Bench time as part of life working for a consultancy

I am starting to get used to effects of bench time

• the first week on the bench is great - it gives you time to recouperate from the project (especially the final sprint to get the project completed)
• there is a mental taxing part - the stigma of not earning fees and the uncertainty of whether a project you have been forward for will come actually happen 

For a consultancy that has both permanent and contract staff - The deck is stacked against you at review time - consultancies measure part of your performance as 'time billed'. However if you are permanent, I believe they tend to place your name against projects that are more volatile in terms of whether the project will happen or not.

Also after enough time on bench, your standards tend to be worn down. Eventually you will take any project you are offered - just to get off the bench. Projects that you would have never considered in your wildest dreams - now start to look attractive.

This is another side affect - you might hope to work on projects of type Z and your name has been put forward for a Z projectYou sit on the bench for a month, clocking up negative billed time (possibly passing the limit on your review success criteria), eventually you just end up working on whatever you can.  

The secret is to use your bench time effectively - this can be difficult if you dont know what project you will be on next week. Which asset class should you read up about, what technology should you study - if you don't know which project it will be. You need to have a plan of skills to learn and personal projects focus on getting these done.

cottage industry of providing feeds

In the banking world there is a  IT ‘cottage industry’ of providing / consuming data

 

Nowdays you need ‘director level’ approval to give another team access to your database – this is because giving someone a feed from your system is like entering into a lifetime agreement – you team will be blamed and have incident ticket raised against them each time this feed is not present or the data is believed to be incorrect. When a team requests access to your database, simply push back by saying “there is the director responsible for this system – please obtain approval from them”.

My life as a gardener

Life working in bank is a little like being a professional gardener.

Each ITPM(IT project manager) in the bank is given a small set of systems that they are responsible for. This is smallish and rectangular similar to a back garden of a terrace house. Colleagues that sit next to them are similar to next door neighbors.

Rules for lawn owners

• Do not peer over the fence and start commenting on someone elses back garden and state of their lawn.
• Do not start mowing someone elses lawn - you will either end up becomming responsible for it forever or upset the owner.
• Be careful touching anything that represents an interface between your system and the neighboring system - breaking an api or feed - will result in your being blamed for an outage
• Focus on creating a clean lawn with nice straight stripes - wax on, wax off

Rules for gardeners

• Do not touch the lawn mover when it is being used - wait till after hours before touching anything. If you do not, you risk loosing a finger.
• If there is a lot of work to be done, schedule it over a weekend
• Be careful of anything that is offered to you - its probably a either a rosebush or a set of clippers - you may end up loosing a finger
• As a professional gardener you may work across different owners lawns - in order to implement a drainage system - but be careful working across streets as these are controlled by different managers

Standard second question - Whats the ETA?

In the City there is always a standard "second question".  For an incident or a feature - the second question is always "Whats the ETA?"
The next question might be "Is it a tactical or strategic solution?", possibly followed by the "Whats the escalation path for this?" or "What else are you working on?"

Tactical vs Strategic

One of the first set of new terms that I came across in banking are the terms Tactical vs Strategic.

• Tactical solution - is a euphemism for 'hack' or short term fix. However 'short term' might end up lasting 3+ years. As one team member said: "Nothing is as permanent as temporary"
• Strategic solution - this is the correct long term way to fix the problem. Often however this takes much longer and requires a lot more resources than a tactical fix.

The standard use of these terms in the bank have several advantages:

• A lot of time is saved when discussing a solution - Manager can ask 'Is that the tactical solution?' and developer says 'yes' - everyone knows what they means.
• It encourages a mental model of seperating short term and 'correct long term' solutions to a problem
• Its avoids having to use words like 'hack' in public