Little by little

The last week has been very hard, and it's not easy to look at it as a sign that an end is in sight. The "go-live" cannot be said to have gone well, but at the same time, there are positive signs. The biggest problem we've had is not in the system itself, it's in how the workload has been unusually high and we've had a number of absences; enough that we would have been strained even without a new system going in. And while there have been problems galore with the new system they're essentially all things that can be remedied, once time is found in which to remedy them.

So the whole week was spent in a frantic, exhausting struggle to get a little bit ahead, but actually falling behind most of the time. Lots of overtime was worked by many people, some of whom were doing unaccustomed jobs. Stress levels were high, but not primarily because of the workload; the real fight is against negativity and defeatism and their ability to be self-perpetuating.

For all that, though, we're on the mend, and there's hope in another week or two we might be approaching normalcy, as long as we can stem the tide of defeatism before it reaches that point of self-perpetuation. It's hard to guess how things will go. If we have gotten caught up and enough fixes have been put in, we could very suddenly find ourselves staying mostly caught up, and things could turn around fast. But we might go right back into the negative spiral that dominated last week, too.

So I'm not sure if this blog will remain almost-suspended another couple of weeks, or only a couple of days, or what. We'll just have to see.