State of the Unicorn (from Sep to Dec 2015)

The previous state of the union post.

I wanted to do more, of these but have I? This is just a post reminding me of various bits I’ve done these past 6 months.

Digital Strategy

• Unify our custom development endeavors
  • Leading the unification of previous dev work into a team accessible resource
• Staff training in GIT
• Staff training in Gitlab
• Staff training in Gitlab CI
• Researched, Created and maintaining standards for our dev team to work with (simple stuff docs and processes)
• Started our “disaster docs” if someone is hit by a bus / wins the lottery
• Identified need for QA resource
  • Got the QA resource!
• Roadmap
  • Asked for and took Action to start a “Technology Enhanced Learning Operational Roadmap” aimed at engaging team members with future considerations
  • Actioned the Roadmap meetings and discussions
  • Lead the Roadmap meetings (ongoing)

Human Resourcing

• Completed the Line Manager Hiring training
• Completed the Line Manager Ethics and Diversity training
• Sat on the interview panel for 3 WMG roles
• Spoke my mind clearly to Head of interview panel
• Invited to help write job specs for 2 roles
• Invited to help create job interview tasks

Representation of WMG

• Invited to the MyDay CollabCo User group to represent WMG & UoW

Agile & Project Management

• Improved on the Agile workflow I introduced to work better inside the University environment
• Project problems solver – became the goto person for digital projects going “haywire” and turning them into achieving projects
• Had our first Agile vs. Culture issue, got knocked, learnt and then spoke with the relevant people to be less knocked next time
• Ran “Introducing Agile” for more staff again
• Agile coached 2 Product Owners on their projects and any fails / issues they were experiencing
• Ran multiple, “introducing Agile courses”

Actual Production

• Lobbied and received Continuos Integration access from Central IT
• Setup Gitlab CI to build, test and deploy on master push
• Changed development method to BDD (Behaviour Driven Development) with Behat
• Created local, feature, pre-production and production flow
• Built a Transaction and BDD testing process
• Built re-usable modules for
  • Continuous Deployment
  • Google Analytics
  • Environment Banner to identify app servers
  • Basic User Role ACL control
  • HTML Helper templating
  • HTML / CSS workflow
  • Model Repository Modules
  • Pulling live DB to local DB for testing
  • Clearing DB automatically
• Improved my Laravel 5 understanding

Projects

• Maintenance on Biddr (my custom reverse bidding web app)
• Launch and Maintenance of critical Supervisor & Project matching tool for 1000 users
• Parachuted in to sort 3 broken projects
  • Applied Trello Story Points
  • Started the team talking again (humour and leadership)
  • Created strategy to bring the external developer more “internal”
    • Skype
    • Daily scrums
    • Internal account from IT
    • VPN access
    • Added to our Gitlab central repo
  • Applied Weekly sprints
• PM Elective Selector
• PM MyTime
• PM Visits
• Maintenance on Gradr

Next…

I’m moving towards more Project Management, so training in that and more experience.

Maybe become a line manager

Baby!