Rollercoaster at work

The last three weeks at work have been alternately hellish and amusing.

About three weeks ago, I found out that I was being invited to an offsite hosted by my VP at work. This was the first time I had even been invited to attend, and so I was pretty flattered to be included. Yay, me! At the same time, it was a bad time in the project to miss two days out of the office. And, worse yet, I found out I was expected to do a presentation at the offsite, 30 minutes on a feature under development. Suddenly, this is looking like a huge amount of work. Boo, work!

A few days before the offsite, I did a dry-run of the presentation with the two levels of management immediately above me. The feedback was very positive. I got lots of praise for having good data, a polished set of slides, and solid answers to the appropriate questions. Yay, me! Then the date of the offsite came and I delivered the real thing. Everything went well, until the very end. My VP took a deep breath and said “I just don’t see the value of this feature at all,” and everything went to hell. Not only was it harsh to be deflated like that, but to have it happen in a room of 50 very senior managers and directors at the company… Boo, work!

This week, I had two days in a management training class. On the second day, a group of seven managers in the class had to deliver a presentation to three VPs at the company. We had been putting in a ton of extra hours on this over the past month. If you asked me a week ago, I would have described the results as a total trainwreck. Unfocused, unproductive, a huge waste of time, and precious little to show for it. Boo, work! However, the team did a fantastic job of coming together over the last two meetings and we managed to put together a fairly solid proposal. We did the presentation, and the feedback was outstanding. We were cited as the best presentation of any they had seen so far (a collection of about 20) and they seemed really taken with our work, the data we had, and the way it was presented. Yay, me (us)!

In fact, they liked it so much we’re supposed to flesh it out with more details in a variety of areas, and present it to the staff of one of the VPs in 30 days. Boo, work!