Tag Archive for 'microsoft'

Work Week

Edit: I typed this yesterday w/o internet access. Posting today.
Crazy week at work this week.

We are doing demos this week of our CRM milestone to internal (MS) and external customers which means I get to spend most of the week in Redmond instead of Bellevue. I wouldn’t mind except for that traffic to and from Redmond is pretty nasty compared to Bellevue.

On Thursday we’re having the company meetup which is the company wide Microsoft employees meeting at Safeco field. It should be pretty sweet. A lot of the execs talk and there are cool product demos. I’m excited to see what that meeting brings; maybe I’ll win a prize or something :)
In addition to all this craziness I’ve got to turn something in to my manager Monday that I’ve been working on basically since I started (in small increments). I’m a little nervous about having enough time to get it done with all the other stuff going on this week and me being in Victoria all weekend but, I should be able to manage.

Training Today - Project Management

I’m in training today at Microsoft. The class is called Project Management and is taught by a guy named Peter Rogers.

Here is the syllabus

Project Management
Description
This is a two-day class for Engineering and IT professions, designed to better prepare Microsoft employees to understand and apply critical project management concepts, processes, best practices and techniques through a combination of instruction, facilitation, discussion, and activity.

At the end of this class students will:

  • Understand how project management components are used to organize and deliver projects
  • Understand the Project Management Institute (PMI) standards for project lifecycle and methodology
  • Use Microsoft (and industry) terminology to organize, communicate status, and deliver projects
  • Start up a project using established project lifecycle templates
  • Keep a project on-track through the project lifecycle; initiation, planning, execution, control, and close-out, using methods demonstrated in the class
  • Understand and be able to appropriately apply the Work Breakdown Structure tools
  • Close out a project and document lessons learned using an established post-mortem procedure
  • Apply tools, tips, and techniques to promote cross group collaboration
  • Know which tools and techniques to apply in the event of common project problems

Eligibility restrictions
Recommended for: IT/operations program manager, program manager, program manager 2 (career model)
Available to: all employees and contingent staff

I’ll edit this post with any juicy knowledge and my opinion of how the class is/was.

My last three posts all had explamation points!

I need to calm down. Also, since I’m posting. Microsoft and NBC teamed up to stream the entire olympic games live in HD over the internet. Pretty damned cool if you ask me! nbcolympics.com/video/

August - Football, Microsoft, Pictures

It is already August. That is kinda crazy! One thing it means though is that football season is coming which excites me. I got my Husky season tickets last week so I’ll be at all the home guys and I’ve got a ticket for WSU. I’m also considering going to: USC, Cal, Arizona and Oregon but, we’ll see how money, how much flights are and what it looks like timing wise. Kendall got the school pack too so she’ll be at a lot of the games with me. I’m excited for that! I’m also interested to see how the seahawks do. I haven’t been keeping up with anything in the offseason so it’ll be a surprise for me.

August also means I’ve been at my new job for almost a month! I started July 7th as a Program Manager at Microsoft on the Dynamics CRM team. I’m working on a CRM feature called the Email Router which essentially helps manage how emails get in and out of the CRM system. I like my team quite a bit, they all seem like great people and I love the environment here. I’m still getting ramped up with all the ins and outs of the Email Router but, overall I’m really enjoying my time here. I finally got my first paycheck yesterday (seems like I haven’t been paid in forever) which takes a little financial stress off. I’m using my first several paychecks to make big dents in my pile of debt collected during college.

My trip to New York City was a month ago now. I still need to post pictures for that (and for a whole bunch of other things that I’ve done recently). I think maybe as I post pictures of events I’ll do retroactive blog posts about them. Yeah, yeah it isn’t as nice as if I did it then but, at least it’ll be online!

I’m excited to see what August brings, I know it will be a great month!