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...