Another extra busy, and at times, stressful week!
We managed to finally confirm at the start of this week that all parts of our testing environments were successfully upgraded as part of the essential maintenance we did last week. This allowed us to confirm the essential maintenance work to our Production environments would go ahead Wednesday/Thursday this week – It took a bit of negotiation by one of my colleagues to agree that we would not start the work first thing on Wednesday, but instead would start at 11:00. This meant it was going to be more of a challenge for us to complete the essential maintenance and fully test the solutions were working so that our users and customers could then use our systems once again, by close of business on Wednesday.
Needless to say we encountered some problem during the Production essential maintenance on Wednesday, however the folks in my team, plus those in our other IT teams and the 3rd party we’d engaged to help us with the work, worked well together to get to the cause of each problem we encountered, and find a solution. It therefore took us into late Thursday morning before we completed our testing after the maintenance work was finished, and were able to advise our users the systems were available again.
We got there, which is testament to how well everyone involved, worked together to successfully complete the essential maintenance.
Last week was our end of sprint/start of new sprint week, but because of other priorities it took me until Friday this week to complete the sprint planning work and send out the Sprint Review documentation to all stakeholders. However we were able to commence development of some work we had been asked to prioritise last week.
Once again I spent quite a bit of time working on our Bellshill Salvation Army Band things in preparation for our upcoming Christmas events – Both for our social media platform (what music to share, Wednesday devotions) and the devotional thoughts for during some of the events. I always find this quite a pressured time, as there’s always so much to do to make sure the band’s ministry is shared with as many people as possible. We may never know the impact something we share may have on someone’s life, so that’s why I always want to ensure we share relevant, and maybe challenging messages, in the hope they are just what someone needs at that time.
Next week is going to be yet another really busy one, between work and several band events to attend – hopefully I’ll have finished my devotional thoughts finished in time for those events! As for Christmas shopping I’ll hopefully get that started sometime!
The Distinct Dot 