Happy Path

ILP is POD in MT

Charles sent me a message. Here's what it said: ILP is POD in MT. It was symbolic of communication at work: a series of abbreviations devoid of context. And yet, I understood.

The incident took me back to my first job. I was fifteen and working at Moby Dick, a fish and chips place on the beach. The owners were German and often spoke to each other in their native tongue. They had two kids and sometimes spoke German to them, too. Over the summer, I heard a lot of German while slinging seafood. One day, Claudia said something to me in German, forgetting I wasn't kin. I nodded and did as she had asked. I don't even know if she noticed what had happened, but I definitely did! Through osmosis and repetition and context, I'd picked up some restaurant-related German.

It was a new year and I seemed to finally be getting my feet under me at The Bank. I felt more relaxed and confident. I was faster at putting the puzzle pieces together and had a reduced fear of people coming to me with questions I couldn't answer and tasks I couldn't perform. Richard still stopped by my desk and sent me cryptic "got a minute?" messages that made my heart pound, and I still harbored a loathing of Excel and its myriad functions, but otherwise I was doing my job and Charles was happy with my performance.

One thing that figured prominently into my workday was meetings. Lots and lots of meetings. When I was a promo producer, our group despised meetings. What was supposed to be a weekly producer meeting was often pushed by the boss to a monthly gathering or beyond. I actually think we should have met more as a group, as the job sometimes felt like working in a vacuum. Factions of the team would be tackling projects unknown to the rest of us. But generally, we were happy to avoid these assemblies.

Day-to-day life at The Bank revolved around a schedule of meetings. Sometimes I'd see Charles's calendar and think No wonder he's always doing ten things at once. His actual work time is constantly interrupted by meetings! It was fairly typical for me to have seven to ten meetings a week, which was nothing compared to managers and directors.

Given my position and general lack of understanding when it came to the technical aspect of the work being done around me, I was more often than not an eavesdropper. I listened and picked up as much as I could, although there were times I couldn't follow a conversation to save my life. I blame this partly on my aforementioned IT ignorance and partly on the remote nature of the meetings. Sometimes a Project Manager would book a room, but even then most people chose to dial-in. There could be 20 people on the line, representing 10 separate groups with a variety of global accents. It was Ham radio for the IT crowd.

More than once, I asked Charles to draw a flowchart illustrating the parts played by each group related to ADS. I'm a visual learner and I was hoping this would clarify the jobs performed by some of the people I heard on the phone. The mental image I had of departmental workflow at the time looked like a roundabout*. I couldn't make sense of how many parts were involved and how they all fit together. My perception of how things worked was more confusion tsunami than workflow.

Always accommodating and ready to impart knowledge, Charles explained how information is imparted to an ABM. There was indeed a flow, although sometimes it seemed more like the data would take a few laps around one area before rejoining the movement already in progress. Charles broke down each group into its parts and the jobs of the people within each group. I don't mean to say that I was learning how to code or anything that granular—that's a word I heard a lot. I was adopting the lingo. I was getting more of a high level (another buzzword) explanation of the process.

This is what I understood. After getting project approval, we'd be approached with a business case. The team would assess the case and tell business how many days of work it would take. Funding was approved and work would start. Meetings began around this time and would take place anywhere from once a week to daily, depending on the project and what stage it was in. Our group, ABM delivery services, was one of five involved in the daisy chain of events that had to occur to do something like present a screen on an ABM that said YOU HAVE BEEN PRE-APPROVED FOR A CREDIT LIMIT INCREASE. Everyone understood what they needed to do to enable their team, thus making the success of other teams possible. The project manager was the conductor who led the project to completion with ease and aplomb.