Taarradhin

Projects

Housekeeping

Every year we take a look at all of our data warehouses reviewing not just the age of the data but also things that may have changed; business logic that may no longer be valid, old tables and stored procedures, and most importantly taking a look at performance to make sure that everything is running as efficiently and smoothly as they can.  Last year we jumped quickly into new projects only did a cursory review, not a fully focused project as I would prefer.  So this year I’ve assigned everyone at least two servers to document, purge and/or archive data, tune processes, and jobs to reschedule and streamline. We also have a few servers that we’ll likely decommission either retiring applications and cubes or migrating them to new servers. This will cover our entire January iteration.

Management

New Book

My team has picked a new book called Manage Your Day-To-Day; this is not a typical getting things done, get better organized type of book. It’s more about finding balance, including time for creative pursuits. It promises to help you better manage your energy and ideas as well as help focus.  It wasn’t necessarily the book that I would’ve chosen, but now that I have my copy and I’ve had some time to look at it, I’m looking forward to it. Even though it’ll be far less focused than what we’ve done so far.  I’ll write a separate post on preparing this this book for a book club format.

Agile Changes

Recently I was able to send a member to a certified scrum master training and he’s come back with some ideas that he would like to present to the team. We’re going to meet prior to our normal iteration planning meeting to discuss his ideas and decide what we’ll implement over the course of the year. I also have some planning level ideas to discuss to help us better support the team and our projects and products.

As an extension of on the agile changes that we will plan for 2015 I also want take a look at how we can expose our agile process at an upper management level. We have a fairly large knowledge gap when it comes to understanding what agile is, what we do and why. And I’d also like to find ways to better engage at that level everything from terminology and process as well as product status. A wide variety of audiences, I feel can assist with finding ways to improve our project planning process and hopefully eliminate some of the issues that we had last year.

Personal

PMP

I have also been lacking considerably with getting my PMP test done and out of the way, which means I am now in a crunch time to get it scheduled by the end of March. I’ll be focusing considerable amount of time to reading, studying, quizzing and testing myself over the next of 12 weeks.