Anyone that publishes anything seems to be offering up their 2015 Year in Review material these days. At first I was a bit put off by the exponential growth of such clickbait this year. But then I remembered that here in the PMO we actually get paid per blog post hits (little known fact). So I decided if you can’t beat them, join them.
I thought the most efficient (read: laziest) way to compile my review was to methodically scour my Outlook calendar for the past 12 months and see what stood out. Eventually a key plotline appeared in the chronology. There seemed to be a lot of clicking on things. In places where my Calendar did not reveal what I was clicking on or why, I looked at my Sent folder to fill in some of the gaps in the storyline. Here’s how it breaks down:
January 2015
Lots of Epic activity this month. I proctored a total of 8 exams for 5 different DFCI staff members trying to earn their Epic certifications. These were online exams where I click the Exam Enable button, then the exam takers answer 50 or so Epic questions by clicking in their exam. When they finish, they clicked the Submit Exam button. They get their exam score back from Epic via email within 2 minutes. Most pass, but when someone fails it’s a sad moment. All that clicking for nothing.
In the middle of January, my wife and I went to Turks and Caicos for a week. When we returned it immediately began snowing and would not stop for 9 weeks.
February 2015
Snowpocalypse dominated this month. Almost every activity that occurred in February started with looking at weather.com. Click ahead to see if I can safely drive to work today. Click ahead 5 days from now and see if it will maybe stop snowing by then. Click ahead to the next 8 hours to see if I can drive home safely from work. I’m a hearty New Englander and all, but maybe I should just sleep in my cube tonight.
March 2015
This month saw some of the most dangerous clicking of my career. I did some one-on-one coaching with an unnamed someone on advanced PowerPoint skills. She had improvised a standing desk setup in her office where her monitor and keyboard were propped up precariously on stacks of 8-12 textbooks. The mouse cord wove between this setup like a snake poised to strike. One wrong motion would bring the thing toppling down. Each click was nerve-wracking.
April 2015
I was drafted into the Epic training army this month to create tip sheets. The goal was to produce click-by-click reference guides. Knowing what to click and in what order is more or less the goal of all software training. I’m good at this. But by the month’s end I was relieved of this duty for mysterious reasons.
May 2015
On May 2nd, my Outlook Calendar shows this appointment: “ZY $20 2-18”. May 2nd is the first Saturday in May which is always Kentucky Derby day. My former next door neighbor emailed me to place his Derby bets. He knows I trek to Suffolk Downs every Derby Day to bet remotely on the race. It is weird that he emailed me at work, not even my wife has my work email. But then he works in Big Pharma, so I guess I should not be too surprised at his reach. We would both lose our bets that day when the stupid 10 horse Firing Line blew up both of our exactas. Otherwise, nothing else of note happened in May.
June 2015
Most of June was spent clicking back and forth between myTalent and HealthStream. No data migration was done in moving from one system to the next. So I labored to simulate a data conversion by hand. Extract from myTalent, save, upload to HealthStream, rinse, repeat.
July 2015
July was pretty boring. I did have a nice moment where I validated a hunch that a recurring error we were seeing in an online course was in fact user error. Click wisely users, click wisely.
August 2015
This month saw the last big push in moving to HealthStream. There is always a ton of clicking when learning a new system. Sometimes you click the right thing. Most times you click the wrong thing. Sometimes you just end up clicking on nothing at all. Once I got really crazed and clicked in a random text field maybe 100 times hoping to break HealthStream wide open like a piñata and spray candy everywhere. But sadly that never happened.
September 2015
In prepping for the return of Project University after the Epic hiatus, I spent much of September building our class schedule in HealthStream. For the greater good of the program, a tenuous peace was reached between me and the system. I resolved to click in it in a professional, constructive manner and not treat it like a piñata.
October 2015
The fall session of Project University is in full swing. I bungled the Waiting List for the first few classes by processing attendance and last minute withdrawals in the wrong order. I did not click wisely. The good news is that I taught my course on Presenting and Public Speaking for the first time. It went well and the content involves almost no clicking at all.
November 2015
My last post documented my misadventures with the Buttonmaker. In November, after fixing the Buttonmaker, I finally had several fruitful sessions of button-making. It occurred to me that making buttons with this machine is a form of clicking. With software when you click on stuff, more often than not, you are clicking a “button”. Cranking out buttons with the Buttonmaker is just analog clicking.
December 2015
My contractor status ends and I officially join the PMO as a fulltime Partners employee. After attending orientation at Partners HQ, you are presented with all kinds of online forms to fill out. But all that clicking was worth it. It is a great feeling to be asked to stay on permanently and I am incredibly grateful to Deb and my colleagues in the PMO for their faith in me. I look forward to many great years of clicking on stuff at Dana-Farber.