Databases offer a number of features that help project managers stay on top of tasks in Confluence
All in Systems
Are system evaluations important? (Yes, definitely!)
I learned a valuable lesson early on - never, ever, pick a system randomly.
"Its broken"
Having a solid relationship in place before something goes wrong is incredibly important to helping folks navigate challenges.
Knowing when to go "quick and dirty"
Sometimes there isn’t time or bandwidth or energy to do everything you “should” do. Knowing when, and how, to do something quick and dirty is critical to successfully pulling it off.
Order Pushing
Non-technical partners need to be careful to partner with their tech teams… many times they end up just sending orders to their technical partners. This not only results in a weaker relationship, but many times results in a weaker end product.
Being better at technical communication
Communication is a challenging skill to learn that is only made more complex when attempting to communicate about technical topics. Making time to understand how to better technically communicate is a critical skill, especially as more and more folks end up in these fields.
Domain Expertise
Knowing the system is absolutely necessary to supporting it. Know the domain it exists in, however, vastly improves our ability to manipulate and design the best way to use that system. Take time to learn that domain, meet the experts in it and if you can, become one.
On Negative Examples
Finding examples of things you want to mimic is great… but looking for examples of things you’d like to avoid (good and bad) is also important.
Understanding both how a system creates/stores data and how it is used is critical to being a good data analyst. Knowing these things makes it easier to interpret information and to tell a good story about any potential results. Failing to Know Thy System at best results in wasted in… and catastrophic decisions at worst.
Learning a new system, especially under time pressure, takes a LOT of energy. Just remember to get hands on, make some friends, and do your homework, and you’ll be fine!
While collecting defects is a great first step, there’s a lot more that can be done, including retroactive investigations and proactive avoidance.
Despite our best efforts every process or system produces some unwanted or unexpected behavior - defects. Many times our customers are the ones letting us know about them, which is less than good.
We’ve all had to put a ticket into something SOMEWHERE. Despite our collective practice, many tickets do not provide enough info for folks to get the help they need. Here are some tips.
HRIS tends to be the forgotten cousin of IT - it’s frequently brought in at the last minute (if at all). Building better partnerships with HRIS helps both sides, as the business gets better results, and the tech team gets less grey hair.
Tech teams need to be brought problems to solve, not solutions to implement. Frequently business partners only present their ideas for solutions, which, at best, will steal time from actual problem solving, and at worst cause problems down the road.
I always appreciate when my partners think through challenges before coming to my team. It does get a bit dicey when they bring us solutions they think will be best…
I’ve found there’s two types of basic skills - generic and specific. Understanding which one needs to be addressed helps folks better address underlying problems.