Let's start Feb 1 to Feb 15 2023

[zsamji]

Hi Community

For quite some time it's been on my list to write weeknotes and after an inspiring chat with Martha Edwards on working in the open , I'm starting the "weeknotes" for our team. Let's start for Feb 1 to Feb 14:

I've got a great team and we started the month off with our branch wide meetings where we share our work with our colleagues. Our team was one of the hybrid of face to face and remote team members. Highlights included learning about other common component teams, actually having lunch with work mates and sharing our awesome product with those outside of our team (and even outside our ministry).

Once a month we host an Open Sprint Demo with the rest of our community. I decided to cancel this for the month of February to give our clients more time to complete their migrations to our new and best service called Gold. We also can use this time to focus on our sprint goals.

As we are an operational team that ensures our service is up and running 24/7, each of sprints has a natural tension between sprint priorities and operational needs and client engagement. We focused on the Openshift Upgrade (and impacts to us), deep dive/investigation on the patroni growth/lagging pod, implementing the latest RH-SSO image to GOLD, helping our clients with their migrations (user migration or q&a on our gold standard offering).

One big learning for me is tied to our silver custom realm decommissioning process. Back in the Spring of 2022, we had one stakeholder confirm it was ok to delete a custom realm only to be told by another stakeholder, they needed it up (and this is after we had deleted). Our team swarmed and the client was back up in 4 hours. Our lesson learned was to implement 2 steps: Disable for certain period of time and then on a mutually agreed time delete the realm to avoid conflicting messages from stakeholders. This process worked well until recently.

Winter 2023 Decommissioning process --needs improvement: It turns out that after the agreed time to delete the realm, end users of our client's application were complaining about not being able to access a system. I suspect either there were no end users making use of our client's app between the disable and delete period OR there was a knowledge gap with no UAT conducted during the disabled timeframe. We have a great relationship with this client and working with them to get back up and running. With a continuous improvement opportunity, we are now going to keep realms disabled for a longer period of time and provide a week's notice asking clients to confirm they've tested their systems before we delete.

The other learning/re-iteration i had was around the awesome team I work with. BIG HIGH FIVE! I always look to protect my team members (and am ferocious about this), so when they were all stretched, I started to dig a bit deeper to help the client mentioned above. My team was super helpful in answering my questions and teaching me. I hope I can do them justice by sharing my learnings in our internal discussion posts. So my ask of the team is to keep me honest and remain objective with me.

Back to my regular PO world, I'm prioritizing based on client needs and am looking forward to the feature of Service Account with Roles and more migrations to our gold service. I also am trying to learn more about verified credentials as I look to building my roadmap for the summer and beyond. Not going to lie, it does hurt my head at times but I'm true to my theme song "Never Give Up"

pause for music break

My biggest take way this week and after some objective feedback, I should stay in my lane and stick to being a Product Owner and keep a distance from the detailed technical aspects but this week was an exception. TBH: it was also fun to put the pieces together to solve for our client. What can I say, I love learning!!

Stay tuned for the end of month weeknotes

-Z

PS: will iterate and improve grammar/sentence fragments as i do more of these :)