New contract....
Mar. 7th, 2025 11:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evile Tuesday: we had an initial meet and greet with onsite supervisor and 2 other contractors working on this project. Got some more background on the situation, including the fact that the guy who had been spearheading the salesforce project left in Dec and our supervisor is now taking up his slack.
Wednesday: We had a quick Salesforce tutorial with supervisor and other team members, led by Salesforce Expert who quickly went through the steps we would be following to do our work. Meeting was slotted for 1 hour, it was about 45 minutes. Luckily someone recorded the meeting so I was able to rewatch it a few times.
Thursday: We had a more 'all hands' meeting with supervisor and other team members, hosted by Senior Manager of ERP Design and Solutions for Supply Chain. He went through the process again, but there seemed to be disagreement or confusion on the essential steps and some debate on terminology (our supervisor is saying Old Salesforce and New Salesforce, and Senior Manager says it's not really a 'new' salesforce, etc.) and time line for project. this was about an hour and 50 minutes of listening to them talking about the process and steps, the background database that Salesforce was pulling from currently vs the one it will be pulling from in the future.... it seemed fairly disorganized. The 'old salesforce' or whatever they are going to call it is being shut down at the end of March.
Friday: the three contractors met to go through our notes and screen shots to try and get through entering an order successfully; we were not able to complete one order. One issue seems to be that the 'live' salesforce has an interface with a resource that is not available in the 'test environment.' We met with supervisor later in the morning and asked for more time with Salesforce Expert, for us to take turns doing the order entry with Salesforce Expert watching and offering advice or corrections as we go. One issue seems to be that in the 'live' version of salesforce rather than the sandbox/training version, there is a report that salesforce pulls from with product information (?) and the sandbox/training version does not have that report or data set to pull from.Another issue seems to be that Salesforce Expert's enumeration of steps is not in alignment with the steps Senior Manager says we need to do in order to successfully create an order (Salesforce Expert says we do not need to send for approval, Senior Manager says we do, supervisor does not know who would be handling the 'approval' process or where those orders would go 'for approval')
Supervisor is great; she is not expecting us to be subject matter experts, have proficiency. or know exactly what we are doing at this point. The team is collaborative, if disorganized, and everyone seems to have a good sense of humor about things. Supervisor says that some team members are asking her if they can use 'her temps' for other projects in the meantime and she would prefer us to continue to review meeting notes and recordings as well as product information for now. She seems to like the questions we are asking, and the fact that we're interested and engaged with the project. So as long as she's happy with us, I'm OK.
So I wrote up a recap and sent to my recruiter to keep her in the loop. No one seems unhappy with my work, but things seem kind of disorganized on their end at the moment. Management, trainers, etc. seem to just be bumbling around without much of a clue
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2025/03/05/band-meetings-hangover-research/5241741104373/
I was definitely feeling this after Thursday's meeting.
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2025/03/05/band-meetings-hangover-research/5241741104373/
I was definitely feeling this after Thursday's meeting.
"Colleagues also tend to vent to coworkers, sharing their frustrations in a process called "co-rumination" -- which can hurt the overall atmosphere and make productivity issues even worse."
I definitely did a bit of this through Teams with my new colleagues; but we are all pretty new so we tried to turn it around and make it seem as positive as possible rather than like a shitshow.
"Chatting with your colleague about how to deal with the situation for the future, getting their thoughts, engaging in sense-making where you're trying to understand, taking different perspectives on what just happened -- those types of conversations increase your skills and your resilience when you do have a bad meeting,"
Definitely want to try and develop some coping skills around this, become more comfortable with 'ambiguity' and understand that these problems are not my problems.
but also covered my ass as much as possible by letting my recruiter know what's up.
a handful of my colleagues from the previous contract got on as full time employees at the same place. They start 3/10. That could have also been me if I had not felt so honor-bound to stick by my committment to the recruiter --she asked first, so I accepted and didn't want to leave her hanging (plus was misled by my temp agency recruiter into thinking that there was no longer a permanent job available, that it was going to be another 6 month contract instead, which spurred me to accept the remote temp job, since I thought I was comparing two temp positions). I am definitely having a lot of second thoughts about that decision. I don't know why I beat myself up with 'shouldas'....that opportunity has passed and it's gone. I fucked it up, now it's time to suck it up. No point in dwelling on 'shoulda'.
I have not done much work on my data analyst course this past week even though I theoretically had the time to do so. I ordered an ikea laptop desk and will be trying to make a bit more order of my work space; I thought it would be easier to switch between work laptop and personal laptop, just unplug and replug keyboard mouse and big monitor between the 2 docks but it's a big mess of wires and junk and so I am going to have to regroup and actually have to unbox the big monitor the company sent to go along with my work laptop, as well as their wireless mouse and keyboard. My work room is a mess.I cleaned my personal desk but my work area is kind of a hodgepodge of janky desk and a couple of storage bins that things are stacked on. the plug outlet situation in this room is also terrible. I will spend some time this weekend getting squared away and trying to make sense of things. It doesnt' help that I don't have a 'work process' established as of yet so I don't have a good feel for what placement of screens will make the best sense. oh well. befriending ambiguity. yes yes.
"Chatting with your colleague about how to deal with the situation for the future, getting their thoughts, engaging in sense-making where you're trying to understand, taking different perspectives on what just happened -- those types of conversations increase your skills and your resilience when you do have a bad meeting,"
Definitely want to try and develop some coping skills around this, become more comfortable with 'ambiguity' and understand that these problems are not my problems.
but also covered my ass as much as possible by letting my recruiter know what's up.
a handful of my colleagues from the previous contract got on as full time employees at the same place. They start 3/10. That could have also been me if I had not felt so honor-bound to stick by my committment to the recruiter --she asked first, so I accepted and didn't want to leave her hanging (plus was misled by my temp agency recruiter into thinking that there was no longer a permanent job available, that it was going to be another 6 month contract instead, which spurred me to accept the remote temp job, since I thought I was comparing two temp positions). I am definitely having a lot of second thoughts about that decision. I don't know why I beat myself up with 'shouldas'....that opportunity has passed and it's gone. I fucked it up, now it's time to suck it up. No point in dwelling on 'shoulda'.
I have not done much work on my data analyst course this past week even though I theoretically had the time to do so. I ordered an ikea laptop desk and will be trying to make a bit more order of my work space; I thought it would be easier to switch between work laptop and personal laptop, just unplug and replug keyboard mouse and big monitor between the 2 docks but it's a big mess of wires and junk and so I am going to have to regroup and actually have to unbox the big monitor the company sent to go along with my work laptop, as well as their wireless mouse and keyboard. My work room is a mess.I cleaned my personal desk but my work area is kind of a hodgepodge of janky desk and a couple of storage bins that things are stacked on. the plug outlet situation in this room is also terrible. I will spend some time this weekend getting squared away and trying to make sense of things. It doesnt' help that I don't have a 'work process' established as of yet so I don't have a good feel for what placement of screens will make the best sense. oh well. befriending ambiguity. yes yes.
