burden on everyone around me. Just…tired.

I broke down and had a good cry over this whole thing on Saturday when I realized that I did not have the energy or will to deal with the stress surrounding going to an event I had been looking forward to for months. I am also looking ahead to the next year and realizing that I am going to have to plan the things I do even more carefully, and I am likely to be forced to continue my hiatus from acting as my therapy cycles are not going to be conducive to rehearsing.

The cry I had on Saturday was cathartic, though, and I knew that once the initial shock of what I heard on Wednesday wore off I would start to feel better about things. The news was GOOD news. My prospects are still wonderful. I have a long road ahead of me and it is not going to be easy, but I have no reason to think the outcome will be anything but positive.

Which leads me to my 50th birthday. Today.

While I was out for my walk this morning, I found a $1 bill on the ground of the park I go to. I am considering it a sign. I am putting it with my collectibles in my office and I am saving it until I am officially declared cancer-free. I realize I cannot really buy much for one dollar today, and I will likely be able to buy even less ten years from now, but that is my plan anyway.

I had a wonderful celebration yesterday with some of my family members and several friends who I have known since I was a teenager. I had some of my favorite foods. I received some lovely gifts and even lovelier cards with some sentiments in them that moved me to the core.

This morning I received a birthday present from my wife that absolutely blew me away beyond any expectations I may have had. It is so perfect I am not sure any gift I have ever received, or will receive in the future, will top it. Tonight, she is taking me to Ruth’s Chris Steak House for dinner. While we have had to scale back a few of the activities we planned for the rest of my birthday month, we still have a lot of exciting things to look forward to this weekend and beyond.

My life is fulfilling. I am happy. I am surrounded by good people who love me.

Everything else is noise.

I’m excited to see what the next fifty years bring.

Ambush

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One of the first things I had drilled into me when I first started dipping my toes into the madcap world of organizational change was that you never, ever, “ambush” someone in a meeting with questions they are not prepared to answer. This was particularly important in cases when you had concerns or questions about something another person in the meeting was attempting to accomplish. These types of discussions, I was told, should ideally happen before the meeting so that when you go in front of the rest of the group you were presenting a “unified front.”

In other words, you and the other person hash your issues out in a meeting-before-the-meeting, come to an understanding, and then go and present your decision to the group as the “right” decision.

This scenario is one of the many reasons why I have a long-standing reputation as a person who hates meetings. It represents a fine example of collaboration theater, and it is just as wasteful as the meeting-after-the-meeting where decisions that were supposedly made tend to get undercut.

I have been trying to get my head around why this happens for years, and I have landed on what I think are a few main reasons, but they all tend to circle back to two root causes – Lack of psychological safety, and lack of trust.

Psychological safety gets tossed around a lot these days, and I feel like the importance of the notion has been dampened as a result. It seems like there is a common misconception that when someone says uses the phrase “psychological safety” they are implicitly implying that there should be no conflict. I interpret psychological safety to mean essentially the exact opposite. For me, psychological safety represents situations in which healthy conflict can occur. Ones in which people felt free to express their opinions, ask questions, challenge assumptions, and otherwise contribute without fear of being negatively impacted by doing so. Negative impacts can range from being characterized as a troublemaker, being complained about to a supervisor, being passed over for promotions, being bullied, or even losing a job (to list just a few things).

Trust can also be interpreted in a variety of ways in this context. Trust that the other people in the room have common goals for one, but it also includes trust in the competence of people outside of your immediate sphere of influence. Trust that those you are working with are operating with the best of intentions and at the best of their abilities is another.

Neither of these concepts is new, which is one of the reasons why I find myself surprised that both things are still a factor in many modern professional settings. Perhaps surprised is not really the proper word. Creating trust in the workplace is hard. Creating cultures where team members feel genuine psychological safety is hard. These things require dedication, diligence, and a significant amount of time. Time that can also be spent trying to “get things done.”

Completing tasks is easy. Much easier than changing the way we work, and treat, each other in the workplace.

Some thoughts on “Comprehensive Documentation”

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There is no value in documentation.

Why Would You Say Something So Controversial Yet So Brave? is a quote from The Eric Andre Show rendered in an image macro and used as a reaction image on Tumblr humorously in response to relatively banal statements.

I am sure that if you know me personally, or if you are at least tangentially aware of what I do and how I view the world, you are rolling your eyes right now and writing off my statement as being naive. My ask is that you go along with my thought process for a minute to understand what I am really saying.

One of the four values in the Agile Manifesto is “Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation.” Many people inherently interpret this as meaning that those of us who resonate with the manifesto believe that we should never document. This is patently untrue. In fact, if you look at the statement under the four values it explicitly says that “while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.” Agile enthusiasts do not advocate for the abolition of documentation.

