Locked.And.Loaded

"Counting the days" ... as some of them call it. That's what I've been doing for the past few days. Apart from that, I've also been cooking up "A Hitchhiker's Guide To Maintaining the [X] System" for the successors to my system. It is an unofficial guide baked from the painful experiences I had with the system and it will be delivered to them, oven-fresh, in the briefing tomorrow.

Come to think of it, I sort-off 'grew-up' with the system in this company. It went on-line the day I joined and it has been under my care since the start of version 1.2. Back then, I was a big-fat project manager poking at eleven team members to do the CIO's bidding. I was also proud to represent it for CMM L3 assessment. After 1.2, a wave of company re-orgs came and there were mass exodus.

The system was in a bad shape after the re-orgs. Business requirements had changed and the functions were misaligned. Since I'm the last one standing, I've got to roll-up my sleeves and fix it myself. After a few rounds of lobotomy, the system is now running (healthily... I think) at version 1.4. However, there are still some mess created by the n00bs which I have not the chance to clean-up. Nothing much I could do apart from accepting less-than-perfection.

I used to joke when people asked me, "Who is working on the system?". I will candidly tell them that the system is managed by three persons - Me, Myself and Serena. Me is incharge of supporting the users, troubleshooting problems and producing ad-hoc reports, Myself is the code-monkey that handles all the development work from database to ASP.NET, and Serena is incharge of gathering requirements, liasing with contacts in other divisions and coming up with documents. Of course there is a fourth character, "I", who was not mentioned. "I" manages the health of the development servers and patches them as required.

Me's responsibilities have been successfully transferred and divided among two technical support engineers in DataOne. Tomorrow (or the day after), a handover session will be conducted to transfer the responsibilities of Myself to four carefully-chosen developers (and the winner of the lottery gets to go to the island). Since, the system is already stable, there won't be much for Serena to do - the CIO will take over from here. *CIO is a nice guy* The development servers will then be managed by the MIS department.

With all that settled, I should be looking at my exit-interview soon (and my farewell lunches too).