We are trying to get organized at work right now by lining up our various projects for the year, drafting agreements, determining scope and reviewing our resources. Today we met up pretty much all day with our new project manager who has joined us from the Western regional team in Edmonton.

We have three major projects that we're looking at right now. All of them were supposed to have had significant work done on them last fiscal year that turned out to not be as significant as we would have liked. So we're playing a little bit of catch up now and need to show some quick progress.

The projects are:

Trainsim: A standalone desktop application used to model trains and train tracks. Written in FORTRAN, this software is a true relic of the past century. We'll be porting it into Windows and giving the user interface a facelift.

Regional Extranet: Our region's presence on the inter-departmental government network. Since we are the Canadian government's back office, this site is particularly important for us to present ourselves to our clients (i.e. other government departments).

AIP Reporting: Our department has been funded to renew the country's infrastructure and lead us all out of recession. Projects funded by this special two year program are being closely scrutinized because the public naturally wants to see results from these highly publicized stimulus packages. Our team is developing scripts to extract data out of an unfriendly enterprise management system so that we can better visualize and report on these projects.

So today we all got together in a boardroom and had a group knowledge transfer session as Lois and Arash walked us through the painstaking process of teasing spreadsheets out of SIGMA, the unfriendly enterprise management system, which is now owned by SAP. Sorry, I couldn't really find anything about it on the Internet to link to for some reason. We also reviewed the current state of the Extranet site and came up with a list of outstanding items that need to be finished by the end of this month. We'll assign and prioritize them tomorrow. We also started thinking about our "technology roadmap" and what sort of tools we'd like to rally around for the next while, and Mike gave us a rundown of Sharepoint which they've been using in Edmonton. I liked getting together and talking tech. We used to do it more often. I'll be pushing for it through weekly group sharing sessions and regular pair programming.