Welcome Wednesday: Share your Accomplishments!

[#1]

Happy Wednesday Everyone!

We have officially made it through the first month of 2024 (really?!?!).

I know many people that either made New Year’s Resolutions or set Goals for 2024. So how are things going? Have you completed any of them? Or are you making progress towards completing them? If you haven’t that’s ok, there’s still plenty of 2024 left to go.

My question prompt for you this week, is to share what you are proud of you have accomplished recently. It can be anything as long as it made you feel good to have completed it!

I’ll get things started:

I work in a operations-like team. Most of our “planned“ work is supporting larger epics/projects that other development teams are working on. Since all the other R&D teams are our customers and their ability to complete sprints can be hindered by our schedule, we have needed a way to show the “entire“ list of requests to leadership so that they can decide the priority order things get completed. We have started using an additional Jira Plan (formerly Advanced Roadmaps) which has really helped provide clarity to our team on our “marching orders“ and has made everything we have in the queue visible to not just our leadership but all the requestors so they have an understanding about why their request may have to wait!

Alright, it’s your turn, let me know in the comments below.

Have a great rest of the week!

[Andy Gladstone]

Our annual planning, which normally is completed in the form of a 2-day offsite of the leadership team focusing on the goals for the coming year stretched into 3.5 days this year. Being a 'process' person, this was difficult for me. But the outcomes far outshine the breakdown in process and I am excited to share those goals with our teams internally and grow the business.

Professional accomplishment - having a set of goals that we can all rally around. Personal accomplishment - not letting my 'process' orientation dictate the outcome!

[Amanda Barber]

A non-work related accomplishment is sticking with my workout routine and finding time to move nearly every day this year...aside from one day I was sick!

As far as work goes, I'm still sorting out what my new role entails, but mostly just feeling proud of myself for rolling with the punches. Hoping to identify some areas to focus on for my professional development this month though.

[Al Chen]

I have two accomplishments:

1. Annual planning demo - Similar to @Andy Gladstone, planning is top of mind at my company and I had the opportunity to create a demo of how our company does annual planning using our company's platform. It was the first type of demo that showed interconnected systems within a workspace and was well received by our marketing and sales teams.
2. Visualizing milestones - I've been sharing more content on LinkedIn and worked on a short video showing how to create milestones on a roadmap on our platform after syncing in Jira issues. It's probably the most viewed short video I've published on LinkedIn so far.

[NAYANA]

We made it through a 14-month long journey of migrating from Data Center to Jira Cloud and are ecstatic about it. We cannot wait to unpack the new features and capabilities Jira cloud has to offer for our end users. The most complex migration I have ever seen in my career. It was not complex because of the application, but because of the several customizations that we had in DC and wanted to carry over, some aggressive deadlines, some gaps in planning, overall a fantastic learning journey, several lessons learned, so much wiser and tons of knowledge acquired along the way.

Yay!

We are in cloud!

[Patrick Lee]

We had a similar challenge last year. We felt our team were not providing visibility on what's on our plate  or how the team's work was being prioritized so we set off to create a way for others to see what's on our "planned" work.

We had experimented with a Trello board but ultimately settled with an option within Jira to have Active sprints and being able to plan multiple sprints and splitting our work into Q1/Q2 ... etc. It was something our team really liked and we stuck with it. 

Goal for this year: Continue with what works and improve upon it. We're exploring options with story points or t-shirt sizing to help us estimate our work and team's bandwidth better. Onwards and upwards!

[Sam Nadarajan]

Speaking of planning, I started working on a talk I will be giving at a conference in a month about 3 weeks ago, and I'm almost done - just doing some touch up. Normally I wait until the last minute - it's insane for me to get ahead on deadline-oriented work. 

Now let's be honest, me getting ahead in this one area means that I am behind in a bunch of other areas, but people only care about the finished product, not the messy kitchen behind it. Right? RIGHT?

[Barbara Szczesniak]

Well, my resolution to make my bed every day was sidetracked by a 4-day migraine and never picked up again, so no accomplishment there. 😊

What I have accomplished is finding a way to present the user guide I'm creating in Confluence to our internal users without them all needing a Confluence license. I have to credit @Kristian Klima with pointing me in the right direction in his reply to another member's question.

[Jayant Bhawal]

This one is a non-work one, but I bought our first car for our family.

Used to be a pain to travel anywhere with our Beagle because most cabs or public transport don't allow that in my country.

The level of freedom we've just unlocked is something we've dreamed of this a while. :)

You could say that the main motivation behind getting the car was to be able to take Berry places. :D

[Summer.Hogan]

Thanks for checking in on all of us @Jimmy Seddon!

On the professional front, my team just finished PI Planning last week and for our fifth one since adopting SAFe it went very smoothly this time! We didn't use anywhere near all our breakout time and we accomplished a lot in the 3 days! Our plan for the next 7 sprints is set! 

On the other hand, on the personal front, I made a goal to establish an exercise routine and stick to it. I was doing really good and then got the flu the week of MLK day and am just now starting to feel normal again. So, now I'm trying to start it up again, which I really need to do before Team '24, but it's a struggle since my body was put through the ringer with the flu. I'll make it back though!

[Teodora V]

My primary goal was to better align with my new team, which is quite challenging when there is an 8 to 10-hour time gap between us. 

My advantage in this situation is my love for async collaboration and proper collaboration across the company tooling. I stepped towards bringing everyone in Confluence (well, of course), so fingers crossed.

As a personal goal - I try to stay away from the work Slack during my non-working hours. Well, it's not working so far :D 

[Tiffin Filion]

This is my first time as a manager, and so far, no one has said anything bad about me. So that's my accomplishment. :D

[John Connolly]

With most of my experience on Jira Data Center, I've started having a play with Jira Cloud, as well as some interesting new plugins. Really loving the speed of Cloud and its fantastic having a sandpit I can test things out in.  Also, where has JXL been all my life!?  Fantastic plugin!   

[Anas Ibrahim]

We had a similar challenge last year

[Joydeep Ghatak]

This is a great starting point for me as today only I have joined the Atlassian Community. I am new to the community but using JIRA for sometimes. 

I am here to learn, grow and contribute to the community. 

From accomplishment point of view, I have just received couple of LLM certifications and planning to receive Atlassian certifications as part of my learning journey. 

Thank you all,

Joydeep 

[rstephens]

We have released 2 of our beta versions of our new apps to clients. So proud of my team and all they have done to get these out the door.

So much scope creep to overcome 

[fathelbab]

Hi,

This is my 1st comment here :D

I work in a big company, 3 years ago, I started an initiation to make in-house tool to perform analysis for some logs and create reports to give the management insights that assist them in making data-driven decisions to enhance the operations.

When things became serious, they wanted to scale it, I spent a lot of time to come up with the cheapest ever solution which would cost only $240 per year. 

In the beginning they were suspicious that this solution could violate the cyber security policy. It doesn't. but they wanted to play it safely. So, they went to a third party vendor asking for their tool to do the same as my tool, this vendor provided a free trial for their tool and our company liked it very much.

Until it was time to talk money, they were surprised when this vendor asked for $1M/year :D

My company called me again to make a presentation about my solution and they finally accepted it and I am very proud now to write in my resume that I have saved the company from paying $1M/year.

Cheers ;)