Tuesday, February 18, 2014

A five-year Resume (2008-2013) reviewed

A five year resume is a visionary exercise in career planning: Visualize the type of professional you would like to be in five year and write the resume for that person; The education, the skills, the type of positions and projects that person would have on their resume.  Suffice to say, compare and contrast with the Five year Plan… presumably a plan starting from today forward 5 years.  The five-year resume shows the forward 5 years, allowing you to create a plan to get there.

 

http://www.careers-advice-online.com/five-year-career-development-plan.html

http://jme.sagepub.com/content/31/1/128.abstract

 

In 2008, I wrote a five-year resume - the time period ending in 2013.   This post will grade (those not interested in my navel gazing can stop here, but I'm committed to publishing this to hold myself accountable)  My memory and documentation of the process are incomplete, but roughly speaking,  to find material for a five year resume , I identified senior leaders in my organization or that I had met through various professional groups.  I may have included some biographies of leaders in the business space that I read through periodicals such as Information Week or GovTech.  I viewed their resumes, articles, and LinkedIn profiles.  Through that, I assembled some of the projects or positions I would need to pursue to have similar experience.  I listed the education that overlapped my interest with my model's education.  From all that, boiled it down to things that could reasonably be accomplished within 5 years.

 

Objective

 

Results-oriented technical project manager with hands on ability in application development and reporting and experience leading technical teams seeking to take on a large enterprise project

Comments: Basically have done all of those, have the ability to do so on an ongoing basis, and am continuing to do so; What's next?

 

Education

Further Training        

      Related Courses        

Project Management - Advanced

ITIL/ITSM, etc        MBA-level

 

 

Comment: Partial: Earned the PMP in 2008 and am into my second cycle maintaining the credential; have spent next to no time on ITIL or ITSM; Not sure what I was getting at about MBA-level, but didn't

Skills

Organizational

Project management professional

Certified in ITSM/ITIL technical management processes

Participating in and leading groups to accomplish project goals

Comment: Basically accomplished; but for the aforementioned ITSM or ITIL; Earned PMP and lead many project groups

Communication

Assess client needs in information systems and offering appropriate solutions

Proactively offering solutions and training to customers of varied skill levels

Delivered training to classes

Published technical author – blog – magazine articles – etc.

Comment: Have pretty muchreached these goals.  I now commonly work with clients at various skill levels and authority; Very often I am the technical lead responsible for proposing a solution vs. just working against a requirements.  Most of my class room training has been ad hoc or small group; Publishing is the one I'm wobbling on.  I am decently active on my blog and social media, but I think I envisioned publishing articles to industry publications or sites

Technical

Microsoft Certified IT Professional; Microsoft Solutions Framework

Architectures – n-tier, web-based

Platforms – Business Intelligence platforms. Microsoft (.Net, COM, DCOM, SQL Server); Oracle, PHP/mySQL

Comment: Pretty much a slam dunk on these; Achieved and MCTS (the evolution of MCITP), could probably do more; Am comfortable with the architectures and platforms I listed, and even ones I couldn't have envisioned 5 years ago

Work Experience

Consultant        Non-profit, etc. small firm        1/2009 –

•        Board-level consulting on IT strategy, etc.

•        Web or application design or selection

•        Fund-raising, etc

 

Comment: Going to generously give myself a complete on this one; For at least, 3 groups my children are involved in, I have at times been the primary web or technology person; In 2008, I probably envisioned spending more time with professional groups or consulting for other non-profits, however the opportunity to help groups that my sons and other children enjoy so much has been very rewarding

Project Manager        Medium to large organization        1/2009 –

•        Lead Business Intelligence adoption, ideally organization-wide

•        End user component

•        Technical project team, and hand-off to operations project team

Comment: I can see I hedged my organization with the term 'medium to large organization'.  Ended up staying with one large organization - the California Dept. of Corrections - the entire time, starting my 10th year with the organization now.  But moving around within the organization has given me a chance to get these kind of opportunities.  For this experience, really completed this in the past year as I moved to a new position - database architect - but was deeply involved in handing off the old position - business intelligence to some new team members.

