Busy at Work. POC.
Sep. 25th, 2024 10:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerI've been busy at work the past few weeks. I began September with a week of vacation then had less than 12 hours at home before leaving on a business trip. I traveled to Austin to staff our booth at a conference. I got home from that trip thankfully not too late at night on a Wednesday only to have ridiculously busy days with all my "normal" work Thursday and Friday. By the weekend I was ready for another vacation. Then the following Monday I began a POC project, or Proof of Concept, with a prospective client. I've been busy with that POC last week and this week.
What happens in a POC is we help the prospective customer install our software in their environment then guide them through an agreed-upon list of test cases with it. In theory, when we plan and scope this work carefully— as I always strive to do— we have a nice, compact, predictable project. In practice, things go sideways. Clients can always surprise us with weird restrictions in their environments.
Fortunately this particular POC hasn't been too bad. The basic install took only 2 days. In theory it should take 30-45 minutes, but given that I've seen it stretch to 2 weeks because of problems like those above, I'm satisfied with it taking just 2 days. We're at Day 7 today, and we're nearly done with everything.
BTW, a "day" of work on a POC starts with just 2 hours, give or take, on a Webex with the customer. There's a lot more work for me than just those 2 hours, though. In addition to 2 hours on a screenshare working with the customer I'm spending another 2-3 hours each day on followups, documentation, troubleshooting, research, and preparation for the next session. At 4-5 hours total it's not a "full" day but it sure does feel like one because of all the tasks I'm juggling and how much time I have to spend on point. And the other few hours a day I have do allow me to stay current with team meetings and lighter weight customer issues.
What happens in a POC is we help the prospective customer install our software in their environment then guide them through an agreed-upon list of test cases with it. In theory, when we plan and scope this work carefully— as I always strive to do— we have a nice, compact, predictable project. In practice, things go sideways. Clients can always surprise us with weird restrictions in their environments.
- "Oh, you need to provision pods in Kubernetes? We don't allow applications to do that."
- "Oh, you need to pull containers from DockerHub? Yeah, we block access to the Internet."
- "Oh, that filestore driver you told us was critical and we agreed to setup beforehand? Yeah, we didn't do that, and it'll now take 5 days because we have to file a ticket with our IT team, who work 12½ time zones away, to do that."
- "Oh, your list of supported platforms? Well, we set one up that's close to a version you support, will that be okay?"
Fortunately this particular POC hasn't been too bad. The basic install took only 2 days. In theory it should take 30-45 minutes, but given that I've seen it stretch to 2 weeks because of problems like those above, I'm satisfied with it taking just 2 days. We're at Day 7 today, and we're nearly done with everything.
BTW, a "day" of work on a POC starts with just 2 hours, give or take, on a Webex with the customer. There's a lot more work for me than just those 2 hours, though. In addition to 2 hours on a screenshare working with the customer I'm spending another 2-3 hours each day on followups, documentation, troubleshooting, research, and preparation for the next session. At 4-5 hours total it's not a "full" day but it sure does feel like one because of all the tasks I'm juggling and how much time I have to spend on point. And the other few hours a day I have do allow me to stay current with team meetings and lighter weight customer issues.