What we want is documentation that is valuable, and for documentation to be valuable it must be useful. The people it was written for must be able to find it. They must be able to understand it.  The documents must be relevant to the current environment.

Having a document repository that nobody uses is wasteful. Putting effort into populating such a repository is wasteful. Using physical and/or virtual space to store documentation that is never referenced is wasteful.

One of the reasons why I am so critical of “traditional” project management practices is because of the amount of documentation that is considered a requirement for projects to be completed, and the main reason I feel that way is because I see most of them being designed as cover for the Project Manager. Often, I see situations in which a Project Manager has all the responsibility for ensuring project success but none of the authority to make it happen, so they make sure that they document everything that they do to be able to say they have done their job when a project fails or is delayed. I cannot tell you the number of times I have seen this happen personally. I have, in fact, watched a Project Manager bring up said documentation and force people to look at it to prove exactly this.[i]

I do not claim to have the right answer for what is the proper amount of documentation in any given situation. Like most things in the Agile world, it really depends. As a developer, I was a huge fan of self-documenting code (using variables with long, descriptive names to describe what the code was supposed to do), so I did not spend a lot of time adding comments to my code. I also contend that if your organization does not have individuals dedicated to the creation and curation of knowledge most of your documentation efforts are going to end up being wasted (largely because doing so is a full-time job). If your end users search for a document on your intranet and cannot find it, it might as well not exist.

Even more controversial is the notion that your systems/processes/products should be designed in a way that does not require documentation in the first place. Documenting complexity does not generate value for your users but eliminating that complexity does.

Creating documentation is a process, and like any process you should constantly evaluate it to determine whether it is generating value. If it is? Think of ways to make it more valuable! Maybe teach others how to do what you are doing or find ways to make your documentation more accessible to your end users.[ii] But if, as if often the case, your documents are essentially locked in a disused lavatory behind a sign that says “Beware the Leopard” your time could be better invested.

[i] In the specific example I am thinking of, the PM in question asserted that it was not their fault if the people in the meeting were unaware of a situation because the PM had followed the communication plan. My contention is that if you followed the communication plan and your message still did not get across the fault is in your communication plan, not the people.

[ii] If, for example, a user says they searched for your document on your company intranet and could not find it ask them to show you what they did and give that feedback to the people who manage the intranet.

[Frustration Hits YOU for 1000]

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I put out to the universe that I wanted to do two things before I went into surgery to remove my Neuroendocrine Tumor. I wanted to be in Picasso at the Lapin Agile, and I wanted to go to Dragon Con with my son. The universe answered by giving me a double (or very extended) dose of COVID-19 that, combined with the fact that I had plans to go to Dragon Con that I was unwilling to cancel because of the fact that my son was going with me, resulted in the mutual decision to recast my role in the show. The icing on the cake is that my son was unable to join me (a fact I did not discover until I was already in Atlanta for the convention).

Needless to say the universe told me to go blow.

I had a fine time at the convention, and I do not regret going, but it cost me a lot. Maybe too much, but I’m trying to look at the bright side. I’m meeting with my surgeon at the Moffitt Cancer Center on September 26th, and when I do I won’t have to put off starting my treatments until after the show closes. Small comfort, but I’m taking what I can.

But speaking of bitter pills…figures that we’ve been able to avoid catching COVID for over two and a half years and caught it just in time for it to screw up my plans to do a show I really wanted to do. More than a bit mad about that one, too.

Anyway, not much else to report on the health front. While I’m over the coronavirus, it combined with my cancer to be a major drain on my energy. I’m only just now, weeks later, starting to feel like I’m back to some semblance of normal. I’ve been paying very close attention to the signs my body is giving me, resting when I need to, eating when I need to, and just being gentle with myself as not to do anything that could further hinder my ability to get the tumor removed.

Fun bonus content! I have a polyp in my colon that has high levels of dysplasia. What this means, in a very abbreviated way, is that it is pre-cancerous but needs to be removed. It is, as my doctor so delicately put it, “big and ugly.” So I’ve got more surgery to look forward to. I’m hoping it can be done while I’m in the hospital to have the NET removed.

Oh, just as an FYI to those who were members – I decided to take down the Caring Bridge site. I’ll still be posting information here, and when I go into surgery Lisa will be keeping my immediate family up-to-date on my status. With everything we have going on dealing with this it was just one more thing to keep track of and I needed to prioritize what was best for my mental well being in that regard. I’m pretty vicious about cutting out stressors in my life at the moment, and that was one I did not need.