8:00 – I start the day by checking the Production system for any errors or integration issues and look at the logs for anything unusual or that needs further investigation or corrections. Today everything looks good. I check my emails and respond to any questions and other issues. One of the client’s department managers has raised some questions about one of the Power BI reports that are sourced from our Dynamics data export service. I set up a brief meeting with the reporting lead.
9:00 – Review the reporting questions with our PowerBI expert to understand if there is anything wrong with the report and how best to respond and clarify the questions that have been raised.
9:30 – Roadmap review meeting. The project has recently had a change of delivery lead and I have a session with him and another senior developer in the team to review the backlog and a new roadmap for future development milestones and epics the delivery lead has been working on.
10:00 - Daily stand-up call with the whole team. Working in lockdown, this is usually the only time during the day the whole team will be on the same call, so it is a critical meeting for us all to keep in contact and to understand who is working on what and how best to coordinate our work and see who needs help within the team or if there are any other issues.
10:30 – Solution design workshop. We take a group of the business stakeholders through a document of their as is process that the business analyst has prepared and make sure we have fully understood it. Then we present back a proposed to be version of the process using a new interface we are designing to allow a trusted 3rd party to enter certain data into Dynamics, where it will be held for review – the new process will greatly simplify the current process and require less people to be involved too. The process and design are agreed and can now be documented into detailed Jira tickets, ready to start the development work.
11:00 – I review some work done by one of the junior developers and ensure everything looks as expected. IT’s fine so we can get the new functionality deployed through to the formal test environment. The work is due for deployment to Production in the evening release tomorrow.
11:30 – Developer meeting to work out what changes we need to make to a set of automated SSIS packages we use to bulk generate entities and Marketing Campaigns in the Marketing App for Dynamics. The next programme of work we create will be slightly different so we need to document the changes required into Jira tickets and divide the work between the team to get it completed quickly.
12:30 – Lunchtime and time for a quick run around the park then something to eat. It’s important for me to keep healthy and to step away from my desk, especially during lockdown, where it is very easy to end up working and staying indoors for too many hours in a stretch.
1:30 – I start to make the changes I had been assigned in the earlier meeting as well as to help a colleague test the changes they have are making by generating data into the dev environment.
3:00 – We have a fortnightly meeting for the senior developer with the Microsoft team leading the development of a new release to the Dynamics Marketing App. Gaining early sight of what is coming in the future for the product for us and we are also helping Microsoft sense check their development against real world user needs.
4:00 – Another quick meeting for the developers, this time about the database schema and how best to classify and group the different types of Contact data within the dynamics system ahead of a future data migration exercise for the client.
4:30 – I make some schema changes to add some new fields that have been agreed in an earlier meeting and tell the team building the API that integrates and will use the new Dynamics fields their details so they can start to try them out in their application.
5:30 – After core hours, our day often ends with evening releases being deployed to Production. So, we back up the system, stop the flow of data coming from the integration layer into Dynamics, deploy our solutions and changes, test the system and then allow the queued up data to start flowing back into Dynamics once we know everything has gone to plan.