ravencallscrows | Feb. 7th, 2006

Today's work day ended more positively than any I can remember in quite a while. I got to drive a bit of discussion about making sure that as part of the closing of a project, the business rules are clearly documented, so that after everyone who initially worked on any project has moved on, it's possible to determine what the rules are, rather than having to reverse-engineer them from the observed functionality. Since when things don't work they way someone thinks they should, the inquiry usually falls in my lap, it's something of an issue for me. Besides, we don't have any real working process, and since we're starting the process of migrating into new tools, this is an ideal time to figure out what processes should be so that we can do things like establishing and implementing usage of best practices, rather than just continuing to muddle through.

And, toward the close of the day, i had a relatively long, fairly high level discussion of what needs to be done to drastically improve one of our existing areas of functionality to make it easier to use. The level of excitement surrounding it reminded me of one of the things i miss about working at Microsoft (and there aren't many!)- high-powered people thinking actively to solve problems.