An update on what I have been doing

I have finally left a company that I had the pleasure of work at for more than three years.  As a contractor, that is a long time.  It turned out to be 43 months in all, which I really enjoyed. 

I left at the end of May and moved straight into to a new contract for a large supermarket chain in England.   The work is not what I expected.  I am tasked with leading a small team to upgrade machines from Lotus Notes v7 to v8.5.1.  This was sold to me as a development team leader role, but is in fact a desktop migration project and not a coding project.

…. hence the lack of technical blog posts recently.

I am making the most of this opportunity to improve my Team Leading and PM skills,  I have even picked up my MS Access skills since being here.  I do not have access to the developer client for Lotus Notes (first time since 1998) and therefore I had to improvise.  The previous team leader had set up a large spreadsheet which was being maintained by many people and was struggling from size and usage, so I suggested we simply import this into a multi-user access database.

It is strange to lead a team and a project in an area where my skill set only touches part of the project.  I do not have in-depth details of how to install software on machines using SMS/SCCM and how firewalls setting must be configured, login scripts written in vb and many other intricate details… but I do know Notes and how it works and is configured. 

I can contribute to the technical discussions when discussing details around roaming and Single Sign-on, location documents and ID Vault.  Thankfully, I have a Technical Lead in the team and another guy that seems to have a wealth of knowledge of notes, machines, vb and a is a general all-rounder.  It is strange, but enjoyable, to be hands off and trust these guys to make the technical decisions, as I am the one that used to be in that position for development projects.

I have decided that I am liking the Team Leader / PM type of role and have committed myself to self-learning of Prince2.  I am planning to have passed my foundation by the end of this month and plan to take the Practioner (if I can) before my holiday in August.  More of that in a future post, I am sure.