How I learned to let go and love life on the beach

Hi. I'm Marjorie Pries and this is my first blog post. I'm a business analyst / project manager / iteration manager / utility player (honest, my business card says, "Utility Infielder" ) for ThoughtWorks, Inc. in Chicago.

I've been in software development since 1992 and I've been with ThoughtWorks since June 2000. Today, I'm "on the beach." That means I'm in-between projects ... non-billable ... unassigned ... waiting for something to come in. I've been on the beach since the end of January and you know what, I have never been on the beach with ThoughtWorks before.

It has nothing to do with me, or the project I was on. We still have that client but they don't have the same budget they had last year, and it just made sense for me to come off. It gave a really good guy a chance to stretch and take on some different responsibilities and what the heck, I'm the utility infielder, at any other time it would have been easy to fit me into something new right away.

So five weeks later, what can I say about being on the beach, this long? I was really surprised how much of a grieving aspect there was to my days. The first week was a lot of sorting through mementos, archiving documents and elements, updating the former team wiki, and just generally letting all those wheels of concern and ideation roll to a halt. The second week I shadowed on another project just to see what was what. It was mostly excruciatingly boring (my IM avatar during that week was a chattering skull in a dungeon with a tortoise) but I was still feeling grief. A great emptiness emerged from no longer having that great project and its great people (TWers and the client's) in the center of my worklife.

I spent a week in Oregon with my mother-in-law (well, my live-in partner's mother). We shopped everyday for things she had vague ideas about but couldn't find on her own ...that's some real analysis work there. It helped! Also reading a really good detective story, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But still some emptiness lingered.

Now I'm five weeks into it and over it. I dropped off my last folder of notes with the old team earlier this week, submitted a proposal for an Agile 2009 presentation, signed up for some conferences and classes, have some project prospects on the horizon, and even started blogging.

It's cool, and I feel I've made an important people management discovery. Downtime between projects is necessary! The longer the participation in the old project and the deeper the ties (to the project team and to the project strategy), the more a person needs downtime to let go, say good-bye, reflect on lessons learned, and focus on the new things they want to pick up. Two weeks is OK for lightweight gear-shifting but definitely a minimum of four to six weeks works better when the previous role was intense. If your organization can afford it, you must do it. The re-charge will certainly payback unforeseen benefits in the long run.