Do I have five things? Let's see.

[owlmoose]

1. I finished Fugitive Telemetry, the new Murderbot novella, and immediately felt the need to read Network Effect again. Not that I didn't enjoy the new one -- I definitely did -- but it felt more like backstory than a prequel, and it made me want to revisit all that tasty, tasty character development.

2. I've been in 2.5 hour meetings every morning for a project management training at work. It's a year-long program that traditionally kicks off with an in-person event at our main office in DC; I was originally nominated for it last year, but it took them until now to figure out how to transition it to a virtual event. It's working pretty well, although it's a long time to be on Zoom, especially multiple days in a row. It's been interesting, and I can see how it will be applicable not just to my dayjob work but to some of my fandom projects as well. But today was the first of two days on finance and budgeting and I can already feel myself start to glaze over. After this week, I'll be assigned a mentor and there will be various follow-up sessions throughout the year. I do hope we're able to do an in-person event at some point -- it's always nice to meet my distant co-workers face to face.

3. Speaking of distant co-workers, it's now been over a month that I'm not assigned to an office and am officially "remote". It's weird. I don't like it. I hope we find out who gets to be assigned to the Oakland office soon.

4. In other media news, we finally started The Mandalorian. We're enjoying it, but T is unmoved by The Child and its cuteness. I am flabbergasted by this.

5. One week and two days to Palm Springs! I can't wait.

Comments

[brainwane]

I would love to know more about this project management training since I'm developing one. Is it bespoke to your organization or is it something provided by a more standardized organization like PMI? Do/will you have hands-on exercises to do? Is the kickoff 2.5 hrs every day for 5 days, and is that interactive or just lecture?

[owlmoose]

It's an in-house training created by and for my employer, but it's based in PMI principles because they encourage PMP certification. (All of our instructors and facilitators were PMPs, and the company offers a more intensive training for people who want to go that route.) This week was the kickoff, which I'd describe as an interactive lecture -- mostly it was people going through prepared slides, but we had regular breaks for written activities and breakout sessions, and we were encouraged to ask questions and interact via the chat at any time. I was wrong about the duration -- it's six months, not a year. Starting next month, we'll have five monthly meetings on a specific topic, preceded and followed by homework and threaded text chat (on MS Teams). We've also been assigned a mentor who we're supposed to meet with for at least half an hour a month. We're allotted 30 hours total PD time for the whole thing, including the synchronous meetings and the asynchronous activities. The kickoff was a lot of information, but I learned useful things about both PM in general and about how projects are managed at my company. If you want more details, let me know!