Taarradhin

More Agile Training

This month I am traveling to Rochester to facilitate an Agile boot camp for one of my company’s digital development and design teams. I’m excited to do some training, meet with a new team and learn about their challenges. I really do enjoy showing folks how Agile can help them overcome problems in process and make life so much easier, and I do also enjoy seeing my own Agile implementation through a new set of eyes.

Performance Management

It is time for our annual common review, in the ten or so years that I’ve been writing and administering reviews I’ve come to find that I prefer to strike a balance between providing my perspective on an individual’s work and habits and providing development and project goals for them to focus on for the next year.  I often feel like I don’t provide enough regular feedback, though we have monthly iteration post mortem meetings, and I spend time a good amount of time with everyone on my team but I don’t feel like it’s often very focused-on-their-needs time and I need to come up with some strategies to try and address that.

SharePoint Issues

Our SharePoint environment was designed and set up about four years ago now and in that time we’ve gone from one heavily used site to a couple hundred in regular use and three additional site collections. We’ve quadrupled our daily site stats and I have no idea how much space we’ve added.  Needless to say this is a good time to take stock in how we are configured, sort out what changes we need to make to support our current usage.  On top of all of that we’ve also recently implemented Office 365 which seems to have caused some issues with the communication between IE and the default Office installation.  Hopefully addressing both of these will put us in a better spot to upgrade later this year.

PMP Certification

Now that my PMI-ACP certification is out of the way, I’m refocusing my personal goal to achieving my PMP certification and the next couple of months.  July, I think, will be mostly spent figuring out a decent study schedule, looking for a testing tools and basically anything helpful.  I’ve really just started to wrap my head around the amount of time and effort it will take to get this certification completed.