About a month ago, I was still finding myself very tired and my "up" and "down" moods seemed to continue to be pretty intense. I was finding it very hard to get out of bed each day. We have a serious shortage of doctors here in Nova Scotia. Our family physician left months ago and, while there is no replacement yet, if we want to see a doctor then we need to go to an after hours clinic where typically we need to wait 2-3 hours to talk to a stranger. After weeks of thinking about doing so, I decided I would do this, as then I could get routine blood tests done and then take that info to a local Naturopathic Doctor.
On the evening of Friday, April 27th, when suddenly I found myself with some "free" time because my son no longer needed me to take him to school like I anticipated, I decided to go to that walk-in clinic. Not sure about you, but I'm not good with new people, and so I found it hard to explain my situation to the stranger in front of me, but I managed to walk away with a form to get blood tests done on Monday morning.
The next Friday, I went back to that clinic to hear the results and was relieved to have the same doctor there. You cannot always count on that at the walk-in clinic - usually it's someone different every time. The doctor told me... "You have elevated liver enzymes. Do you drink?" Of course, I don't drink at all, so that explanation was ludicrous. He wrote up another lab request form, and told me I need to go again for a repeat test of my GGT levels in a month to see if this changes. I asked him what causes that and he seemed to brush me off. I asked him if it could simply be temporary from stress and he said, yeah, that could be it. He said my cortisol results were not in yet, so I should check back in a week about the result of that test. He didn't take the time to explain further. Instead, I felt very rushed out the door. Sure felt the doctor shortage on that evening!
Well, what does a computer geek do when she goes to a doctor and is left with questions about a blood test? She goes to our friend "Google", right? You're all cringing now, aren't you?
I looked up "elevated liver enzymes" and here's what I got:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/symptoms/elevated-liver-enzymes/basics/causes/sym-20050830
I didn't sleep very well in the past few weeks. I was a bit unnecessarily freaked out ;-)
Now, after a few weeks of waiting, that last test result finally came in, and so this Saturday I found myself in that clinic again, with another 2 hour wait to see another doctor I had never met before. This turned out to be a blessing. This doctor took his time. He explained that my cortisol levels are in the normal range, which honestly surprised me because I feel extremely stressed out most of the time now it seems. I pressed him further on all this...
Turns out my liver enzyme levels are only "mildly" elevated. I was a bit surprised to learn that some employers could actually look at a test like mine and reject me as an employee for fear that I'm an alcoholic. That seems rather harsh and unfair, especially to a non-drinker! Will have to keep that in mind if I choose to apply somewhere else someday...
He went on to explain further though, thank goodness! It's likely I'm in menopause. The "on edge" moods could all be explained by that simple "change" that we women must deal with. I should get used to this, as it is not likely to get better for a while. Far better than what "Google" was telling me - LOL! I'll still go see the ND because I have observed her helping others in this time.
Now, Sunday was interesting. As I said, I've been REALLY tired lately. Still, I find that going to church is good for me, and so I ensured I made it there. During children's time, our minister talked about "ruach"... Did you know that in Hebrew there is a single word that means "breath", "wind" and "spirit"? Google corroborates this, too ;-) https://www.gotquestions.org/meaning-ruach.html He had us do some deep breathing, and there was extra singing, and I walked away from the service reminded of the days when I used to meditate and that did a world of good for me. I was totally energized!
Yesterday was a beautiful, sunny Sunday. After a few years of living with a kitchen ceiling with a hole that I tried to patch, sand and prime a few times and gave up on, I finally found the energy to try again. Last night, I was SO happy crawling into bed realizing that FINALLY I had patched and primed that ceiling. Today, it was beautiful again. I hauled our deck furniture out and then spent a good part of the holiday sitting on our deck reading a book. Thinking about that word "ruach", I can't help but reflect now.. maybe "That's the Spirit!"
I will have to ensure I do that deep breathing and meditate more often!
Hope you enjoyed your weekend, too. If you are in Canada, Happy Victoria Day!
Monday, May 21, 2018
Wednesday, May 16, 2018
How do you Define Office?
Imagine you have noticed... Many of our non-profit organizations are struggling now, a lot. Every day, there seems to be another story of a group fighting to keep its members, pay its bills, and just plain keep it together. This is a huge challenge for our communities, as we have become very dependent on such non-profit organizations in our lives. So much of our world is dependent on volunteers, and yet it seems that more and more people are "too busy" or there is "not enough money" to keep the organizations afloat.
Facing declining membership and significant elimination of funding from government, one Nova Scotia group currently based with an office in Truro has even given me a direct question to answer. "We are interested in redefining office," their leaders have stated. "How would you redefine our office?"
As someone who works full-time, yet doesn't have an office, and hasn't had one now for over a decade, I find this question quite interesting! My first reaction is, "Why do you think you need an office?" You see, I don't have an "office" in the traditional sense, but I do work full-time for a corporation out of my home.
