Friday 14 October 2016

Personal Blog 3

Before Enterprise Architecture started, I had no clue what it would be about or whether I’d enjoy it or not. We started by picking four teams and then we were given an overview that we would be using Enterprise Architecture to determine why a company was experiencing a drop in customer satisfaction and how to bring it back up again. The project was started by agreeing on a project manager and a team name. When I say “agreeing” I mean one person was chosen to pick the team and then a couple of days later, another person was chosen to be our project manager because the first person was very much against being the manager themselves. As for the name of our group, Pea consulting. The name came about from the first project manager’s love for peas; an almost unhealthy love for peas. It also helped that pea includes the letters “E” and “A” exclusively in that order which, of course, stands for Enterprise Architecture. Once these had been determined, we then began to discuss the provided case study in our groups to get an understanding about the business that we were helping and to plan how we were going to proceed with the project.
We started by interviewing two senior members within NBGardens, John and Debbie. They were asked about their roles within the company and their understanding of the business model. Although we thought we did quite well in the interviewing process, we were told that none of the groups had collected enough information for the next steps. Due to this, a question and answer session was set up with John and Debbie to try and gather all the information needed. After the Q and A session, we separated tasks among the group. A couple of people worked on the Business Canvas Model while others worked on starting to create a possible BPMN diagram for the business. At the same time, we were also scheduling interviews with employees from different departments and levels within the company to get a more accurate understanding of the business’ processes. I was involved in the interviews of Ray Smithy and Chris Corder. Ray was a likable person but regularly fell off topic and didn’t seem to take the interview very seriously. Chris on the other hand, was very serious, stern and seemed to be under the impression that his department was perfect and the fault lied elsewhere. At the same time, he didn’t really have any useful information to give us apart from what the COFT employees’ roles were.
After this, we really had a much clearer understanding of how the business operated. We were able to create a much more accurate BPMN diagram and started to find methods in which the business could be improved. As solutions were being created, a couple of us started to work on the presentation that we had to give to the senior members of the company. When it came to the presentation, I felt we did well since we seemed to have a clear picture of the solution within our heads. However, we did not articulate our thoughts very well since the senior members did not think our solution was valid. Although the presentation did not go as well as I’d hoped, I did learn that going into more detail while presenting is key when proposing solutions to others.
In my last blog, I will write about the coming weeks as I start learning about specialising as a DevOps consultant and my thoughts on it.

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