AIDS Walk - San Diego

Getting up 5:45 AM on a Sunday morning, getting all your muscles warmed up on a cold September day and driving out with Payal and a friend to Balboa Park and be greeted by a crowd of over 300 people present to walk/run/volunteer for a noble cause - that's one of a kind experience for me (definitely the first). Anyone who would look at me first will realise that this is not something I do but then this became something I like to do. Never ever looked athletic for a single day in my life but not many know that I was a regular basketball junkie who played full games without a break!!
Anyways, coming back to the AIDS walk - it was fun. There were folks from the gay and lesbian community, some of whom had nice costumes (wondered what energy they had to to get into those and come that early in the morning); old people, people who lost dear ones to AIDS, young children who had come to enjoy the fun and school/college kids along with professionals (part of companies who contributed to the foundation) and sports clubs. The walk itself was fun - people all around, volunteers prodding on the walkers/runners while supplying them with water, Gatorade, music and lot of cheering, wonderful weather and of course quiet personal competitions going on among the groups. For my part, I was in competing with a couple of gymnasts from UCSD and a lady from Starbucks, whom I managed to pass in the last 5 mins before reaching the finish. =))
And of course, this being the first time, at the end of the walk was all the after-effects: legs were almost as good as wooden and were totally numb. I managed a recovery in 3 hours. Also Payal, who was a little more tired (as, I must add, she cheated by running during the 5 Km walk) had the same after effects!! And like every other physical activity, lot of sleeping in the afternoon.
However, I must thank the organisers, not only for putting together this event to raise money for the foundation and providing us all a wonderful opportunity to have fun and participate, but also for getting me hooked into participating in more of such events. Need to find out more on such events in India, but as long as I'm here, I'll continue to participate at every opportunity possible.

Funding V/S Work

As a project manager, I am constantly faced with the dilema of getting the project completed (mainly getting the change requests or CRs incorporated) in the face of getting customer satisfaction to being able to ask for the funding of these unanticipated changes. These are more complicated while operating in a pseudo-T&M scenarios with an offsite component. The customer always wants that one more change that is 'critical' to the success of the project while the offsite team is bothered about the funding needed to secure the resources. The challenege for me here is to maintain the relations with the customer while balancing the work so that the offsite team is still able to continue working.
The principle I use is being open to the customer in terms the amount of work involved and the cost. Also, added to this, is thinking of a solution that is suitable to the customer while not hurting us in anyway. Be sensitive to the budgets from the customer while helping them to chalk out what they really need. And provide alternates to completing everything on their wish-list. Worked for me today!!

Turn Over a new leaf

I would now like to blog on more responsible, educative topics rather than my thoughts. There are lots of reasons for this, the most prominent being that I am taking up my PMP certification ASAP. Also, I have been a witness to ardent mis-use of blogging that is equi-valent of hate mails/notes. So I no longer wish to be in any way a contibuter, even in a directional sense to any of it. So hence forth, all will see my experiences, practices and 'pravachans' on management topics.

- Gyan Guru =))