Project Manager - 2        Medium to large organization        1/2009 –

•        Manage full-blown, department or large unit-wide project from near initation to completion

•        Apply PMBOK best practices

•        Cross functional teams

Project Manager - 1        Medium to large organization        1/2009 –

•        Manage full-blown, department or large unit-wide project from near initation to completion

•        Apply PMBOK best practices

•        Cross functional teams

Comment: I envisioned managing at least 2 big projects, and although I didn't change organization, I probably ended up managing at least 4-5 in this manner for a single unit - COMPSTAT - of the Dept. of Corrections.  Didn't hold the working title of 'Project Manager' at most points, but nonetheless, was doing PMBOK in an appropriately tailored way; Nearly every project involved some type of cross-functional team; usually a mix of technologists and business program areas

Technical Author        Publishing House        1/2009 –

•        Author technical articles – blog- article - book

•        Companion teaching, courses, speaking

Comments: Had much higher hopes here; early on I had submitted articles to a few IT trade magazines such as MSDN or Code; nothing accepted; Of course the world changed at the same time, with much more emphasis on community and open articles; so my blog and other social media represents at least some effort;  Have arranged many workshops and presentations internal to the organization, not nearly enough public stuff

 

Next steps:

From this exercise, I would say I didn't end up exactly at plan, but it was a good check on a yearly basis or so to see if there were any big areas . I probably could've set more stretched goals, or documented in more detail the types of project which I wanted to undertake. Ultimately, very happy with where I've landed along this journey.

 

Well, clearly the next step is to research and start a new five year resume, to set a target for 2019!  Rough ideas include a new game plan for publishing and speaking.  As my commitments to my sons' youth groups change shape as they age, I hope to spend more time in professional groups or perhaps find another non-profit in my community to assist.  The next level of leaders I hope to emulate are hyper-involved in networking, their community, and the development of the staff around them.  Education is always necessary, and I'll need to define a focus to the menagerie of online courses, webcasts, and videos that are available more than ever before, but competing for time with other activities.

 

This has been my experience with a five-year resume.  I hope that if you've constructed one or are in the process, in what you see here, it will guide your to creating something that you can review at the end of the five year duration and measure yourself, identify next steps… and celebrate what you've accomplished.

 

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Tortoise SVN - Update Failed! - Adapting an SSIS development approach for Window Server 2008

Trained some new developers on a SQL Server BI solution that required them to edit various source files - including SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) packages.  Well immediate after the orientation to the Version Control repository a new developer received an error attempting to update the local repository.


Turned out a couple of assumptions or constraints were in play
1.       Development of SQL Server Integration Services packages is easier from a server console.  The connection rules aren't an issue.  The connection to source systems is usually - not always - but usually faster.  Running a long-running package doesn't interfere with the developer's ability to do other programs on their laptop… or close it up and go home while the long-running process churns on.
2.       Using TortoiseSVN to edit-merge-commit from a remote repository running on a file server was a simple and elegant version control approach.
3.       Having the source code on a shared folder on the server's local file system was convenient
4.       When there were two developers and a Server running Windows Server 2003, this generally wasn't a problem - we weren’t stepping on each other's folders and/or 2003 security was fairly lenient.

After migrating this technique to Windows Server 2008, these error became apparent quickly.
1.       It was still convenient to develop SSIS packages from the server's console.
2.       The shared folder on the local file system became problematic.  The 2008 security (it behaves like Windows Vista or Windows 7 does) became more finicky about file ownership and ability to edit and delete files with another's ownership.
3.       Multiple developers currently in edit or merge, but not yet commit steps would collide with each other if one another's work overlapped in the file system.

The solution I took was to have each developer create their own 'SourceCode' folder under their 'Documents' folder (i.e. C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Documents\SourceCode). 
Tradeoffs are it is a bit trickier location to which to navigate.  And the redundant copies of the code for multiple developers have a minimal impact on storage.  The advantage, of course, is a truer work process with SVN - each developer is forced to develop SSIS packages separately editing and merging; mitigating most conflicts through collaboration.