Goals – January 2016
Well based on my ability to post in the last six months, writing should probably be at the top of my list for goals this January. I’ve been a little consumed with day to day work, volunteer work and life lately but here I am again and I’ll do my best to catch up and keep going.
Projects
After spending a good portion of the last six years converting our Notes databases and applications to SharePoint 2007, this year we’re going to reverse a handful of those applications to .NET in order to fully migrate our current MOSS on premise environment to the cloud based 2013 version. In the long term I believe that this is the right choice, naturally I wish we’d known this was going to happen (or been consulted about it) so we could skip the extra work of converting twice but this is more in line with what my developers prefer to work.
For more than ten years we’ve owned a large collection of Access databases that one of our customer groups uses to manage their daily operations. We’ve been slowly moving the databases to SQL back ends but have yet to flip the switch and start working on the front ends. This month will mark the back end conversion and some research into what our options are for the front ends, they’re primarily data entry with a handful of reports, I’m hoping at least to move them to something web based.
The system we were given last year to fix and support has recently lost it’s primary (and power) user, this has exposed some additional issues that need to be addressed. I think it’s a good opportunity to sit with the new users, get their input on improvements and fixes and see what we can take care of in the next couple of months.
Management
I’m back AGAIN to planning out my two primary goals for that I had planned for 2015; creative abrasion, agility, resolution training and reporting.
I made significant strides on the reporting side in the last six months, finally coming to an iteration close report that combines iteration specific details with a longer term view of our progress. It is still a work in progress, being able to predict success is still complicated, and I’m sure I’ll continue to adjust and expand how we’re communicating status going forward.
On that note I need to do some clean up and streamlining of our team sites; making them more user friendly, adding in some additional tools and sorting out how best to integrate Slack into the mix. While we use it effectively for communication, I need it to add more to the team to get it to sink in.
For the training, which I outlined in this post from last January, I’ll be revamping an old training guide I have for abrasion and getting the foundation created for the other two. I’ve finally gotten through the first pass at the abrasion training, I’ll be wrapping that up and conducting it in February.
We also have a new book for our monthly book club – Mindset – I need to spend some time outlining the book and setting up the pacing this month so we can launch it.
Personal
I have made zero progress on my bios, profiles or personal sites in the last six months. I have done some work on it but it really needs to get wrapped up this month so I can stop spinning cycles on the procrastination wheel.
January will kick off a new volunteer project, I need to quickly sort out what tools we’ll be using, spin up a project plan, get the meetings in order and scheduled. That I’m shooting to have done in the upcoming week.
Taarradhin 