Well it has been two months of the six at UW-IT. The job is going great, though the time is speeding by. My job is divided into two parts. The first part has to do with Bench marking and metrics. In this, I am gathering the inputs to complete two surveys which will enable UW-IT to evaluate itself against many different university IT departments. This will be used to determine strategy and for determining where to focus improvement activity. Also here, I have been looking into developing metrics, actually a dashboard type concept for IT. So far this is in the research stage, with benchmarking being the current focus.
The second part of the assignment is in helping with the implementation of ITIL. ITIL is a set of international best practice processes for IT. I worked for many years at Boeing in the implementation of process management and ITIL. This has several facets and has been very interesting. I designed and held a world café conversation involving 45 fresh ITIL foundation certified individuals. This was designed to promote a community of change agents and to discuss the strategy of ITIL implementation going forward and was a great success. I have been asked to design another conversation as the next two certifications classes complete. For this first conversation I invited 60 people, so getting 45 to attend is a fabulous turnout. For the next one I will be invited over 100 individuals.
I have also been working on a project to begin the implementation of incident management. Incident management is the processes that are used to answer a user who is having a problem using IT services. And this week, I picked the assignment to start thinking about a project for implementing Change, Config and release. These are the processes that control how changes are approved, recorded and ultimately released into production. For me this is the heart of the ITIL system of processes.
In the last couple of weeks most of my attention has been focused on the design of a comprehension strategy for ITIL implementation. This the type of work that I really love doing. I’ve built a framework and supporting work breakdown structure that can be applied to each service and to each process as it is stood up. Another section focuses on the people issues of such a large scale change. And the last aspect focuses on the change and project management of multi-year change project.
Well that’s work. It’s been great. The people are fabulous to work with, and they are treating me very well. I feel appreciated, trusted, and valued. I am learning as quickly as I can about the organization and the people and enjoying myself immensely.
At home, we have slowly been getting back into a shared routine. Without the structure totally in my control, it has been harder for me. I need my routines, otherwise seem to waste a lot of time. We have shared cooking the meals. Shopping for groceries has been more erratic then before. The time constraints of working and commuting have been hard to adjust to.
Commuting is still taking the bus and runs 40 to 45 minutes overall. This a about what my commute to Boeing would take. The big difference is that I can use the time on the bus to do things, which is quite nice. I use it mostly for reading, though recently I have started to listen to “A course in Miracles.” on my IPOD. I have also done a lot of studying for work. I think I’m finally getting this bus things down. Last week was the first time that I had to do a flat out run in order to catch the bus I wanted, ending with pounding on the doors to have him open for me. I take exercise where I can get it.
Speaking of exercise, this was one of the areas that I made a focus when I got laid off and I did good for the first 4 months and then two things interfered. The first was making time for the remodel. I’m a creature of habit, so once my routines get messed up, I find it much harder to get back into the swing of things. The second influence was injuries in my foot, which meant I needed to rest it for 6 weeks as best I could. Once this was done, while a continued to workout, I never got back to the same level.
I’m glad to say, I’m back on this exercise trail. First my commute includes a walk across the beautiful UW campus which gets me 30 to 40 minutes a day of walking to which I add walking at lunch on most days. I also told my wife that I would do the STP (Seattle to Portland) bike trip with her this year. We paid our entry fees and went out and bought new bikes in order to do this. I’m way behind in the training department, but I’m hoping that I can catch up by biking to and from Work. My wife has been getting into running this last year or two, and that is something that I have not felt comfortable doing yet. Biking is something that I feel I will be able to do, and be able to do it well up into my older years. It is low impact on the joints, so I’m thinking I may still be biking at 110, that is if this bike lasts that long.
The remodel was slow before, and now it has slowed even more. I have been working on painting the basement so that we can get the cabinets in. The misses has picked a beautiful deep red color for one of the walls. It looks great. Can’t wait to get the next wall painted. You can see this wall in the bike picture above.
Here is me on the road:
I wanted to spend the first two months completely focused on the job. Now it is time to begin to refocus a bit. I need to start getting back into the job market. In order to do that I need to get back into a better time management. This will be the first step. Then I need to rewrite my resume including the UW-IT position. Then it will be time to get back into the swing of job searching.
I have to tell you, I’m not looking forward to this. Job searching is a pain in the butt. I have really enjoyed working at something that I love to do, versus the drudgery of job searching. And as I think about it, I am excited to see what new possibilities are out their.
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