Well, this has been a really odd work year. The first part of this year wasn’t massively productive from a value of delivery point of view, although good from a personnel management stand point, with new lessons on how to deal with high stress and how to minimise impact to your team caused by changes in other areas, but from a pure enjoyment point of view not one of the greatest, and I’ve been always one of the very, lucky people who have always enjoyed their work. Thankfully its an old lesson, to always value the joy in your work first so I decided that, going back to full time consulting, rather than a permanent role was where the fun was, I DID however, make a huge ton of good friends, and as a number of them left after me the network of good people I now know has grown.
The latter half of this year has been far more enjoyable. It’s been challenging, but fun. It has been filled with enthusiastic techs rather than political battles. It has been totally delivery orientated. It’s just been everything I’ve always loved In a job, and people that know me have noted that I am back to my old bounce, The new set of clients I have been working with have also squared the circle for me in improving my CV.
The next part is I have for my day to day work moved even further into the management role. Away from technical and that is simply down to discovering that it was the place I could do the most good. As a tech, there is a limit to what I can fix, but as a manager that represents the interest of delivery and technical people and tries to actually help them reach their goals, that’s a big thing and the sheer volume of good, if you can call it that, that such a view point can provide in a corporate environment is huge. It’s been very, very rewarding. And I’m going to be a little bit egotistical and say It’s actually made a few people’s lives and work better, and who could ask for more.
But if I look at the three basic areas that I normally review:
Management: I am still treating this as a growth thing, and something that I have noted with quite a few of my management colleagues at various different clients over the years. Managers do not treat their personal growth in the same way as techs and business people treat theirs. They think in terms of their growth, rising through an organisation, getting more powerful, but not in terms of their skill set, and I’m finding that that is a really wonderful thing to try for, can you be a better manager, not simply a more powerful manager, so that is where I’m going at the moment. its my main focus which means I’m not looking at getting any formal certifications as you would if this was a business or a technical position.
The old management certifications aren’t worth what they used to be and Agile while it is nearly the only game in town nowadays. It is being treated more as a religion than a faith. I’ll expand on this more on a separate blog post. To me Agile has been for the last 20 odd years merely the simplest way of getting a lot of deliveries done while keeping track of them. Now as always these things have grown into far more of a religion. There are people with silly titles. There’s people who do silly ceremonies that don’t actually bring you closer to your delivery and just chew up time and frustrate your team. I found that going a little bit old school on this and trying to just focus on things that help deliver is making my management style work much better. I’m getting good feedback from both the people I work with and the people I work for. one of this years challenges will be to try and better explain it as a process.
Technical: As always, I might do management as a role but what I am is a Tech, and I still fiddle with it constantly. The two technical areas I’m mainly working on both last year and the coming year is making sure that my Azure is as good as my AWS. and ensuring that I keep up to date on Salesforce. And while you might be expecting me to do AI, I am not learning it in the normal way. The large language model side. Everyone’s getting excited about that, but I like to dig under the covers, and particularly how vector databases are working and growing and how they work in terms of security are my big things that I have both been learning and am continuing to learn. thank fully I have a smaller client that has had me working on a challenging little problem on this very subject, and this is hitting all my geek buttons.
Business: My business knowledge is growing at the same pace as management. Because my new set of clients, even though they’re in the same field as my old ones, they are dealing with wildly different things. Unfortunately, I haven’t made as much progress as I wanted with my CII certification. That is still on my hard to do list and it’s getting more and more important this year.