Now Archive: February 2021

3rd Feb 2021
5 min read

This is my Now page and here’s what’s up for me these days (as posted on 02/03/21). For my current Now page, go here.

February came up fast and will probably feel even faster for me. I’m all in with work right now.

In case you missed it, I’m living in the middle of Utah, working as a full- time employee for the first time in my life as of last July. Crazy, huh?

Lately I’ve been really bad at even keeping in touch with anyone, posting here, or following up on anything that’s not work-related. But then it’s been 12-14hr day every day for 6-days a week lately too. Getting up by 5am to get to work that doesn’t seem to end as long as I’m awake.

This is not what I had intended to be doing in this role. And I don’t intend to be doing it forever.

It does seem to be paying off though. Just this week it’s starting to look like the tide is turning, and I’m working my way to the bottom of an ever- expanding inbox. A couple more weeks of this, and I should be able to pull back to reasonable levels without compromising too much.

What happened to cause this is that our LMS Admin, the one who worked here the longest and kept everything running, left at Christmas. It wasn’t exactly a smooth handoff, and there’s a lot that’s come to light since then about things that weren’t being handled as consistently as we all thought. I mean, 2020 broke all our internal processes, with 3.5x as many training events & assignments as any year previous, and it forced a lot of last-minute creative solutions to keep training itself from spreading COVID-19. So a lot of that situation is understandable, but it still needs to be addressed.

What I’m doing as a result is basically an in-flight do-over of our Cornerstone OnDemand Learning Management System, and everything to do with training from inventory, to labels, to processes is getting created from scratch. Luckily, I had hired a new junior-level admin in December, so it hasn’t been just me, but he needed time to ramp up and we needed to build out the processes that he’s ramping up on. We also have one part-time consultant, and I’m working on bringing in some others for standalone projects.

As someone who’s done LMS implementations for two decades now, this non- implementations job has become my biggest and least resourced implementation ever. Though Global Learning Technology & Analytics Manager for ConvaTec is my title, I’m still caught doing everything there is to do with training on top of the system implementations part (making courses, videos, reports, standards, etc.).

I always seem to find myself here, don’t I? But then…I guess I am the best guy for it. In any case, I hope to dig myself out of this hole in February. Though it takes a ton of work, it is working.

One thing I did manage to do last month was to get a few live looping videos up to YouTube and this blog:

Of course it was only when I was uploading the final video that I noticed I’d done it to the wrong channel, and that the audio levels were inconsistent between videos, and that…there’s other stuff I really should fix. Maybe I’ll get around to this someday?

Some other things I’d planned to get around to but didn’t really happen much were:

Gaining strength & losing weight = I did gain some upper body strength, yes. But no weight was lost as most of my exercise plan fell by the wayside for January. While I will try not to lose any ground in February, March will be when I focus on this next.
Drop50 cleanup = Rolling over to March as well, except for some critical financial & tax & vehicle stuff that has to happen before then.
Tableau Certification = Turns out this program doesn’t work on my new M1 Mac. And it doesn’t work on my work laptop. And it only barely works on my decade-old MacBook Pro. This makes it very laggy and unfun. I might miss the window on getting my certification altogether, though that’s ok I guess. I do still have my college course certificate.
Learning Spanish = No aprendi mucho este mes. Mi cerebro ya esta damasiado lleno ;)
NAS maximization = Due to some unanticipated network issues (replacing faulty hardware and rebuilding everything), this didn’t happen much either. I got some duplicate files deleted and played with setting up my phone and computer better. By and large it didn’t really work though. This will take more time than I thought.

This is a short month anyhow, and I hope to pull through this period knowing more and being more capable and feeling more in control of my own time.

So that’s me for now. More Now to come later!