Taarradhin

One Thing I’ve Learned

This week I kicked off my SharePoint 2013 Upgrade goal by attending a video conference hosted by Microsoft. The conference itself was geared more toward understanding the enterprise social gains of making the move. We’re not a very enterprise social company, culturally we’re split across divisions with the chasms in between ranging from step width to canyon width, as a whole but we do at site levels certainly leverage our instant messaging systems as well as Yammer. With all of that in mind, the enterprise social stuff sounds fabulous but won’t hit my to-do list. What I did learn is that our current intranet will not go smoothly across to 2013; we’ll have an interim upgrade (2007-2010), will have to undo/redo/lose some customizations, and will likely end up rewriting most of our custom applications. However…

Three Things I’m Grateful For

I am grateful for the depth and breadth of free online resources that Microsoft provides. Post conference I was able to view demos and trainings, download architecture docs, checklists and planning guides. They make it super easy to prepare.

I had a fairly rough week which started a long ponder into how as leaders we should manage our own emotions and more importantly as employees how to best deal with a leader that loses their cool. A couple of years ago I was given a copy of Being the Boss by Linda Hill, which points out that formal authority in no way leads to motivating employees, probably the most important lesson we all should learn along the way. It’s well worth the read and I feel is a must read for every new manager.

I’m also grateful for the support and empathy of my peer group here at work. We do not all get along, connect on all levels or even spend that much time together but when stuff starts flying I know I can count on them to lend an ear, shoulder or a laugh when I need it.

Five Things I Accomplished

Getting this thing back on track! I love writing, sharing stories and experiences and even just capturing those special moments but I don’t often make the time for it that I should. Last month I realized that I really needed to refocus some energy back to here because it makes me happy.

Along those lines, I have a boatload of things I want to get accomplished this year around my own development that have also fallen off the priority list. A good friend of mine pointed out that she was surprised I didn’t have a project plan for those things and just like that I now have a workable project plan for accomplishing those personal/professional goals for the rest of the year.

I spent a bunch of time this week coding, not something that I normally do but part of Agile is facing your technical debt and I’ve created a bit of that in my time. This week I cleaned up a bunch of code I wrote long ago that determines the FRE (full run equivalency) calculations for advertising that runs in only a portion of the products we deliver, I also adjust code in a few reports to make sure some business changes were reflected properly. And yes I’m looking forward to not coding next week.