October 2014 – Goals
Projects
This month we’re wrapping up a two new data warehouses, since both are with new user groups we’ll be doing a ton of training and are expecting quite a bit of enhancements as they start digging through their data.
We’re also ramping down our Lotus Notes to SharePoint conversion; more than 800 separate databases have been retired or migrated over the last five years, we’re now down to just four left to go, two in user testing, one going to a third party application and the last in the final stages of migration. I’ll be glad to call this project done.
Leadership
This month I’ll be traveling to Indiana to train some project managers on Agile and the roles and responsibilities of product owners. It’s been about two years since the last time I did a similar training, I’ve been lucky to have only added new product owners and not lost any, a revamp of my training materials is probably in order.
Management
Now that we’re solidly in the fourth quarter of the year, my managerial focus is moving towards wrapping up our goals and development plans for 2014, and beginning the planning for 2015. This year, with a restructure pending, I also feel the need to do some housekeeping where our servers are concerned, freshen up our documentation and do a deeper dig into our infrastructure needs.
Personal
Now that my PMI-ACP certification is done, I’m focusing on obtaining my PMP certification by the end of the year. The PMP exam is a bit tougher than the Agile certifications for a couple of reasons; the breadth of the exam or the topics that are covered are fairly extensive, some of the topics are things that I don’t do on a daily basis and aren’t as fresh, and while it wasn’t difficult for me to take project management terms and translate them to agile terms going in the reverse direction seems to be a bit tougher on my brain.
Taarradhin 