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.