Monday, December 15, 2008

Enshaallah


This is a phrase I've been hearing here in Egypt. It means "God willing." It's used when people make plans to say this is what we want to do, but it isn't completely up to us.

It's like project management. We can make all our plans but things can still go the wrong way. Those are the times we can take the Egyptian attitude and accept the situation and go from there.

I had a project one time where we were doing a data conversion. About a month out, we found out some hardware wasn't going to be ready in time. There wasn't anything we could do about the situation, so we ended up doing the conversion in 2 steps, the second step happening when our hardware got in place. It took a little while to get people past the issue and on the solution, but we did it.

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