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Showing posts from December, 2017

31 December 2017 - Review of 2017

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Its the final day of the year so it only seems fit to take a look back across 2017. I'm also feeling a little nostalgic as I've just listened to Mike Gerholdt's last ever Admins podcast and in the final few minutes of the recording you can hear how much doing the podcast had meant to him. Fret not, Mike has lovingly handed it over to his sidekick Gillian Bruce so the show will go on.  Anyhoo, back to my 2017 memoirs. As a London Admins User Group Leader one of the highlights of the year started in January when we held our largest gathering. 127 members turned up for the first show and maybe it was a combination of new year resolutions or the draw of holding it at Salesforce Tower that encouraged the big crowd. Our happy average is 70 so it was a significant uplift for the night. February saw one of my favourite Community Events return; London's Calling. Having spoken at the inaugural event the previous year and been crowned their top speaker (aside from the Keyn

21 December 2017 - The Bench

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If you’ve ever worked in a consultancy then you maybe aware of the term the bench. This phrase is used to describe the time between projects when you’re not at the beck and call of a customer. You may have just gone live with an implementation and are waiting the call for the next project to begin.  It’s this bench period that you use to decompress. Projects can be stressful so it’s important to take time out and reflect on the good and as well as the challenges faced. You can also use it as an opportunity to catch up on personal development, nail the latest release exam or add a new certification to your belt.  But I think the bench should be used wider than just the human aspect. I think an approach to the bench should be considered for systems too. Over a period of continuous implementation with a change of processes and hence requirements, then a system can build up technical debt.  Technical debt can contain a whole mix of items, simple things like unused fields,  v