The statement of work says six months. Everybody on the programme privately assumes nine. You are onsite at the client four or five days a week, in the same building, on the same deployment, with the same integration issues, from now until go-live and for a while after it. Onsite is not a phase of your job. Onsite is the job.
Implementation consultants get the longest postings of anyone who flies in for work, and the length is the whole problem. Two weeks you endure. Two years you move properly: you get a flat, you sign up to a gym, you register with a doctor, you make friends the slow ordinary way. Six months sits in the dead zone between those, and it is a genuinely awkward length of time to be somewhere.
01Too long to be a trip, too short to build a life
At six months the trip framing breaks down. You are not passing through, you are living here, badly. But the usual mechanisms for building a life do not accept a six-month commitment either. The interesting evening course runs for a year. The five-a-side team wants you for the season. The people you meet ask how long you are here for, hear "until go-live, probably", and file you accordingly, which is fair enough because that is what you told them.
So most people on a long deployment do neither. They do not unpack and they do not settle, and they spend a hundred and twenty weekday evenings in a holding pattern waiting for a date that keeps moving. The suitcase stays half packed on principle. That is the six-month problem, and it is not solved by finding more things to do in the city, because the city is not what is missing. What is missing is anything in your week that repeats.
02The aparthotel makes it worse, not better
Long deployments usually mean an aparthotel or a company flat rather than a hotel room, and everyone treats this as an upgrade. It is, for laundry and for cost. It is not, for evenings. The kitchenette means you can cook, so you do, so there is no longer any reason to leave the building at all. A hotel at least forced you out for dinner. An aparthotel lets you go from the client site to the lift to a pan of pasta to a laptop, five days a week, for half a year, without ever making a decision about it.
Cooking for yourself is sensible and you should keep doing it. The failure mode is doing it seven nights out of seven because the alternative requires a decision and there was nothing prompting you to make one.
03Go-live cycles mean the weeks are not the same
The other thing that makes a long deployment different is that it does not run at a constant intensity. There are cutover weeks and hypercare weeks where you are in the building until eleven and the weekend disappears. Then there are the flat stretches: UAT is with the client, you are waiting on a defect list, and you are leaving at half past five with nothing to do.
Almost everyone plans for the brutal weeks and nobody plans for the flat ones, which is backwards. The brutal weeks look after themselves, they are full by definition. The flat weeks are where the deployment quietly becomes miserable, because a five-thirty finish with no plan is a longer evening than a ten o'clock finish with none.
If you can see a cutover coming, you can also see the flat fortnight after it. Book something into that fortnight while you can still remember it exists.
04The unit that works at this length is one repeatable weeknight
At six months, stop thinking about things to do in London and start thinking about one weeknight that recurs. A list of attractions gets you through three weeks. Repetition is what gets you through six months, because repetition is the only thing that turns evenings into people whose names you know, and a single recurring slot costs you one decision rather than a fresh one every Tuesday.
One is the right number. Three commitments on a deployment schedule will all collapse in the first cutover week and you will conclude that none of it works. One survives a bad month and picks up again afterwards.
This is what a KF.Social table in London is for on a long posting: six to eight people at a real restaurant on a set date, booked in advance so it happens without you arranging anything. It is £15 to be matched, or £5 if you are a Premium member, and food and drink you settle at the restaurant. The venue is confirmed 72 hours before. Book the same weeknight each month for the length of the deployment and you have the one repeating thing the six-month problem is short of.
On who else is at the table, the honest answer is symmetry rather than screening: everybody there booked their own seat and paid for it, the same as you. Guests can choose to verify who they are with an ID check, and you see the tick if they have. Booking gates on two things only, that you are 18 or over and that you have paid.
05The weekends you stay
On a six-month posting you will not fly home every weekend, whatever you intended in month one. The flights get expensive, the Friday cutover runs late, and eventually a weekend arrives where you are staying. Those are the weekends worth having a habit for, because a Saturday with nothing in it in a city where you know nobody is the single longest day on a deployment.
Treat the staying weekends as the ones you plan hardest, and get out of the borough the accommodation is in. The area around a client site is chosen for proximity to the client site, and it is usually the least interesting square mile you will find.
06Go-live will move. Plan for the version where it moves.
Every deployment date you have ever been given has moved to the right, and yours will too. The strategy of waiting it out is therefore a strategy of waiting out something with no fixed end, which is how six months becomes eleven and you realise you spent the better part of a year in a building and a kitchenette.
You do not need to build a whole life here for a posting that ends. You need one evening a week that is not the deployment, and it needs to be booked rather than intended, because intentions do not survive hypercare.
KF.Social
