Chapter 2 - in which the project manager startles himself by contributing twice in one week to the ongoing blog

Claire and I have leapt forward in the creation of our presentation. Up to now we’ve had at least four team meetings in which we’ve agreed that we must get started and several meetings where we’ve entertained ourselves massively but actually produced very little. I guess to legitimise the activities we could call the previous meetings brainstorming but as Andy, one of the technical members of our project team would have it ‘the signal to noise ratio is very low’ or as a farming friend says ‘plenty of churn, but no butter’. You get the picture.
However, today was different. We’d arranged our meeting (which I thought was going to be about Highlight reports and risk logs – project manager that I am) but Claire adroitly suggested we should now, no really, now! Recognise that we’d better focus on producing something. After all, an hour and a half is a long time to sit and listen to someone dribble on. I know, I’ve sat through presentations, grinding my teeth feeling angry and resentful that someone is stealing my life from me and I’ll never get it back.
So we worked. The blessed relief of actually getting something done was balm to my fraying nerves. The outcome is that we have produced a decent skeleton for the presentation. We’ll continue to work on it over the next couple of weeks and I’m hoping that as the fateful day draws closer other delegates (that have so gamely signed up to attend) may ask questions or make contributions that will further clothe our skeleton with the meat and sinew of knowledge and purposefulness.
I’m beginning to look forward to this!