OPTIONAL: Rust, For rust and grime pick out some small areas with Rhinox hide, less is more here as you can always add more later so start slow, I would also recommend going around any rivets first before doing drips. inside the Rhinox hide apply Mornfang Brown, covering about 2/3rds of the Rhinox hide. next add a few dots of Skrag Brown just to give it the slight rust ‘setting in’ look. and finally a small amount of White Scar highlight under any rust or scratches, this will give it that 3D effect.
Paint Time: 4-6 hours
Notes: Although this model looks easy from the guide I cannot stress enough the importance of taking your time with the “white armour plating” the key thing here is multiple very thin coats of Celestra Grey and Ulthuan Grey. take your time and be ready for 4 or 5 coats. While it may seem tedious it will be well worth it for the smooth finish on the white. no body wants lumpy plates.
Post Pandemic, a lot of us are going back into the office in a serious way, and there is a lot of push to get everyone back full time in person. But as we know, with a few exceptions this does not give the productivity boost a traditional manager would like. We have moved on from this. Everyone back in the office is just as extreme as everyone remote. It doesn’t work perfectly in all situations. A nice compromise to this has been the growth of hybrid working. And most well thought out hybrid systems work nicely. hybrid working balances letting people work at home and save travel time, and get on with work versus team communication and everyone feeling part of one deliverable.
How many days works best depends on your team, but common consensus seems to be two days a week. It’s the best long term and hits a nice balance. but that brings a question which two days?, which ones are best and which ones are valid?
Monday.
This is one of my favourite hybrid dates. I like going in to the office on a Monday. I feel it kickstarts the week. It stops you from slow starting. It actually makes you feel more involved and set your goals, however, Monday is also status update frenzy. You will not get much done on a given Monday because the first half of the day will merely be everybody chasing around to find out what everybody else is doing. It’ll be everything from setting up spreadsheets to building PowerPoint slides for senior managers, to organising sprint meetings etc, etc. You don’t actually do that much solid work. So you’ve only really got half a day. if you’re talking about teams working together, unless your teams are all benefiting from working out their sprint and their plan for the week, first thing Monday is not a good hybrid working on site day.
Tuesday
Tuesday to me is the best hybrid day. Everyone’s got a grip on what they want to do for the week or for the sprint. And now people are banging into blockers and they want to know why!. They want to discuss why, they want to liaise, fight with each other, squabble over resources, deal with technical issues. This is the day to have people in the same office, yelling at each other, getting into meetings, and resolving things with a five minute chat rather than 10 emails. You will get a hell of a lot done on a Tuesday.
Wednesday
Midweek Wednesday is a split day in my personal opinion. Wednesday is an excellent hybrid working day for senior managers because they want to see the results of the Tuesday and they want to know answers, they want to demand questions or override decisions. So for senior managers and P.M.’s Wednesday’s is an excellent onsite working day. For Tech’s / B.A. and the like It’s not, they have had Monday which was part wasted in status calls, and Tuesday in the office justifying them and getting the details sorted out. Now they just want to get on with the work so they can deliver.
Thursday
I think everybody is a solid worker on Thursday. They should be left to work this day. PM’S know exactly what they’re doing. Tech’s have already had their full first day of working on Wednesday and should really be making progress. So Thursday is a pure working day. If you pull people into the office it tends to be a quiet heads down affair which begs the question, why waste the time pulling them in?
Friday
Friday is the worst on site working day. Unless you are in a sales orientated business or you have weekend work, People are resentful about being pulled in to an office on this day. They are not going to give you their best. I have found that working with teams it is best to merely break a Friday up into two sets of deliverables. See how much actual work you can get done by about 2pm. then between 3pm and 5pm get whatever status updates need sorting done, ready to be sent out to the senior managers, don’t pull people in for this day. However there is one exception… Deep sigh… use it as a consequence, if the team is consistently not delivering, then they come in on a Friday to try and fix it, you will be amazed at the motivation this provides for both junior and senior members
Conclusion
To summarise if I was making the decisions and pulling in on reflection, I would have Tuesday as the definite hybrid working day for all and then additionally Wednesday for PM’s and managers, with Friday as a little used option if the team is having consistent issues hitting goals.
I’ve never really got on well with project managers despite managing projects myself.
And I think it’s down to the sheer diversity of management styles and what people think are the actions of a project manager versus what is genuinely needed to manage a project. However, I suddenly realised that the exact definition of a project manager has been staring me in the face and you will forgive me if this exists already, but it’s only just come to me.
So your project is a car journey, and a project manager is the Co-pilot. They plan the route, They keep a second eye on the petrol gauge. They arrange any changes to the car and book it in for repairs if needed, They ensure the rest of the occupants of the car are doing well, and if necessary they eject a passenger if they can’t behave.
In short they are the person that facilitates keeping the project on the road and going at the right speed in the right direction.
However what the project manager is not:
The Driver: This is the business or information technology, you can show this by the fact that if the project manager is missing, the car journey would still continue. It would eventually get there. It might get lost a few times, It might run out of petrol. It might even stall, and a number of terrible things might happen to it, arriving late and in bad shape. But it will still reach the goal.
The Passenger: They are not the passenger in the back. Their role is not to merely say “Are we there yet?, Are we there yet?” and “Drive faster, Drive faster!”
So as a project manager, if you ever wonder why your requests for status updates are ignored, look at your actions and try and determine if your are a co-pilot on the journey, or just a passenger.
Method(s): Spray basecoat of Wraithbone. For the skin use Guilliman Flesh, once fully dried, dry brush Pallid Wych Flesh lightly over all skin, then with a 1:1 mix of Magos Purple and water, wash over the hands and feet. Next apply Gore-Grunta Fur to all fur areas being careful not to get it on the skin. Lastly paint teeth and claws with Stegadon Scale Green.
This is an object, usually software, that promises something but can only deliver it when a lot of additional resources and other systems are bolted on, normally paid for by the customer.
In this tale, a traveller or travellers convince either a old woman or a village that they have a magic stone that can produce soup. However this is a con. They get the villagers or old woman to actually make the whole soup by adding tonnes of ingredients one by one.
This tale has two interpretations:
Is that if everyone works together they can produce amazing things.
Don’t believe people who say something can produce amazing things without proof and that nothing is free.
In the corporate world, its the second interpretation that is most common, and is seen mainly in the form of something that promises everything and while the something indeed exists, 1 it doesn’t do what is advertised as without tonnes and tonnes of extra bits. This is most commonly seen in software systems, particularly a lot of the modern day cloud ones. So they may say our software does XXX, but it only does that because it’s hosted on AWS and takes advantage of their systems and you have to pay for the extra AWS systems, or that it has monitoring when all it does is allow other monitoring software 2 to interface to it. or it sends emails but it requires a separate mail server etc, etc, etc.
It’s when something is sold as doing something but requires lots of other systems to actually complete. In the worst case, you will be sold a single licence for a cloud subsystem in the hope of keeping everything on the cloud and end up with a bunch of local servers to deliver on that promise and leave you with twice the complexity you started with.
The only real way to combat this is to dig down in to the detail, arrange a workshop with your techs and get hard details on what supporting systems and licences are needed for your deliverables.
Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.
