So,if Wednesday is "hump day" – that is, the hump you have to get over to enjoy the weekend… then "June & July" are the "hump months." At least to me. Don't get me wrong. I love summer. I love the sun and playing in the pool. I love working outside and getting a tan (tan is used loosely – I'm very VERY white – so any "darker white" on my skin is a tan – and is a #win in my book).
The problem with June & July is that my projects experience a slowness that doesn't happen at any other time of the year. I'm still not sure why that is, but I've experienced the "Summer Hump" for years now and it has been in the forefront of my thoughts lately. I'm sure part of it is because the nice weather means I want to play hooky outside. I work at home. My home office overlooks our backyard and our swingset/playset and my kids splashing in the sprinklers. Who can work with that outside your window?
The other possible, more probable, explanation of the "Summer Hump" is vacation. Because school is out (in the US at least) – families take their coveted vacation time – most often in June and July. They are gone for a week or so (give or take). When working with cross-functional, and cross-organizational groups – it seems that someone is ALWAYS on vacation – every week – through June or July. Sometimes multiple stakeholders, or even support contacts, are gone for significant lengths of time in the summer. This isn't a bad thing – just an observation. I'm less likely to complete a "quick" project in June or July than any other time of the year. I propose that "Summer Hump" is real.
Here's what my May was like
- My wifey had Baby #3 – Andrew – and he's awesome.
- I flew back to OKC – and provisioned three new AT&T circuits. One of which needs to be re-done, because of failed AT&T design through their Dallas POP – but that's another story for another day.
- We upgraded BES – from v4 to v5 – and migrated servers. With zero downtime. Well, not zero – we did have two users that required manual intervention. Not bad.
- We migrated from LCS 2005 to OCS 2007 – and migrated servers. With minimal downtime. It would have been ZERO downtime, but literally, the day before the cutover, the LCS server crashed – so – we had to "push" the cutover and lost all the users' address books. Bummer.
- We made progress on our Nexenta SAN – it's not perfect, but it's gonna be AWESOME when we work through a few remaining issues.
Here's what my June was like
- I sent many emails/voicemails and am still waiting to hear back from some of them
- these were mostly to vendors/partners – concerning our technology installs and relationships with said vendors/partners
- I practiced patience – very poorly at times
- And, I fixed a few little things here and there – nothing SUPER significant though
Here's what my July will be like (I hope)
- Hopefully, maybe, our "corrected" AT&T 100meg EaMIS circuit will come live at the end of the month
- We should work out the remaining Nexenta SAN problems. Many of the issues turned out to be hardware related from when we dropped the stupid thing from a liftgate. I've talked about that many times on twitter and on here so I won't rehash it. The last few remaining issues are "migrating scsi disk IDs and GUIDs" – obviously if software loses track of which disk si which, bad things could happen to your data stripes. That's a biggie. Once that gets resolved, I'm confident we can get this badboy going.
- As an aside, I've been more vocal the last few days on twitter re: this project. Rest assured I **WANT** Nexenta. I pursued them. I chose them as a vendor/partner for our large disaster recovery / replication project. Part of that choice was the understanding that this was a v1.0 product (v2.0 launched this week – on 6/29/2009). I've been frustrated with the support mechanism(s) in place, but I can sense from several phone calls recently that this will improve. I trust it will. I look forward to the MANY tweets & blog posts re: our success with Nexenta.
- Maybe, just maybe, We will upgrade from VMWare ESX 3.5 to vSphere 4.x – maybe.
What about you? Have you ever experienced the "Summer Hump?" How do you handle it? How do you think we (everyone) should handle project management / expectations knowing that the "summer hump" could be real?
Yep, I experience the summer hump with a lot of my clients. We work together to set out deadlines in the spring for projects to be done. We’re working along fine and then all of a sudden it’s days before emails are answered or calls returned. They always forget to factor in their vacation times or to even tell the outsider what is going on. Thankfully most are OK with missing deadlines in those cases, but it still makes it hard to schedule other projects.
And of course there is the winter hump. It’s pretty much impossible to get anything done from Thanksgiving until the week after Jan 1.
Hey Mikel, I agree with the Winter Hump too – it’s definitely a “shorter” hump – but a hump nonetheless. It is pretty amazing how easy it is to forget “vacation” time during project planning. I’m just as guilty as anyone else – how about you?