ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS REQUIRE STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT AND RESOURCES. THIS MEANS BALANCING PROJECTS, RELEASE CONTENTS, AND ONGOING COLLABORATION.
I didn’t plan to be an enterprise system administrator. My transition from Director of Financial Aid responsible for one aspect of student information system to system administrator of the entire solution happened quickly. I was in the role almost before I noticed. Regulatory and operational complexity of financial aid, and need to manage both at satellite campus locations, forced me to fully utilize the newly implemented student system. The annual changes to federal aid applications, program awards, and reporting, meant I pushed for the consumption of feature releases and the timing. Issues found after consuming releases made me good at creating and maintaining regression tests.
At first, I advised other directors on building workflows to capture data that would better manage activities at satellite locations, and how I approached testing large feature releases. From there I quantified the minimum tests needed for a release to be deployed in production. Next, system configuration was centralized with me for better control. I’d worked in higher education long enough that I understood the interconnected nature of US Department of Education program approval and curriculum and course changes, or how demographics of incoming students can show up in reporting two or three years later. System usage meant I recognized how configuration in different modules interacted, and how data flowed through the larger ecosystem of systems used to manage the student lifecycle, including CRMs and learning management tools.
Unexpectedly, I found myself targeting the releases which aligned with our operational and compliance needs, and socializing calendar of releases, testing windows, and implementation of new features. While I understood operations and compliance and the system, and supported multi year project to convert 120 campuses using 7 systems into the eco system, I understood I couldn’t know everything. That’s how I came to create a talk called “How To Eat An Elephant” for vendor conference.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. The vendor conference session was about release management, regression testing, and recruiting additional resources. The best way to eat an elephant is to recruit more people and more forks. I presented versions of it at several conferences because of the demand.
Understanding how to consume an enterprise software release, the interplay of configuration and operations, or larger ecosystem of connected systems, doesn’t address priorities competing for the same people.
Click link below for lesson learned early in my tenure as enterprise system administrator which has continued to serve me well. Testing and deploying a bug fix release created to address a problem we reported seemed to be the obvious course of action until business resources quantified hours required to work around the bug and timing of a feature release which had to be consumed.
WATCH HOW TO EAT AN ELEPHANT
ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS REQUIRE STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT AND RESOURCES. THIS MEANS BALANCING PROJECTS, RELEASE CONTENTS, AND ONGOING COLLABORATION.
I didn’t plan to be an enterprise system administrator. My transition from Director of Financial Aid responsible for one aspect of student information system to system administrator of the entire solution happened quickly. I was in the role almost before I noticed. Regulatory and operational complexity of financial aid, and need to manage both at satellite campus locations, forced me to fully utilize the newly implemented student system. The annual changes to federal aid applications, program awards, and reporting, meant I pushed for the consumption of feature releases and the timing. Issues found after consuming releases made me good at creating and maintaining regression tests.
At first, I advised other directors on building workflows to capture data that would better manage activities at satellite locations, and how I approached testing large feature releases. From there I quantified the minimum tests needed for a release to be deployed in production. Next, system configuration was centralized with me for better control. I’d worked in higher education long enough that I understood the interconnected nature of US Department of Education program approval and curriculum and course changes, or how demographics of incoming students can show up in reporting two or three years later. System usage meant I recognized how configuration in different modules interacted, and how data flowed through the larger ecosystem of systems used to manage the student lifecycle, including CRMs and learning management tools.
Unexpectedly, I found myself targeting the releases which aligned with our operational and compliance needs, and socializing calendar of releases, testing windows, and implementation of new features. While I understood operations and compliance and the system, and supported multi year project to convert 120 campuses using 7 systems into the eco system, I understood I couldn’t know everything. That’s how I came to create a talk called “How To Eat An Elephant” for vendor conference.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. The vendor conference session was about release management, regression testing, and recruiting additional resources. The best way to eat an elephant is to recruit more people and more forks. I presented versions of it at several conferences because of the demand.
Understanding how to consume an enterprise software release, the interplay of configuration and operations, or larger ecosystem of connected systems, doesn’t address priorities competing for the same people.
Click link below for lesson learned early in my tenure as enterprise system administrator which has continued to serve me well. Testing and deploying a bug fix release created to address a problem we reported seemed to be the obvious course of action until business resources quantified hours required to work around the bug and timing of a feature release which had to be consumed.
WATCH HOW TO EAT AN ELEPHANT
ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS REQUIRE STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT AND RESOURCES. THIS MEANS BALANCING PROJECTS, RELEASE CONTENTS, AND ONGOING COLLABORATION.
I didn’t plan to be an enterprise system administrator. My transition from Director of Financial Aid responsible for one aspect of student information system to system administrator of the entire solution happened quickly. I was in the role almost before I noticed. Regulatory and operational complexity of financial aid, and need to manage both at satellite campus locations, forced me to fully utilize the newly implemented student system. The annual changes to federal aid applications, program awards, and reporting, meant I pushed for the consumption of feature releases and the timing. Issues found after consuming releases made me good at creating and maintaining regression tests.
At first, I advised other directors on building workflows to capture data that would better manage activities at satellite locations, and how I approached testing large feature releases. From there I quantified the minimum tests needed for a release to be deployed in production. Next, system configuration was centralized with me for better control. I’d worked in higher education long enough that I understood the interconnected nature of US Department of Education program approval and curriculum and course changes, or how demographics of incoming students can show up in reporting two or three years later. System usage meant I recognized how configuration in different modules interacted, and how data flowed through the larger ecosystem of systems used to manage the student lifecycle, including CRMs and learning management tools.
Unexpectedly, I found myself targeting the releases which aligned with our operational and compliance needs, and socializing calendar of releases, testing windows, and implementation of new features. While I understood operations and compliance and the system, and supported multi year project to convert 120 campuses using 7 systems into the eco system, I understood I couldn’t know everything. That’s how I came to create a talk called “How To Eat An Elephant” for vendor conference.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. The vendor conference session was about release management, regression testing, and recruiting additional resources. The best way to eat an elephant is to recruit more people and more forks. I presented versions of it at several conferences because of the demand.
Understanding how to consume an enterprise software release, the interplay of configuration and operations, or larger ecosystem of connected systems, doesn’t address priorities competing for the same people.
Click link below for lesson learned early in my tenure as enterprise system administrator which has continued to serve me well. Testing and deploying a bug fix release created to address a problem we reported seemed to be the obvious course of action until business resources quantified hours required to work around the bug and timing of a feature release which had to be consumed.
WATCH HOW TO EAT AN ELEPHANT