I’ve worked for larger companies since I was hired out of college. I’m comfortable there, I know how things roll, and I can work somewhat effectively. However, they all had one thing in common – my workload was dependent on whoever screamed the loudest or the fire of the day. Everything was reactionary, even our planned work. That automation script I wanted to write will have to wait. Performance tuning or capacity analysis …. I don’t have time. I know this SQL doesn’t do everything you want Mr. Client, but it will have to be close enough because a competing team needs me.
I’ve been in a new position at a smaller to mid-sized company for a year. Other teams did things differently here. They never had their hair on fire, seemed pretty methodical, and got a lot of quality work done.
So at lunch I asked what they were doing. Frankly, I wanted it. That is when I learned about a concept called “Agile” and started reading up on the topic. Over the next six weeks I taught myself this process, sat with my boss, and implemented it on my team. What a difference!
Although this is not a technical topic, I think there is value to a DBA or team of DBA’s. Would you be interested in a topic like this?
What are your thoughts?
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Michael Krafick is an occasional contributor to db2commerce.com. He has been a production support DBA for over 12 years in data warehousing and highly transactional OLTP environments. He was acknowledged as a top ten session speaker for “10 Minute Triage” at the 2012 IDUG Technical Conference. Michael also has extensive experience in setting up monitoring configurations for DB2 Databases as well as preparing for high availability failover, backup, and recovery. He can be reached at “Michael.Krafick (at) icloud (dot) com”. Linked-in Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelkrafick. Twitter: mkrafick
Mike’s blog posts include:
10 Minute Triage: Assessing Problems Quickly (Part I)
10 Minute Triage: Assessing Problems Quickly (Part II)
Now, now you two play nice … DB2 and HACMP failover
Technical Conference – It’s a skill builder, not a trip to Vegas.
Why won’t you just die?! (Cleaning DB2 Process in Memory)
Attack of the Blob: Blobs in a Transaction Processing Environment
Automatic Storage Tablespaces (AST): Compare and Contrast to DMS
DB2 v10.1 Column Masking
Automatic Storage (AST) and DMS
Reloacting the Instance Home Directory
Very nice to see you embracing Agile, Mike. If you’ve not read up on it, Scrum is one of the most effective and creative Agile implementations around. Just the fact that you have a really cool role of “ScrumMaster” is enough to give it a look. Really though, the role division is Scrum is very effective and good communication is put on a pedestal with its “sprints” paradigm. Hope you check it out if you haven’t already.
That’s exactly what we are doing. After talking to a developer he gave me a book called “The Phoenix Project” and I devoured it in 2 days. I walked into the office to my Tier 2 manager and said – “I want this”. It took no time to implement and the results are huge.
Being techno-weenies we never think of project management, but this was something I felt needed to be shared.
You are the 3rd person to mention this book to me in the last two months, so I think the tipping point has been reached and I’ve gotta read it. Given that you “devoured” it I’m hoping it will be a page turner for those of us interested in the subject…either that or I’ll just have to finish binge watching season 2 of Orange Is The New Black. 😉
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