Things are heating up at work and, after a bit of a personal dry spell in December, I'm back in action. We've got some new blood in the form of two co-op students who joined us this week from SFU. We also have a pretty well-defined lineup of projects to take us through to the end of the government's fiscal year: March 31.

I've been assigned to carry out feature upgrades on four existing projects. They are as follows:

One: A billing application for the Esquimalt Graving Dock. Administrative clerks at the dock use this application to record all the charges incurred by their clients. The application produces progress reports and invoices for clients and reports on revenue and usage for management. They've been using this application for the past year alongside its antiquated predecessor. Once this latest set of feature upgrades is completed the intention is to abandon the old system for good.

Two: The human resources staffing application. This tool is used to keep track of all the job positions that are planned to be filled within PWGSC in our region. Before a person is hired to fill a government position, a fairly involved and rigorous staffing process is carried out to make sure that they meet the job requirements and that the hiring process is fair to all applicants. The application keeps track of the progress and status of these processes and provides overviews for human resources staff and management. It's also used as an employee tool for people to discover what opportunities are planned or underway within the department. The upgrades I'll be carrying out will make the system faster and easier to use for the human resources staff that have to enter in all the data. We also hope to prep the application for its eventual nationwide usage. My partner in crime Arash has been assigned to work on this one with me.

Three: A real estate project management tool. Staff members of the Real Property branch have been using this application for years to keep track of their government real estate projects. They've requested some improvements to the app that will allow it to keep track of more information for each project and allow the users of the app to access the information more efficiently. I'll be overseeing this project but most of the technical work will be carried out by Shila and Alice, our most hardened veteran and greenest co-op, respectively.

Four: Our department's regional corporate intranet site. This is the homepage for a majority of the seven hundred odd people working for PWGSC in British Columbia and the Yukon. It's the main source of internal news, documents, information and tools for employees. Last year we undertook a major overhaul of the site to reorganize the pages, revamp the interface and redo the technical infrastructure. The next round of changes will be focused around the implementation of a custom-written content management system that Lois has been heading up so far. Right now, all content updates are sent via email request to be carried out by our small web group (re: João). We want to give designated web publishers the ability to update their own content through the website itself, in the spirit of other collaborative websites like Wikipedia.