I have a monthly appointment to set aside time to write these blog posts. I am hoping to be able to use it but sometimes I am just too busy. I just went through and removed all our clients names in the previous blog posts to prevent any issue with corporate. I hope I'm not violating any corporate policies by blogging here. I'm innocent due to ignorance if anyone is thinking about prosecuting me.
So it's been almost four months since I began my new position and there haven't been that many changes except that I go to many more meetings. Almost every meeting that Chad goes to, I will also go to. I am continuing to go to Business Review twice weekly to keep the app's SDLC moving. I have also started going to the twice monthly Managers' Meetings which have been eye-opening in the level of frustration between the attendees. The Performance Issues meeting that met weekly was mercifully cancelled a few weeks ago and rolled into the weekly Priority Projects meeting.
Since the last time I blogged, Kris Young started at Broadridge and Sabitha spent six weeks visiting. Both are great co-workers but I spent lots of extra time helping mentor them. I am also in the process of moving which involved preparing my house to sell and finding a new home to buy. This has all contributed to me not spending as much time as I would like thinking about the best way to utilize my time in my new role.
Two other big projects at work are finally wrapping up. First, the Retirement Plan project that Kris and I have been working on will be going out to production with the build tonight. (It's unfortunate that there will be no data in production to use all of our new code.) Also, the security assessment project is nearing its end. Our Cross Site Forgery issue was thankfully remediated earlier this week leaving only the Input Validation and Output Encoding. Both were submitted to BISG for what will hopefully be our final retest.
I am hoping to be able to wrap up a moderately sized enhancement to the Invoice Reports. After that, I hope to work with the API project, but I am afraid that I will head up a project to reduce the number of CAST findings. While finding more time to focus on my leadership role would be helpful, I am worried that I will continue to be booked. The sad news of Pat's departure last week makes the latter seem more likely.
I really wish there was someone who could mentor me and help me grow into a leader...
Friday, June 24, 2016
Friday, February 26, 2016
The Calm Before The Storm
Strangely, I currently have nothing assigned to me for this week. It feels like the calm before the storm as everyone has been clamoring about signing a new client for the past month or so. As soon as we sign them, I think everyone around here is going to be super busy.
I started writing this in March 2015 and never finished. After almost an entire year, I am trying to get back into blogging again. It makes a lot of sense with my new promotion so that I can track my progress and see what happens.
I started writing this in March 2015 and never finished. After almost an entire year, I am trying to get back into blogging again. It makes a lot of sense with my new promotion so that I can track my progress and see what happens.
Promotion and leadership thoughts
After some scrambling around, I will be promoted to Lead Programmer Analyst effective Monday, February 29. (On a side thought, should I only celebrate this anniversary on Leap Years?) I am hoping that this new role leads to additional leadership responsibilities. I feel like I am ready to be a leader here at Investigo and am just hoping for a chance to see what I can do in that position.
I am going to list a few thoughts here to document my mindset at this point in time. It will be really interesting to see how accurate my assessment will be.
Being empowered to actually take on a bigger leadership role removes the biggest obstacle. Now I need to focus on the other obstacles. (I should probably talk to others about what obstacles are in the way of allowing me to grow into a leader.) Right now, I view my biggest obstacles as perception ("Joe is the guy on the app team who handles reports and SAML stuff.") and a lack of information on what everyone else is working on and what they are planning on for the future.
The first thing I think I should take on is managing the application build. This would involve knowing all the ins and outs of all the tasks in the builds so that I can easily answer questions from developers (especially Hyderabad), QA, and Product Management (or at least know where to go to find the answers to questions). I think that staying on top of all the the tasks in the current build as well as all the tasks in Fast Track will make everything flow better. I think I should also be able to participate in making sure that functional specifications are better suited for developers and that technical specs are created (when necessary).
I am not sure how I will be involved with other projects. I feel that I should be a key point of contact on integration projects for clients or third party partners. I'm not sure where I fit with the other projects such as the API. I think one key thing for me to do would be to get some of the day to day tasks off Chad's plate so that he can focus on the development of roadmap-like tasks where he can really shine.
