Taarradhin

I feel like September was a giant blur of meetings, reacting to issues, more meetings and watching my own deadlines blow past me. That leaves me with an October goal list that looks very familiar.

Leadership

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. We have our first official kick-off meeting this month where we’ll finalize our responsibilities and agree to a rollout schedule. I’m still expecting this to take the remainder of the year to set up.

Management

Agile

I approached our customer groups last month to get the Product Manager role formalized and was met with a bit of resistance regarding the timing and change tolerance level with everything else going on in the company. Lesson learned – while we are at the right stage our customers are not quite there yet. This month I’ll be taking a step back and begin training with the one department who  is open to rolling this out now and working with the rest to get a schedule going that will coincide better with their availability.

Projects

We’re stuck with a rather large backlog of projects in user testing, most in a single department, to get cleared out in the next month. My highest priority this month will be to get these moving again as quickly as possible; we’re currently sitting with a warehouse and three applications but will be adding another warehouse and two more applications within another month so I’m a bit concerned.