Back to the blogging

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...

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.

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.