Taarradhin

Projects

We recently took over support for two existing .Net applications, both of which have a significant amount of technical debt, while we’ve been able to fix things it’s getting to the point where we really need to decide if we’re going to push for a rewrite or continue on this path of patching. I’m hoping if we can get through the initial backlog that’ll buy us some goodwill and trust to really start over but I’m also mindful that it’s an application that may not be in use for more than a few more years as our Corporation continues to consolidate to enterprise level applications.

In the last six years we’ve slowly pushed through converting and retiring more than 800 Lotus Notes Databases/Applications, the final five were finished as of July 1^st and we’ve begun the process of archiving important data and removing user access to prepare for a complete shutdown on July 31^st. I had initially scoped this project as a five year, six developer, gauntlet – we never were able to get more than three resources dedicated at any time and went many iterations without have a single related story in the queue but we did it, finally.

Management

After a four month hiatus to focus on getting my PMP, I’m back to planning out my two primary goals for this year (with less than half the year left LOL); creative abrasion, agility, resolution training and reporting.

For the training, which I outlined in this post from January, I’ll be revamping an old training guide I have for abrasion and getting the foundation created for the other two. I’m targeting August to start testing it out and maybe even do the first training.

Where reporting is concerned, again which I outlined in this post in (argh!!) January, my primary motivation is ensuring that we’re first and foremost using the right measurements and looking at how we could potentially expand that out to help us plan future iterations better. Lately we’ve had some unexpected variances in our normally stable velocity and a spike in unplanned work from the support we’ve taken on, I’d really like to be able to have a longer term view backwards and a backlog with more information gathered to help with predictions. And charts…more charts!

Personal

I recently used Slack in my non-profit position and am intrigued on how to expand it out to better manage and effectively support a distributed team; the goal being to move further from dependence on Google Docs for schedules, tasks lists and meeting support. This month I’m going to focus on integrating Trello with Slack to automate task creation as well as pulling together a list of other tools that might be helpful.

We recently went through a major change in management at the corporate level at my company and with passing my PMP exam I feel it’s time to get all of my career related sites updated, new resumes written and work on my own web sites to ensure that they’re all up to date and coordinated. I predict that there will be lots of procrastination on this, that I will likely get the sites updated and will make minimal progress on anything else. Why are bios so difficult?!