Camis - Software Configuration Specialist

Goals

Soft-Skill Goals

Given the difficult circumstances produced by COVID-19 during 2020, the first goal I set for myself was to improve my ability to work on a team through remote methods. I had wanted to learn how to effectively use tools such as Jira and Confluence to monitor my progress on team tasks as well as understand the flow of overall team activities. While working remotely did prove challenging, within the first few weeks of starting my position I was able to make excellent use of Confluence to learn about the software processes required for my position, allowing me to participate more in team discussion and problem-solving. This allowed me to quickly shift into making significant use of our team’s Jira dashboard to monitor my own ticket progress as well as see the contributions and actions that other team members were making in real-time, greatly reducing the difficulty of working remotely.

My second learning goal for the semester was also strongly related to working remotely. This goal was to improve my ability to communicate via text formats while completing complex work tasks. I found that within my first few weeks of work it became a very important part of my position to be able to effectively and efficiently communicate with my team members through text-based messaging services. This goal became a persistent effort throughout my work-term and was less ‘measurable’ of a goal than it was visible in my everyday work. I would often communicate with my team members and managers to ensure that I was successfully making myself clear through my writing and never hesitated to contact my supervisor Jenna Hill should I have any questions or concerns regarding my performance. Through regular meetings with my team members, I was able to confirm that I was indeed effectively communicating through text streams such as slack and leaving thorough and appropriate comments/notes on Jira tickets for others to reference.

Position-Specific Goals

After working for a little while at Camis I realized that many of the goals I wanted to achieve were specifically related to my role at the company.

The first of these goals was to expand my understanding of the elements within the software that I am using in order to perform my job to the highest capability possible. This became very relevant shortly after I started my position as there was a vast array of content that I would need to be able to work on without requiring assistance from other team members. I set out to achieve this goal by learning how to make use of the online documentation tool Confluence where past and current team members as well as quality assurance staff had written and organized incredible amounts of documentation. My ability to make use of Confluence’s search and filtering features grew quickly as I began to be assigned weekly epic tickets that required completing. By the time I was approximately halfway through my work term I was successfully able to understand or efficiently find the information for most elements of the Camis software without having to ask my colleagues for clarification or assistance.

As my ability as a software configuration specialist grew I realized that I wanted to take on increased responsibility and work within the team. In order to do this, I set a goal to complete a large >40% of the team’s weekly epic tickets each week in order to allow more experienced senior team members to focus their time on project tasks. I would often seek to takeover tickets from my team members when they were under a heavy workload and ensure that I was assigning myself as many tickets I could confidently manage. This allowed me to greatly increase the number of weekly tickets that I was completing. I would also make increased efforts to review team members’ tickets or offer to perform testing in order to clear ticket queues ahead of deadlines. I was able to successfully increase the percentage of weekly tickets I was completing to well above 40% depending on other work I had to complete during each given week.

The final goal I set for myself was to complete a configuration project for a client in order to expand the role that I had on the software configuration team. Within the last month of my co-op term, I was given the opportunity to take on a few different projects, the largest of which was to add a new parking reservation system for a client. I worked closely with my supervisor and a client account manager on this project to ensure the projects I was working on were being completed as the client had expected and on time. By the end of my work term, I was trusted to handle a series of project tasks on my own with little required oversight from my supervisor Jenna or other configuration team members. I feel this was possibly the largest success I had of the semester as it allowed me to greatly expand my ability to assist the team with tasks of any kind.