My week in review – week #27 2023

My energy levels in the last few weeks hasn’t been great. Not sure if the muggy weather today is contributing to my feeling of just wanting to curl up and go to sleep all day. Had a bit of a sore head the last couple of days, and my shoulder has been bothering me again also, so I haven’t been sleeping particularly well. Decided not to do much today in the hope I just need to conserve my energy.

As far as works concerned this week, it’s felt like an extra long working week, even although I probably didn’t work quite a many extra hours as I normal find myself doing, just to keep on top of everything.

All was going relatively well this week until Thursday when we discovered our AAD Group tied to our Dynamics Training environment had been deleted so access to the environment was now open to everyone in our tenant who had a Dynamics license. We only discovered this because we got a request to give access to a new user, to this environment. The AAD group has now been recreated, but we have lost details of all users who had access to the Training environment but we had moved forward to resolve this. My biggest worry was that while this time the AAD group that was deleted was for our Training environment, it would be a major issue if the same things should happen to any of our Production environments.

I therefore escalated the issue, and so we’re now looking at setting up some safeguards to notify specific people if someone deleted one of our AAD groups, and we’re also looking at the processes for allow people to delete AAD Groups, as well as backing-up/exporting the list of users in each AAD group on a regular basis so that, should there be an issue in the future, we can more easily recover.

I also made good progress on reviewing our Azure DevOps processes and boards, and our use of them, having now determined we’re best to implement one change at a time, rather than trying to completely review/redesign our processes and boards in one go. This should also make it easier to keep our development team on board and take them with us on this journey.

First set of changes to our Azure DevOps processes and boards agreed, and so I’ll now test this out on our Test project before showing to my team and then implementing.

It was also Sprint review week, and this week we did the sprint review first thing on Thursday morning, so that one of my team could demo the permits solution that they were working on. Feedback on that seemed positive, so we will move forward with that development now.

All in all a fairly positive week as far as work is concerned.