There are a few items which need attention that I think I could help spearhead and make some headway. First, we need to make getting data to developers and QA a priority. One of our bigger clientshas specifically given us data early for developers to work with, and no one has made it a priority. The other item that needs attention is the build process and the SDLC. It seems like addressing these issues is really low-hanging fruit that could easily improve the efficiency and more importantly the morale around the office.
I would like to be involved with the manager meetings so I can learn more about what is going on around here. I'm not sure if that will be within the scope of my new role, but I feel like this would be the fastest way to grow into a leader. I am pretty confident that this is the way that my career in supposed to grow. I hope I can take this opportunity and run with it.
I am going to list a few thoughts here to document my mindset at this point in time. It will be really interesting to see how accurate my assessment will be.
Being empowered to actually take on a bigger leadership role removes the biggest obstacle. Now I need to focus on the other obstacles. (I should probably talk to others about what obstacles are in the way of allowing me to grow into a leader.) Right now, I view my biggest obstacles as perception ("Joe is the guy on the app team who handles reports and SAML stuff.") and a lack of information on what everyone else is working on and what they are planning on for the future.
The first thing I think I should take on is managing the application build. This would involve knowing all the ins and outs of all the tasks in the builds so that I can easily answer questions from developers (especially Hyderabad), QA, and Product Management (or at least know where to go to find the answers to questions). I think that staying on top of all the the tasks in the current build as well as all the tasks in Fast Track will make everything flow better. I think I should also be able to participate in making sure that functional specifications are better suited for developers and that technical specs are created (when necessary).
I am not sure how I will be involved with other projects. I feel that I should be a key point of contact on integration projects for clients or third party partners. I'm not sure where I fit with the other projects such as the API. I think one key thing for me to do would be to get some of the day to day tasks off Chad's plate so that he can focus on the development of roadmap-like tasks where he can really shine.
There are a few items which need attention that I think I could help spearhead and make some headway. First, we need to make getting data to developers and QA a priority. One of our bigger clientshas specifically given us data early for developers to work with, and no one has made it a priority. The other item that needs attention is the build process and the SDLC. It seems like addressing these issues is really low-hanging fruit that could easily improve the efficiency and more importantly the morale around the office.
I would like to be involved with the manager meetings so I can learn more about what is going on around here. I'm not sure if that will be within the scope of my new role, but I feel like this would be the fastest way to grow into a leader. I am pretty confident that this is the way that my career in supposed to grow. I hope I can take this opportunity and run with it.
Friday, November 14, 2014
After a two week hiatus, I am back with more thoughts on the LTC changes to the Insurance Reports. I have the initial development completed and committed to our repository, but with little data to test it on, there are some obvious errors when running the reports. It should be fairly easy to go through the report with Erik and see what he wants to change. Hopefully, we can get the majority of the changes into UAT for the testers early next week.
There was a minor issue with my estimate of the CDR. I missed that they wanted to change some of the table columns depending on the account types. (Annuities, Disability, and LTC all have different fields to show on the CDR.) It was interesting that the client also requested a change to the disclaimers on their Rider Detail section on Tuesday (which I was able to accommodate). However, overall, I am pleased with my estimate. As long as the client doesn't request any other major changes, I think we will keep the reported issues on their side under 30 which is a win for everyone.
I also started working on showing the Validation Messages in the report hub for Book of Business. This will be a little bit of a trickier ticket. I'm going to need to append to an existing dataset and build it up and then I think it will be fairly easy. If all goes well, I will be done with that on Monday or Tuesday. I have a feeling that it will get moved to the next build since it will be late and it involves a change to the report hub.
Finally, we began discussing a change to the hierarchy tree control which I think will be a good thing for everyone. I am looking forward to putting in the work there to make sure that the tree works better than ever but doesn't lose all the functionality that currently exists. Next week, I should have time to start looking at this.