Perhaps we could start with a list of tasks that typically happen inside the office, all of which I assert can be done from home instead?
Facing declining membership and significant elimination of funding from government, one Nova Scotia group currently based with an office in Truro has even given me a direct question to answer. "We are interested in redefining office," their leaders have stated. "How would you redefine our office?"
As someone who works full-time, yet doesn't have an office, and hasn't had one now for over a decade, I find this question quite interesting! My first reaction is, "Why do you think you need an office?" You see, I don't have an "office" in the traditional sense, but I do work full-time for a corporation out of my home.
Perhaps we could start with a list of tasks that typically happen inside the office, all of which I assert can be done from home instead?
- Respond to questions from members, using phone or email
- Pay bills, write receipts, accounting records
- Ordering stuff, receiving stuff, arranging accommodations
- Advertising or otherwise telling people about our organization
- Running computer hardware and software to do business over the internet
- Making sure people are there and have what they need to do the organization's work (mostly volunteers)
- Administrative stuff like photocopying, printing
Maybe ask yourself, is there anything you do in your current office that you could not do from a home instead?
In my own work, the only time this seems to happen is when a face-to-face conference is deemed necessary. For me, this has happened less than once a year, in the last decade! Normally, I do my work using a computer with internet service and Skype. I don't even use a traditional phone for my work anymore, though I know there are "virtual office" services available so you can still have a physical address and phone number if you need it separate from your home.
As for conference space, I think that even if you need to do face-to-face meetings more often, there are alternatives to have a full-time space. As an example, maybe you could arrange to host meetings in a community room in a library or community hall, or perhaps your community has a hub space where different businesses will split costs to have access to a meeting room for occasional use?
Personally, I like the small tax break that I get by working from home. Say you have 10 rooms in your home, and you use a room for business purposes... In Canada, you can claim 10% of your power bill to reduce the income tax you pay. You can also claim what you pay for your home-based in internet service, because you're using that for business purposes. There are other claims that can be made as well, depending on your circumstances. Also, I love that I don't pay for gas in my car every day, here is less wear and tear on my vehicle, and I don't waste an hour or more driving to/from work every day either - more "me" time when work hours are done!
There are a few challenges to working from home as well, of course. It was a bit tough at first, not seeing people all the time "in an office". What I learned to do though was to use tools like Facebook (sparingly) to replace the social trips to the "water cooler". Also, I found I needed to have someone else watching my kids, so I could close myself in a room to work quietly. Those are really small challenges though, when I consider the benefit I've had where I've been there for the brief moments when my kids really seemed to need their Mom.
Does anyone else out there have ideas about how to "redefine office"? I bet I'm forgetting some good points... Please "comment" to add to this, as I'm sure the group asking me for input would like to know!
Saturday, May 12, 2018
Agile - To be or not to be?
Want to work with our team? Check out http://jobs.dxc.technology!
This has been my focus for a weeks now, so thought I'd share a bit about what our team is doing, because it's exciting! In India, I'm looking for three automation engineers, a data scientist, and a machine learning specialist, and there are many other leaders looking to fill other roles as well, with focus on artificial intelligence, catalog services, and more!
In about 2015 though, we started to explore a new way of working... "Agile" methodologies. Some of us (including myself) studied Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) 4.0 in 2016, and became certified as Scaled Agilists. Our team evolved our approach. Our team is now a Scrum team, within a few Scrum of Scrums teams, where I am "Product Owner" (a.k.a. internally as "Engineering Dev Lead") for some "element" solutions intended to support delivery of DXC offerings of services, including but not limited to:
Our team includes experts who focus on "capabilities", such as ensuring a COTS product can be installed and configured with best practices in mind or ensuring a new service can be delivered through integration of various components together, and we also have experts who focus on developing components to differentiate DXC from our competitors.
Once every two weeks, we choose a set of stories from our backlog, plan the changes needed in our components by documenting "sub-tasks" in each story and estimating time we'll require to get each task done, aiming to provide each engineer with a set of sub-tasks that can be completed in the next two week period, and then we set to work and review at end of the two weeks. We repeat this procedure 8-10 times, and that ultimately leads us to deliver a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) release of documents and other artifacts to produce an element release.
Now, instead of taking many, many months, we typically take about about a quarter to produce an updated release of our solution related to our key vendor products of focus.
In some cases, our documents and components are clearly valued for delivery of offerings, while in other cases we have started to identify we should retire them (some have been around for 15 years). We want to focus on developing content with highest value. We want to bring in the future, as we are learning about data science, machine learning, and more! Sometimes, it can even be a bit scary to think about - watch "Black Mirror" on Netflix to get some ideas about why I say that ;-)
Our key challenge now is that this is a LOT of artifacts for such a small team to manage, so right now we are working on DOUBLING our team size! Exciting!
http://assets1.dxc.technology/innovation/downloads/DXC_Creating_the_Agile_Organization.pdf
The paper highlights that Agile is typically great for managing development of custom components, but weaker as a methodology for managing collateral related to COTS components. This describes well what I feel is the latest "aha" moment for our team... the next phase in our history of loyalty?!
