About a year ago I was working on an absolutely exciting eShop project which fulfilled almost everything I needed from my job at the time. It was so much fun that I would willingly come in on weekends, I would dance to the water cooler, I would sing songs of praise in our project meetings, and sometimes I would even start work by 9am in the morning.

It was truly a wonderful project that was fulfilling almost everything I needed at the time. But as we all know, nothing in this world is perfect, and the fly in my ointment during this time was a dire and constant threat known as 'Prioritisation'.

For those of you who have not experienced the joys of cross functional resource planning, Prioritisation (always with a capital P) is a process whereby an organisation ranks currently planned initiatives, and decides which will get resources.

Some small logical deduction:

+ Projects depend on Prioritisation
+ Project managers depend on projects
-------------------------
-> Project managers depend on Prioritisation

And on what, then, does Prioritisation depend? The answer is something along the lines of "market conditions, business strategy, and the vaguaries of interdepartmental political warfare".

So yes, my fate was inextricably linked to the treacherous and inconstant mistress known as Prioritisation. The project itself was initiated in early 2003, and had taken two years to get sufficient Prioritisation to get 'above the line'. The specific Prioritisation of our project this two years later in early 2005 was the subject of much amusement, as we were ranked as the last possible project above the resource line.

This theoretically meant that our project should continue with resources, but also that any problem with any project above us on the Prioritisation list could easily knock us back under the line.

The reality of this was that all of the technical resources we dealt with considered this project to be the least important work on their plate, as well as the least likely to continue. In project meetings these programmers would quietly regard me with a certain glassy eyed sadness, typically the expression one reserves for the crazy drunk great uncle that needs to be tolerated just another hour or two before the family takes him back to the retirement home.

Asking long hard hours from my team (as well as myself) was especially difficult knowing that the project itself could be put on hold at any given time. As our personal investments into the project increased, if anything, the probability of losing resources in Prioritisation only seemed to increase. Putting so much time into something, to have it cancelled or indefinitely postponed, is a pretty soul destroying thing for me. I'd already started then lost five other projects in similar situations, and this would have been the straw that broke the project manager's back.

Ultimately, there was a happy ending. The project itself succeeded due to both excellent planning by the key people involved and successful lobbying by my wonderful manager. Regardless though, at this midway point in the project I decided that I needed a change.

As Czech Republic stood, I felt I had experienced enough that it was starting to seem somehow normal. In regards to Oskar/Vodafone, I still enjoyed working there, but I could easily see Prioritisation looming on the next round of initiatives. The simple truth is that web work is not so critical for running the Oskar/Vodafone business. Prioritisation is the generally rational tool that our management use to make well-informed decisions about how best to grow value for the business. I can respect that - it makes sense to me - but it also means that to do work that I find meaningful I have to go elsewhere.

So I did go elsewhere. And today is my first day in London.