Wednesday, January 8, 2014

new situation at work

I haven't been feeling happy at work lately.

As you kow, I've only started at this job in September and everything looked alright at first. But in December I felt a little dejected. The work itself is still fun, I like writing specifications and doing mock-ups. But I felt like busywork, not really useful. Plus I felt really disconnected, our team sits scattered over three rooms and doesn't feel like a team at all, the people in my rooms usually don't go to the cafeteria for lunch and the others usually forget to ask me. I don't know, it just didn't feel right.

Now since I felt like writing specifications wouldn't really fill all of my time and since I'm really interested in it, I wanted to see if I could do more work concerning usability and user experience. I think it's really closely related to the work I'm doing anyway and the open position isn't filled yet. A co-worker is doing some work, but I know she's really busy with a lot of things. I just wasn't sure how to start... I didn't know who to tell about the idea and how and what to say and whether it was a good idea at all.

There's a lot of reorganisation going on and some time ago we were told that another departement would be joint with our team. We were also told that there wouldn't be much change for us, team e-commerce experts, but mainly for the others.
Now today we got a mind map from our boss and tomorrow there's a meeting concerning our reorganisation. Much to my surprise, I am transfered to another team, team "requirements management" - as the only one from our current team. ... I really didn't expect that at all.
First of all that will make it more difficult to do more usability-related work because that job will remain withing the other team. Secondly after just a few months in the company I'll have completely different team mates. Since I've not been feeling very connected with my current team mates, I'm thinking that this isn't necessarily - but it's not easy either. I hardly know these people, I've maybe seen them once for a few minutes (and they all know each other). And thirdly I'll have a new boss; well, my current boss will stay as my boss, but I'll have a team leader. I have heard rumours that he's not a very boss, though nothing precise, I am a little worried.
I feel insecure, I feel a little free falling, like there's no one/nothing to hold on to.

Since it quite suddenly got urgent I had a talk with my current boss about my idea of doing more usability-related work. It didn't go very well. I think... I'm not really sure. He disagreed with my worries of not having enough work to fill the day (apparently there's a long list of projects that all need a concept - but in my experience most projects from these long lists will never get done). He didn't want me to change into another position, said they needed me to write these specifications (I didn't mean to imply that I wanted another job). He did however say that he thinks it's a good thing that I give my ideas and my input and that I can work on usabilty stuff for maybe two days a week if I need to clear my head from writing specifications all the time (though it sounded a lot more like "two days" was just something he said at that moment and not actually an approval of spending exactly that time on it).
Unfortunately my boss is a very vague person, he doesn't give you precise input, he never tells me what to do. So now in a way I have an OK, but no starting point, nothing definite.

So tomorrow we'll have the meeting to talk about the changes, together with all the people from the two-became-one departement. I'm really a bit worried, and I don't know what to expect. I just had to get all these things off my chest, that's the reason for this hurried blog post. I hope I can sleep tonight.

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