Despite my best efforts to catch the flu, it’s looking like Monday morning will bring with it my first working week of 2009 (booooo!). It’s set to be a busy start of the year, with quite a lot of projects and work carrying over from December. As well as the big Enterprise Architecture project I’ve been working on there are a host of smaller things that will be taking up my time.
I’ll be following up with Apple and O2 on the iPhone Exchange ActiveSync issues we’ve been seeing. Hopefully now we have some repeatable scenarios we can provide to Apple we’ll be able to help fix the issues.
There’s some ongoing work to streamline our supply chain for desktop (and laptop) computers. This has been hanging around for months and although nothing is actually ‘broken’ there’s a general feeling that we can do even better. We should be able to work with our suppliers to cut some slack from the supply process and with any luck cut some costs at the same time. In truth this isn’t strictly my job anymore, but as it’s what I used to look after I’m giving the guys a helping hand. Plus it should put us in really good stead for the Desktop/Windows 7 work we have pencilled in over the next year.
By far the most varied – and time consuming – chunk of work is the ongoing programme of work my team has put together for the remainder of the 2008 FY and 2009. Ensuring the these projects make a successful transition from our drawing board into actual working projects is incredibly important. Our project guys are all pretty good, but there’s a lot of projects to keep track of. One thing we need to do better is to both better publicise – and ‘market’ - the roadmap of work coming up (and it’s implications/benefits) and also ensure the we have a clearer view of the status of the programme and it’s component projects. Again nothing is broken as such, but I’m a stickler for the details and making things better! :) Fortunately some of this ties in nicely with the Enterprise Architecture so I should be able to bring it all together into something more consistent.
Hopefully I’ll be able to get my hands dirty in a few more technical projects this year as well. Whilst I enjoy the higher level architecture work, I do miss the more immediate satisfaction of getting a script to run or seeing your freshly installed system work for the first time. I won’t get too much time for this, but if I pick the right projects I’ll be able to get stuck in. We’re doing some good work on the development side with Agile working, it’d be great to try and translate some of this into the more infrastructure related projects that are my background.
So a busy January awaits… It’s good fun work, but I’m still not looking forward to the alarm clock going off at 6am on Monday!