There was a minor issue with my estimate of the CDR. I missed that they wanted to change some of the table columns depending on the account types. (Annuities, Disability, and LTC all have different fields to show on the CDR.) It was interesting that the client also requested a change to the disclaimers on their Rider Detail section on Tuesday (which I was able to accommodate). However, overall, I am pleased with my estimate. As long as the client doesn't request any other major changes, I think we will keep the reported issues on their side under 30 which is a win for everyone.
I also started working on showing the Validation Messages in the report hub for Book of Business. This will be a little bit of a trickier ticket. I'm going to need to append to an existing dataset and build it up and then I think it will be fairly easy. If all goes well, I will be done with that on Monday or Tuesday. I have a feeling that it will get moved to the next build since it will be late and it involves a change to the report hub.
Finally, we began discussing a change to the hierarchy tree control which I think will be a good thing for everyone. I am looking forward to putting in the work there to make sure that the tree works better than ever but doesn't lose all the functionality that currently exists. Next week, I should have time to start looking at this.
Friday, October 31, 2014
Hello World!
As a programmer, the title of this first blog post is very appropriate. I've never blogged before so I'm just letting the words flow and we'll see what comes out. I really want to focus on self-improvement here. This is sort of a dual purpose purpose blog: I am doing this as an Action Plan for my recently completed Leadership course from my Accelerated MBA program, and I am also doing this as a performance objective for my current work.
I just completed my first three classes (out of eleven) in my MBA program at IPFW. I did really well in those courses and found that Management Science and Operational Research could be a possibility for a career change if the management track doesn't work out. I really enjoyed learning from Dr. Gurgur, and I am hoping to pursue this work further with her in a potential side project after I complete my MBA program.
At work, I have been very focused on two large projects since the beginning of September. First is the insurance report changes for Disability Income which went out with the September build. Since then, I have been focused on output encoding which I completed this week, but I'm not sure when that will make it to production. The rest of the week, I've been tying up a few loose ends including cleaning up my inbox and updating the new VM for the internet-facing development server.
Next week, I need to complete the LTC changes for the insurance reports. I am hoping that I can avoid some of the issues that we had with the DI changes by paying attention to the spec. Right now, I have 40+ hours scheduled for the QA period to clean up any issues that the client finds with the reports. My goal is to get the actual work associated with these closer to 20 hours by putting in the time next week. Some of this is out of my control because it is unknown what the client will find and add to the reports, but I can do a little better at keeping to the spec. It also helps that I understand the spec better.
I am really trying to develop my leadership abilities. I need to be conscious of my nonverbal actions. I am currently enjoying working with the Business Review team and working with agile meetings to implement our fast track builds. I am hoping that we at Investigo can expand in the next few years which could possibly open up a leadership position for me.
I just completed my first three classes (out of eleven) in my MBA program at IPFW. I did really well in those courses and found that Management Science and Operational Research could be a possibility for a career change if the management track doesn't work out. I really enjoyed learning from Dr. Gurgur, and I am hoping to pursue this work further with her in a potential side project after I complete my MBA program.
At work, I have been very focused on two large projects since the beginning of September. First is the insurance report changes for Disability Income which went out with the September build. Since then, I have been focused on output encoding which I completed this week, but I'm not sure when that will make it to production. The rest of the week, I've been tying up a few loose ends including cleaning up my inbox and updating the new VM for the internet-facing development server.
Next week, I need to complete the LTC changes for the insurance reports. I am hoping that I can avoid some of the issues that we had with the DI changes by paying attention to the spec. Right now, I have 40+ hours scheduled for the QA period to clean up any issues that the client finds with the reports. My goal is to get the actual work associated with these closer to 20 hours by putting in the time next week. Some of this is out of my control because it is unknown what the client will find and add to the reports, but I can do a little better at keeping to the spec. It also helps that I understand the spec better.
I am really trying to develop my leadership abilities. I need to be conscious of my nonverbal actions. I am currently enjoying working with the Business Review team and working with agile meetings to implement our fast track builds. I am hoping that we at Investigo can expand in the next few years which could possibly open up a leadership position for me.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)