Job

So I’ve been in my new position for a couple of weeks now, and I’ve been having some uneasy feelings, which is normal. I’ve lost all of the day-to-day responsibilities from my old position but they haven’t been replaced by similar day-to-day responsibilities in the new position, so its hard to know if I’m being all that useful yet or not. I knew all of this going in. My main task now is to be writing up requirements for a new system we will help design and hopefully have fully operational in a few years. I think our whole team is a little lost because we haven’t been given a whole lot of direction from our superiors on how to go about doing this. Today is really the first day that I’ve thought that maybe everyone else working on this is as lost as I am. I don’t think any of us junior folks have done anything like this before.

We are selecting a software vendor in the next week, and it appears that everyone’s approach is to wait until they get here and let them tell us how to design everything. This is not a great idea, as I think this is what happened during the design of the current system and it ended up being a little too different than what our stakeholders wanted. Right now we have a high-level document provided by our stakeholders and everyone has been assigned a part of that to turn into a requirements document. It looks like most of our team is taking the high-level document and rewording and reformatting it into the requirements document. That seems like a waste of time to me. I mean, if we’re just going to do that why not just tell the vendor to read the high-level document instead? I’ve been taking a different approach and have been reading the high-level document, then asking myself what a software vendor might need to know to implement it, and getting a bit more specific as I put the requirements document together. Sure, I’m making a lot of stuff up that hasn’t been discussed, but I assume we’re all going to get together at some point to review and revise these documents. I say it’s better to have some idea down, even if it’s completely wrong, because that way we won’t forget about that particular detail and we’ll all have a chance to fix it. It would be worse to start working with the vendor with just the high-level stuff and totally rely on them to fill in all the details. We should take as much control of the project as possible, since we are more responsible for it then the software vendor will be. Anyway, I spent all day today working on this and I feel like I’ve made a lot of progress. I hope I’m doing the right thing.