Going LIVE

I had no idea what "global" meant until I started working on this project. Tomorrow, it's go-live. Here's what the month of September was like for me:

Anywhere you see "UAT Group", that's at least an hour of me briefing groups of people somewhere around the world via WebEx and conference call. Dubai, New York, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Greece, India, Taiwan, Bermuda, Bangladesh. For participants in Rondon, I had to do face-to-face sessions. That's close to 130 people I spoke to in the space of 2 weeks.

Anywhere you see "GSC Con Call", that's where I had to do an hour long debrief with the Support Team in Bangalore. Although they were great fun to talk to, they were exhausting with their endless list of questions. I can now greet you in Hindi - Namaste!

Every Monday was the Steering Committee meeting at lunchtime, where I had to answer to my workstream sponsors.

Anywhere you see "DEV KETCHUP", is when I had to go through defects, fixes, retest results, change requests and any issues with the Development Team. Who sat on the opposite side of the floor to me. My excuse for wearing trainers to work, "Because I keep having to run to talk to them, and I can't run in heels" :P

Smattered in between all those are meetings with the third-party trainers, more demos to new managers, conference calls to Philipines on developing Macromedia flash demos, and lots of time spent sorting through defect reports. Teaching non-technical business users how to test, is not easy.

Total number of defects raised for UAT: 98.
Go-live delayed by: 1 week (mainly because Dev were late in delivering to me :P)
Number of times yelled at by angry fat man: 3
Time off to spend with my parents: 3 days and I was still working :(

It's been such a solid hardcore month of work. I'm exhausted. But I'm proud :) We're going LIVE! :D (Me to my boss: "We have to go live on Monday, I'm losing weight!")

Special thanks to Trini for being my escape buddy *besos*
Special thanks to Shuai for defect management advice *grin* No Jira (haha, if only SF knew), no Test Director, just good old Excel done in a very efficient way.
Special thanks to KC for comforting me at dinner :)