The week in review
Whew! I can't believe it's already Friday. It's usually a good week when it goes by that quickly. I'm making no progress on my Email Inbox Containment Project. I'm still at 150 emails, and sadly, none of those are junk or things I can file away into the ether. 95% of those require some sort of action on my part. I'm debating whether to spend part of my Sunday at work armed with good music, comfy clothes, and snacks to chip away at this crazy backlog.
On Tuesday, I had an executive review of our TAP program, with the Speech Server "leadership team" of MSS, including our GM, Rich, and all the folks that report to him, both on the product group and business side of the house. On previous teams, I've had to contribute slides to one of these things, or present a few slides in a larger review, but this is the first time I had to do a whole review on my own. It went well, I think - wasn't too contentious, and I got some good feedback in the end. I'm pretty comfortable at giving presentations but the thought of this audience was a little more nervewracking than usual. However, it was nowhere near as scary as I've heard from people who've had to present at BillG reviews. (BillG = Bill Gates, just to be clear...)
After that hurdle, the next day I presented my usual slide at our weekly status meeting with all of the product group leads. That was a piece of cake, relatively speaking! I also got some good feedback on my 'customer spotlight' slide, which I recently started doing to make my status reporting more interesting. Every other week, I try to choose one TAP partner and highlight what they are doing with MSS, and their likes and dislikes about the product to get our team more familiar with our TAP customers.
I also managed to put together the monthly TAP newsletter, and learned a little bit about importing log files into a database for analysis. Since I haven't yet rebuilt my machine and installed MSS, that was my techie fix for the week.
And finally, I sent out the dates of our next TAP training event, which is only 2 days in May. It should be somewhat easier to plan this time since I've got the experience of having done it once, and it's shorter. Plus, I don't have as much pressure on me to "prove" I can pull it off, like I did last time since I was so new to the team.
Today I went through all of the customer suggestions filed via TAP and made sure they were assigned to the right person on our team, followed up/harassed those who need to respond to the customer who filed them, and resolved and closed some of the older ones. I've been meaning to do this for a few weeks so I feel a lot better now. I am thinking about TAP-related "exit criteria" for our release, which would be things that have to be done before we can release the product, and one of them will be around making sure all customer bugs have been addressed in some way (moved over to the next release, fixed, or otherwise resolved and closed).
So that's pretty much the life of a customer/TAP Program Manager - lots of status reports, communications, bug follow up, etc. It would probably drive some people crazy, but I like it.
A few posts ago, I mentioned that my husband was interviewing at Microsoft. Well, he didn't get that job, but he did get an offer from another team in our new Unified Communications group. He will be an SDE (software development engineer) and he starts his new job in just a few weeks. His commute is much better now (my walk to work is 1.04 miles, and his will be even less because his building is closer to our house!) and of course, we might even have lunch together occasionally. His previous job was in downtown Seattle, where he had to pay $200/month just to park (yay free parking at Microsoft!) and his commute was about 30 minutes each way on a good day. So I guess we've now joined the ranks of the many "Microsoft couples". That should be interesting...
So, what did *you* do this week? :)
