Feb 16 to Feb 28 2023

[zsamji]

We've just wrapped up a sprint and it's amazing to see that we are already in March!

Looking back at my paper notebook a few things stick out for me:

• Confirmation we are serving our clients
• Learning something new and breaking it down into smaller pieces
• MS Teams and it's retention policy

Confirmation we are serving our clients

As we have 15 or so clients moving from our silver custom to our gold standard service (from 100 last year this time), the conversations with outstanding client migrations have confirmed, our team is building the "thing" that serves our clients the best.

Many digital delivery teams don't need a keycloak skill set, what they need is to learn about Open ID connect, OAuth 2 and the respective libraries they can use with our service. I'd say about 4-5 of our clients are in a holding pattern with the migration as they get the right resource to help them with their migration. One client explicitly said "we definitely want to be on the standard service going forward so our team can focus on other things rather than a custom keycloak realm".

There's also been a few clients with SAML issues but let me save that for the next round of weeknotes.

Learning something new and out of my comfort zone

As a product owner, I am constantly having to learn new things ranging from procurement processes, figma interaction design, to disaster recovery processes. Truth be told, I try to learn only the bare minimum unless I really have to dive deeper. Sometimes this approach works and sometimes it doesn't.

This last sprint, I've been challenged to figure out the best way to break these problems or huge org process into smaller more digestible pieces WITHOUT getting into the weeds. You see, sometimes I can get absorbed into the weeds and feel an ownership to the details. This is problematic because when I'm there I don't let go until I am confident in my understanding that I can pass it off to another team member.

In the true spirit of agile, I am going to timebox myself in these learnings and then communicate to my team and leadership.

MS Teams retention policy

Back in January I got a new computer and transferred all of my important files. I didnt realize nor remember that MS Teams only keeps my chat files for 30 days so when I was digging in my inbox and sharepoint folders, I realized I need to improve.

Consider this my PSA: Create a monthly task for 15 mins to save all existing chat files on to your computer or sharepoint to avoid losing files you may need.

Wrap up

Branch wise, there's a lot of buzz around Scrum@Scale and I need the right balance of it distracting vs learning. I tend to want to protect the entire team as we focus on client engagement and our operational requirements -- we still have our sprint commitments to hold. I'll likely have more to share as I learn more.

We have some work to prepare for some usability observations on "bulk user assignment " since as a team we can't agree on the design. It will be great to see the end user evidence through a clickable prototype.