The new role in more detail

Over the last two years, I have been working for a Japanese Bank, without giving away the client name, it is the largest of the Japanese Banks.  I am now working for a consultancy, working on the client site of another Japanese Finance house.  There will be many similarities to the previous company, however there will be differences in processes.

The first stumbling block has been that they use an Agile methodology.  I have never used Agile before, as I have been involved with infrastructure projects, rather than Agile Software Development projects.  I have always thought that Agile was developed for Software projects, but the PMO have decided that it is flexible enough to successfully manage Infrastructure projects.  So, my first task will be to meet with the PMO and understand what they can do for me, such as providing a Project Lifecycle document and some templates.

The majority of the execution of the project tasks will be performed by the vendors.  We have two vendors working together to provide a migration and an on-going service.  I still need to breakdown the project into manageable work packages, but the first meeting and subsequent telephone calls, lead me into thinking that we will have a good working relationship.

The current planning phase is to synchronise the vendor plans against my client’s plans.  We need to ensure the governance and planning is all working together in a harmonised way.  I need to meet with the Programme Manager of the vendors to ensure that they can provide me with the control that I need and the deliverables in the time required.

The Infrastructure Manager was keen to show the data centres to me, so we visited three data centres in the first week.  Two are located over in the Docklands area and the other is in Central London.  It was interesting to see the data centres, but I doubt I will need to step foot inside another one soon.  However, it is always good to be able to visualise what you are working with.

My task for the coming weeks is to understand the Agile methodology and to see how it can be used for and infrastructure project.

It has been a busy and interesting first week and I look forward to picking up the pace next week.