Agile Results - A New Workflow?

As someone, who for most part in my career, has been used to taking orders, or had a definite & clear understanding of the work I was assigned to, this new job means that my range of tasks in developing and producing a solid GIS program has become wider.



The last few months, like most new jobs, has been a bevvy of administration duties, budgeting processes, and the standard airport security courses. Such as is it working for an airport, and rightly so.



But overall, the airport is a mini-city and while I could never develop the range of mapping applications or services like a big city and a vast GIS section to service those user requirements, I think I can modernize what's here into something a little more robust for our core users in Engineering and Airport Operations crews. Between meetings for new requests, meeting new people, and figuring out all the new data and software, some days can be overwhelming.  (Side note: Microstation has improved a lot since I took that dreadful course in 2004. <shudder>)



Lots of freedom to explore but a lot of responsibility as well.

I've always had an interest in how to develop a good enterprise GIS program. Kudos to the BCIT GIS program for giving a good foundation in what a GIS can be for an organization.  Now that I'm no longer a small cog in the GIS section, and now the primary one facilitating most aspects of GIS here, it's important to nail down what's important and how to go about giving my coworkers the best data & maps either via ArcMap, or online, or in a printed map.



So JD Meier's post the other day on Agile Results got me thinking. Agile development is all the rage with GIS developers - time to get into that and apply it to my workflow too. Let's see if I can keep up with it in the next month or two and make it a solid habit. With all the changes in my life (personally and professionally), it's a crazy, busy time.



It's great food for thought and something I'll have to practice to be productive. Because my productivity is no longer tied to waiting for a hard-copy map to be printed or icons to be designed for a new map app by the GIS Analyst Team.



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Gotta channel some Ron Swanson, daily!  And good coffee helps too.

When I have to forward a map request to my colleagues for our online map application...

URISA BC Winter Seminar 2009

Haven't had much time to blog over the past few weeks - work has been busy with the Pattullo Bridge going down and the recent flooding in the Lower Mainland due to the snowfall. This blog was just one more thing on my plate to fix up so I've got a new look now. That masthead picture is the next thing to change too (as much as I like Vegas.... it's just not geocorrect here...!)

But I do need to mention that I'm off to the Burnaby Hilton Hotel for the biannual URISA BC Workshop. This one will have a range of speakers on the use of 3D tools in the geospatial toolkit. There's been a lot of interesting developments in the past couple of years (much more than Sketchup models of buildings in Google Earth!) so it'll be good to hear what's going on around town.

Later!

Cool Facebook app: Where I've Been

I've recently joined Facebook and like many others, I've been sucked in. Badly. (Not at work. Honestly. Open office = too many people can see my monitor = bad work impressions. And I've got waaaaay too much to do.)

Anyway, one of the coolest 3rd party applications I've tried out is "Where I've Been", a very cool little Flash map of the world. In the words of Craig Ulliott's , the developer of "Where I've Been", here's its description:

A detailed, interactive world map, [to] show everyone where you’ve been, where you have lived and where you want to go.

It includes a zoom tool with simple click and pan functionality. It also has all the US States, Canadian Provinces and other international regions; it is not limited to only countries. There is no need to create an account on any third party site.

Simple and efficient. I like it. Here's a screenshot of my map - RED: where I've lived, BLUE - where I've been, GREEN - where I want to go.