A daring retrospective: is the pandemic dried out as a source of reflection?
By: Johan Pereira
Tags: Dragon King, Reflections, Covid 19, Project Management, Agile

Covid-19, that strange change agent that affected everything, the wildest unknown variable of the century.

One could think that there are enough interpretations, publications and discourses written about it, that it's somehow running short already, but I believe otherwise.

Any pre-covid clarity was vanished by the seclusion. The whole cultural change enforced by the health and economics crises has extended for the most part of this year.

It is a pandemic, and it is ours to live, suffer, reflect on, and overcome it, once we can. In that sense, how could there be a saturation of interpretations, reflections, and motivation speeches originated on COVID-19?

The virus has been obliterating in months what we built –for better or worse– during our whole life, not to say what´s done to the communed efforts that found the society as we knew it.

I am not an exception. There are things and great opportunities I’ve missed, people who I knew and loved that are now gone, those of who I care the most, in great vulnerability, and all thanks to this Sornette’s dragon king that we face, and to which we were far from being prepared.

I believe these are times to look down and, as Frank Cuesta recently invited, to gain gratitude for what we still have. It is also an invitation to work, as harder as ever, to provide for those who we care the most.

That compromise to provide stability amid pandemic chaos, together with a set of fortunate events, drove me to be an IT Operator for half of this year.

I have had the opportunity of working in a department that –much as other operators believe– requires putting your feet in the mud and making the errands for giant clients, by operating cutting edge systems in the electric mobility industry and server infrastructures. I´ve learned how operations work for large companies from within, and the logics that can take them to range from untimely to assertive decisions.

I collaborated with a team that has done nothing but welcome me and coaches me in their ways. It was also the opportunity to learn firsthand about how a technical operations support center works. The escalation process in both regular and uncommon days, together with the insights you could get from a service´s incidents flow.

I have faced a complex (sometimes even chaotic) system that gave me a clear picture of what usually happens, in large organizations, with their done products once in production.

The same reason that drove me to get into IT management was fueling me with motivation during this stage of my life, and that is a professionally tailored curiosity and empathy.

This has been an opportunity to learn from the other side of what I have done so far. Not the challenges of development, but the gear-like operations processes that follow successfully done complex products. I can see the kind of information that arrives in reports, and the insights lost in the routine. The social dynamics left as wild variables and when not, or the truly meaningful indicators being tracked (and when not).

The beauty of this is sustained by the human factor. The fuel behind small desks to immense corporation’s success, that´s the willingness of collaboration and delivering value, operating as a conductive thread.

I am always grateful for gaining new perspectives, and this is not the exception. If anything, I leave the operations department with gained clarity and respect for what operators do. Thanks, guys, for providing me and corporations value during unprecedented circumstances.

On the other hand, I´m days from returning to Project Management. I´ll be working on projects of cutting-edge technologies and for amazing use scenarios… and I´m so excited about it!

Retrospectively, 2020 has been for me a year of changes, challenges, and gaining new perspectives. The pandemic was been the conductive thread connecting me to new opportunities, and to the courage of being public about the things I care about and the subjects I would like to discuss with my network.

About that courage, let this post be a farewell to the old year, but also as the first post of a series on which I would like to discuss things that I´m passionate about such as Anthropology, Agile and Predictive Management, organizational culture, cutting-edge technologies and more!

Now that I’ve shared my part, could you tell us about:

> What new challenges and opportunities are you facing thanks to Covid?

> Where does the strength that keeps you here come from?

Thanks for resisting a pandemic, for the courage and determination that made you be here, holding your ground, loving, and caring for what motivates you, being unvictimized of any circumstances.

❤️STAY DETERMINED!️️❤️

Johan.