The vendor selection project came up again today. Paulina asked me directly if I wanted to lead it — a six-month engagement picking a replacement for our current portfolio tool, involving four vendors, procurement, and probably three stakeholder workshops. She said it'd be "great visibility." I said I'd get back to her by Monday.

Here's what I actually know: it's probably 8 to 10 extra hours a week for at least four months, the executive who owns the budget is hard to read, and I've done this kind of selection before — the last one in 2022 added nothing I could point to on my comp review. What I don't know: whether this one lands differently because the new CTO is paying attention, or whether that's wishful thinking on my part.

The trade-off is concrete enough. If I take it, I'm giving up the four hours a week I've been putting into a systems thinking course I started in August. I'm halfway through and actually finding it useful for how I run retrospectives. If I drop it now I'll probably not restart it. That's real.

Three rough options:

Take the project, pause the course, see what the visibility actually amounts to by March.
Decline, finish the course, add it to the spreadsheet as a Q3 skill bet with a 12-month check-in.
Ask Paulina if the scope can be scoped down to the evaluation framework phase only — about half the hours.

I notice I'm leaning toward the third option partly because it feels like a compromise, which is its own kind of red flag. Sometimes a scoped-down version is genuinely smarter; sometimes it's just avoiding the decision. I'm not sure which this is.

Current best guess: I'll ask Paulina about the scoped version on Monday and see how she reacts. If she pushes back, that tells me something about how optional my participation actually is. Review date: end of September, once I know whether the project kicks off on schedule.

#career #decisionlog #tradeoffs #worklife

There's a role posted internally — senior PM on the infrastructure modernization program. Posted Tuesday, closes next Friday. My manager mentioned it before I saw the listing, which means someone nudged her to nudge me. Worth noting.

The move would be lateral in title, maybe a 4–6% bump depending on how band negotiation goes, and would add two direct reports for the first time. The program is 18 months from a hard cutover deadline with three vendor contracts already signed. Not a greenfield situation.

Here's what I'm actually weighing:

Stay: known work, known team, slower but predictable. My current project wraps in Q1 and I'd likely get slotted onto something less interesting afterward.
Move: real scope expansion, people management experience I don't have, but I'd be inheriting someone else's commitments on a schedule that already looks thin.

The people management piece is the honest unknown. I've led cross-functional groups but never had direct reports. I don't know if I'm good at it. I don't know if I'd like it. There's a reasonable chance I'd be mediocre at it for 6–12 months while the program is under pressure, which is a bad combination for everyone involved.

What I'm not doing is treating this as "my next step" in some abstract career arc. The question is narrower: do I learn more, or lose more, in that role over the next 18 months? Current best guess is 55–45 toward taking it, but I don't have enough signal on the manager I'd be reporting to. She joined the org in June.

Next step: coffee with the hiring manager Monday morning. One real question — how much of the current timeline is negotiable versus baked into the vendor SLAs. Her answer will shift my estimate more than anything else I could research this weekend.

#career #decisionlog #projectmanagement #internalrole

September 2026