September Goals
Leadership
Welcome to Management
After a few weeks’ worth of research and gathering the input of about a dozen new managers, I’ve come up with a fairly comprehensive solution to the ‘tossed into the frying pan’ issue. I’ve drawn up a proposal to implement a landing page where anyone new to management can find training, forms and access to all of the resources we have available online. Now to get it approved!
Department Training
This month I’ll begin consulting with the rest of the management staff in my department to get a solid and prioritized wish list of online training, technical conferences and offsite classes needed for the rest of this year through June of next. My vision is to create a site where staff can view online training on demand and managers can submit proposals for anything with a cost associated. Simple enough but consensus among the groups will be challenging.
PMO
I’ve been give the PMO responsibilities for our site along with training a regional person to handle our other sites. This position is a combination of traditional project management and an Agile lead, basically Agile methods for all IT projects and traditional tracking for non-IT, though I hope to transition some of the non into a hybrid Agile. During this month I’ll be learning more about the expectations from our corporate office and start putting together a timeline for rollout. I’m expecting this to take up most of Q4 for implementation.
Management
Agile
Our third iteration has begun, and we’re definitely getting the hang of juggling production issues while maintaining pace on releases though I do feel like we’re still having issues with daily SCRUM and task levels but perhaps not as much as last iteration. We are at the right stage where we can start training our customers next month and I’ll spend September working on those materials and getting the resources identified so we can start spreading the Product Manager role across departments.
Team Foundation Server
I found the best book to get us started – Professional Scrum with Team Foundation Server 2012. After reviewing the book and having some discussions with our Scrum Masters so far, we’re going to implement the Scrum template and set up our test server for current projects over the next couple of weeks, in the hopes of getting everything migrated/implemented by November.
Projects
Interesting issue, meaning that I haven’t dealt with before, has developed where a corporate project lead negotiated a data extract on our behalf but ignored our technical specification for the delivery method. It’s interesting not because of the mistake but on that he steadfastly refuses to even discuss our spec instead he ignores all attempts to correct him and doesn’t respond to emails regarding resolution. I’m not sure how to take all of this but the Psych minor in me is absolutely fascinated by his behavior. It’s been about three months now so I’ve had to escalate the whole thing to my boss’s level, hopefully that will bring about some action this month.
Personal
This month I’ll be attending Computerworld’s BI & Analytics Perspectives Conference and am planning to do some actual networking this time around. Typically I go to these and take copious notes on every session I attend but then skip out on the luncheons and cocktail hours. Which I feel like if I’m to learn and grow beyond my current environment then it’s probably best to spend some time with people doing my job in a vastly different manner. So my mission is to meet and chat up at least four people outside of my current local base.
Taarradhin 