We are now working on a shift, where we will focus more on the DXC-developed components in our solution that are intended to differentiate DXC from our competitors. We are considering breaking up our solution to manage a bit differently. We need to continue to use Agile to manage changes in the DXC-developed components that are considered of high value - we want to shift to release changes to those components separately much faster - maybe even every two weeks! We are exploring changing our way of working.. maybe we could use Kanban to manage evergreen of our support for the COTS components? We have lots of options - the challenge is finding time to figure it out while we keep it all going and interview people, too!
Time will tell where we go next.
Are you the right person to help us? If you want to be a part of this and have the right skills, please consider applying! Check out http://jobs.dxc.technology!
This has been my focus for a weeks now, so thought I'd share a bit about what our team is doing, because it's exciting! In India, I'm looking for three automation engineers, a data scientist, and a machine learning specialist, and there are many other leaders looking to fill other roles as well, with focus on artificial intelligence, catalog services, and more!
Who are we?
Prior to 2016, "Waterfall" was the method for managing projects. We would develop and release many artifacts by going through a series of phases that typically took months to go through. We would identify requirements for all the components, then prepare a component design document for each component we wanted to develop, then develop each component, then conduct designer testing for each component, then conduct integration and acceptance testing for all components as a single set, then finally release. A release took us many months!In about 2015 though, we started to explore a new way of working... "Agile" methodologies. Some of us (including myself) studied Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) 4.0 in 2016, and became certified as Scaled Agilists. Our team evolved our approach. Our team is now a Scrum team, within a few Scrum of Scrums teams, where I am "Product Owner" (a.k.a. internally as "Engineering Dev Lead") for some "element" solutions intended to support delivery of DXC offerings of services, including but not limited to:
- Workplace Devices Services (WDS)
- Virtual Desktop and Applications (VDA)
- Mobile Enterprise Services (MES)
Our Current Approach
Now, about once per quarter, the team I lead decides the key scope of focus for our element, typically based on need to support a new version of key vendor products, and then we log a backlog of stories to take care of the various phases necessary to evergreen and add components in our solution, with concentration on supporting installation, configuration and operation of these products integrated with other products. We also continuously add stories in our backlog to describe changes we feel we should make to improve our existing collateral.Our team includes experts who focus on "capabilities", such as ensuring a COTS product can be installed and configured with best practices in mind or ensuring a new service can be delivered through integration of various components together, and we also have experts who focus on developing components to differentiate DXC from our competitors.
Once every two weeks, we choose a set of stories from our backlog, plan the changes needed in our components by documenting "sub-tasks" in each story and estimating time we'll require to get each task done, aiming to provide each engineer with a set of sub-tasks that can be completed in the next two week period, and then we set to work and review at end of the two weeks. We repeat this procedure 8-10 times, and that ultimately leads us to deliver a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) release of documents and other artifacts to produce an element release.
Now, instead of taking many, many months, we typically take about about a quarter to produce an updated release of our solution related to our key vendor products of focus.
Our Challenge
With each commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) product from a vendor, our small team of engineers now needs to maintain about 60 DXC-developed automation components (about 50,000 lines of code) to install, configure and integrate about 40 components from our vendor partners. We also maintain over 100 documents capturing details of design, test records, and best practice recommendations.In some cases, our documents and components are clearly valued for delivery of offerings, while in other cases we have started to identify we should retire them (some have been around for 15 years). We want to focus on developing content with highest value. We want to bring in the future, as we are learning about data science, machine learning, and more! Sometimes, it can even be a bit scary to think about - watch "Black Mirror" on Netflix to get some ideas about why I say that ;-)
Our key challenge now is that this is a LOT of artifacts for such a small team to manage, so right now we are working on DOUBLING our team size! Exciting!
What's Next?
Recently, our company (DXC Technology) released a white paper called "Creating the Agile Organization":http://assets1.dxc.technology/innovation/downloads/DXC_Creating_the_Agile_Organization.pdf
The paper highlights that Agile is typically great for managing development of custom components, but weaker as a methodology for managing collateral related to COTS components. This describes well what I feel is the latest "aha" moment for our team... the next phase in our history of loyalty?!
We are now working on a shift, where we will focus more on the DXC-developed components in our solution that are intended to differentiate DXC from our competitors. We are considering breaking up our solution to manage a bit differently. We need to continue to use Agile to manage changes in the DXC-developed components that are considered of high value - we want to shift to release changes to those components separately much faster - maybe even every two weeks! We are exploring changing our way of working.. maybe we could use Kanban to manage evergreen of our support for the COTS components? We have lots of options - the challenge is finding time to figure it out while we keep it all going and interview people, too!
Time will tell where we go next.
Are you the right person to help us? If you want to be a part of this and have the right skills, please consider applying! Check out http://jobs.dxc.technology!
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