Things are getting busy!

Since my last blog entry, my life as Configuration Management Engineer for the Customer Training department of a major British Aerospace manufacturer has become pretty hectic. Gone are the days when I had hours of spare time on some days; now I find it hard to complete my assigned work in my 37 hour week. The major reason for this is that clearly the "Bottom up" approach I took to instigating CMII methodology in my department has had the impact predicted during my CMII training. Currently, there is rarely a management meeting where the subject of Configuration Management does not raise its head. This has obviously led to a big increase in my work load; to such an extent that I am having days when I have to work much longer than my assigned 7.4 hours per day. In fact there are some days when I have to work in excess of 10 hours a day, to clear my desk, just in case I have another hectic day tthe next day.

Mind you, there are benefits to my job - firstly, I love doing it! Secondly, there is immense satisfaction in knowing that because I am doing a good job of configuration management things are going well for my colleagues and that my training department is being seen as improving its performance and product due to my efforts. Thirdly, I am now treated with tremendous respect by some of my colleagues who until recently viewed Configuration Management as an intrusive management practice, that limited their freedom of action. Naturally, there are still some members of staff who try to get around the configuration management measures I have instituted, but obviously they eventually have problems and then come to the conclusion that it makes life so much easier if they let me do their configuration management for them, then all responsibility for configuration management falls on to my shoulders and if anyone makes a mistake it is only the config management engineer who gets the blame. In other words, it is a "no loose" solution for them.

On the strength of the above, I am now pushing my manager for someone else to join my configuration management team and he has readily agreed to this increase in staff and pushed the proposal up to our Head of Training. Hopefully, it won't be too long before I have someone to help me, but until then I have reconciled myself that there will be days when I have to work longer hours than I should.

Recent victories for configuration management in our Training Department is that more and more teams now come to me for the configuration management of their products and processes. I have recently been asked by the team that produces the majority of our training to take over the configuration management and version control of their training courseware. This is quite a big victory for me as the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in this team have been most vocal in their resistance to the configuration management of their courses. I have been loud in my assertions that without rigorous configuration management and version control of their courses, if the worse case scenario ever happened, how could we produce the training that a specific student received, should we ever need to for an Air Crash Investigation. Only since I took over the configuration management of their training can we definitively produce every slide, every document and all training records for every student we train.

Anyhow, I think this is enough for this blog update, by now you should have got my message that I am now working very hard indeed, but thoroughly enjoying every second of my job as Configuration Management Engineer for our Aerospace Training Department, thanks to the training I received on my CMII course.