I spent all day in a meeting today as both a Centre rep as well as the “Server Guy”. It’s a huge project. Basically serving up all medical imaging for the entire province. Rough budget just for Winnipeg is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 4-6,000,000$, though I don’t know specifically. More than 2,000,000$ of that will be purely for hardware.

Big project, big meeting. And it reminded me about everything I was missing in this job. No high level interaction. No evaluation of business needs. No pushing vendors to deliver what they said they’d deliver pre-sales. No working with really smart people on projects which 3 years ago would have been completely impossible (and even now are quite pushing the envelope).

In my last job I’d be in these meetings 4 days out of 5. This is the first I’ve been in since moving out here in January. And it was really hard to sit there going “this is what I’m great at”. Because I really am. I mean I was out of place in this one, but that type of meeting is exactly what I’m really, really good at. Taking something really abstract and making it into something that resembles reality. Delegating tasks, pulling in resources and getting funding to make the project happen.

Really, really hard. It was a great meeting, but it’s really hard to know that that could easily be my last one this year. But, hey, more than 50 people at work read this blog so maybe it won’t be the last one ;-)