So, I’ll start off by saying it has been just about a year and a half since my last post. It has been quite an eventful period of time with the whole shutting down the world basically and dealing with the impact on the College of Charleston due to that. Additionally, I have been spending the time trying to absorb as much as I can from my coworkers to further improve myself.
Well 2020 was certainly a year that took place, even with the microcosm that is the PMO office at CofC there was a lot of changes taking place. At the end of 2019 we got a PMO director in Brittany who has brought a lot more stability to the College. Going into the year we were working on finalizing the business units that we were to be aligned with for the year with the big ones that I received being Admissions, Facilities, and the Graduate School. Outside of those I have a litany of small ones as well but the bulk of my time has been taking up by these organizations as well as the projects that came my way. Throughout the year I was involved with projects that involved bringing a mobile based platform to replace my.cofc, updating our scholarship system, updating our facilities management system, and working on our Access Control project… to name a couple.
Within these projects I have been expanding the knowledge that I have learned throughout the year. I have worked on creating Requirement Traceability Matrix documentation, testing documentation, and vendor scoring documentation. This knowledge has been supplemented, greatly, by working with Jill Tartaglini and Shawn Embrey helping me with any questions I may have. They have been absolutely amazing with working with me throughout the year, as well as just fun people to talk to.
Outside of working on projects and working with my business units a lot of 2020 was focused on self evaluation and realizing what our strengths and weaknesses are. We came into 2020, besides being filled with optimism (oh how naive we were), taking an assessment to determine our strengths as found through a test by CliftonStrengths. Through this I found that my five biggest strengths were: Adaptability, Context, Harmony, Intellection, and Input. I’ll make another post where I go through what each of these mean. I do have to say that I am grateful that Adaptable was number one because I really needed to test that this year. To sum them up real fast though:
Adaptability — You are able to go with the flow and be in the “now”
Context — To make decisions today I look on how similar decisions, projects, designs, etc made in the past
Harmony — I look and strive to make decisions that are agreeable with all parties
Intellection — I like to have intellectual discussions
Input — I like to gather information and knowledge in areas
Just to note my five weaknesses are: Significance, Ideation, Futuristic, Achiever, and Learner. Once again I’ll make a post where I go through these and discuss how I think they may be relevant to me. Outside of this, we have also taking quick tests to determine where our skill level lies as a BA as given by an exam by IIBA. Unfortunately I do not have those results saved anywhere.
These tests have given me a great point to understand better who I am intrinsically as well as where I need to focus some more of my energy to make sure that I keep improving at a rate that I approve of. Outside of determining strengths and IIBA tests I have further engrossed myself into the German language and am now taking German 201 at CofC and am looking to get my first business related certification through trident. When that starts I am hoping to make some posts about that as well!
Hopefully I will keep this up to date and keep working on just improving some of the CSS within this page to make it look better. Until then enjoy your day!