August Goals
Leadership
New Manager On Boarding
Wow, I so hate that term! I’ve been kicking around an idea to help prepare people for a new management position. One of the things I hear often from new managers at my company is that they feel like they need to figure it out on their own, which isn’t the most comfy position to be in right? So, I’m working on a proposal for a new intranet site with everything someone could possibly need when they’re new to managing people.
Management
Agile
Our second iteration is underway. This time around we’re focused on improving estimating and separately tracking all of the unplanned tasks that pop up. Overall I think it’s going pretty well though it seems we’re having issues with maintaining SCRUM and the right level of tasks.
Team Foundation Server
Eventually, after a few more iterations at least, I’d like to manage our Agile process as well as QA through the TFS 2010 product. We’ve been on VSS since oh forever so having this configured and setup correctly the first time around is pretty important, I’ll be spending a good portion of August reading up and planning.
Projects
This second Agile iteration is largely made up of 1st or 2nd releases: Reporting Services conversions, web site and warehouse upgrades and a some new SharePoint sites. The new stuff involves data projects (my favorite), we have one where we’re integrating a new data feed into an existing warehouse and another where we’re beefing up an existing warehouse to meet the needs of a new extract. So aside from a handful of websites, I don’t expect to have much completed this time around but we should make some significant progress on most of what is on deck.
Personal
This month I’d like to get some headway made on my whiteboard, for months now I’ve had the results of a brainstorming session, in the form of about a dozen giant sticky notes and a half formed mindmap, on a departmental issues and potential solutions. Looking at all of it as is has been fairly overwhelming I admit so the procrastination level has been high, this month though I’m going to at least get all my thoughts organized so I can start working on some plans.
Taarradhin 