I am back at Royal Greenwich full time after having my op and feeling much better for it. It was a rough few weeks and coming back to work was very needed as the boredom frustration had really started setting in.
It’s been a bit of a whirlwind returning. There was the initial overwhelming feeling of ‘oh gosh, how will I ever catch up!’ but this quickly got under control by simply doing some stuff.
Backup has had a great development in that our backup schedule and retention has been approved by the information experts at the Council meaning we are all done scoping for the on-premise side of the solution. WooHoo! We now focus on the O365 side of things.
I’ll be working with Jamie and Elliot on this. We’ve got our first brain dump later this week but I suspect our O365 estate may need tweaking and changing to make a modern backup solution truly beneficial. Time will tell.
I’ve been added to the Cloud Migration project in earnest since I returned too. I’ve been focussing on getting to know who is on the project, what their role is and where they’re ‘at’ with the work. It’s been a lot. there are a seemingly infinite amount of moving parts in the project and trying to make sense of them and how they influence all the other ones has been making my brain melt. I am getting there though with stalwart support from Dave Kirk and our partners team.
I’m trying to think in terms of Now, Next and Later for now. If I try and model in any more complex ways at the moment, I find it too overwhelming and I get lost in the detail. Whilst I’m getting up to speed, simplicity is my friend and Now, Next, Later is tried and tested.
The biggest thing in ‘Now’ is the pilot migration. We want to move an application/server into the cloud to learn and adapt before we start migrating in greater volume. We had thought that our pensions system may be a good candidate for this but, after a very useful and honest conversation with the application owner, it was clear that the business reasons against were far more compelling then the technical reasons for. That means we’re back to the drawing board, ish, on the hunt for suitable applications. We’ve got a shortlist of 4 or 5 that we’ve built internally (thanks Dave for all your effort on this) and now we’re collaborating on with our partners to make sure we haven’t missed anything. Providing all is well, we’ll be going out to talk to the relevant application owners for these ASAP so we have the full business context as well as the technical one and we can make in informed decision on which will be the pilot candidate we take forward to migration. Watch this space!
Skirting the borders of Now and Next is the ‘ecosystem’ we will be migrating into. This is more than just the architecture and networking. We need to consider and plan the ‘sundry’ service you get in a data centre; vulnerability scanning, software patching services, back up service, logging etc. This is crucial to support applications in the cloud well and definitely need careful thought.
My non project wins have been getting access to approve holidays etc. on the HR system, having a great 4 week review with Beth where I think we really nailed goals going forward, going to a great lunch and learn hosted by Philippa and Beth where they shared learning from Lean Agile Exchange with the team, hearing about the social care system that was built from the ground up in a guest talk by Elle Tweedy and catching up with Sam (from data) and Susan (one of our service designers).
And that’s me since I got back. Busy, busy, busy!
