A Week With… Johanna Adamson
Johanna Adamson works since 2015 at Backbase, she is Chapter Lead Business Analysis and Senior Consultant in Professional Services [We implement Backbase products for our customers]
In her free time she tries to play music. Some mobile recordings are on https://soundcloud.com/joy-adamson
FRIDAY
Does the week start on Friday? Well, it sort of feels that way because…
This one has not been a typical working week. I am a business analyst so my work is to get into the gritty details of what our customers need, help them build a vision and make it happen using our products and the skills of the bright people in our teams. I don’t bother about materials, I worry about content, requirements, processes until I got the questions from our VP of Professional Services, Linda Bovaird, if I wanted to be the project manager of the Hackathon 2016. How could I refuse?
In case you don’t know a Hackathon is an event that generally goes on for a couple of days (including the night) where (mostly) developers and other disciplines get together to create, disrupt and/or hack a product. In the end there is a presentation, a jury and a winner. It just felt so amazing to help creating this moment for the colleagues, I didn’t know what I was getting into but with other 12 volunteers we did and we absolutely underestimated the effort, we made mistakes, we had good laughs and in the end we are approaching the big days.
Some impressions from last year…we have to make it bigger and better this time…
The hard work we did with the Hackathon organisation team is concentrated on today and tomorrow. It is very exciting! We started the promotion of the event on the website http://hackathon.backbase.com, Mark Wittkampf created new T-shirts and the 2016 poster, Anna Caibling was all around the office and on social media doing the communications, Mark de Jong set up the live stream, Fernando Gonzalez setting up the back end servers, Justyna Adamzcyk taking care of the goodies, Sarina always taking care that we are all good fed and that there are enough drinks. All the pieces of the puzzle coming together with the support of Kyle Kinnaman in our Atlanta office. Next to that we needed extra hands everywhere, so Anderson Vaz, Sofia Kosiborod and Dominique Hesta joined forces for the final touches.
We kicked of the day with a speech from Jouk, our CEO, and went straight into 36 hours of coding, drinks and team working. We also wanted the jury to take a first look at the projects. Hard to do with so many locations. Luckily our new colleague Sofia Kosiborod organised this flawlessly. We are ready to survive the night and prepare everything for tomorrow.
SATURDAY
Today is the day! The Hackathon is in full mode and after lunch we will have the presentations and the jury will choose the winners. The challenge today is that we are running the event on 9 different locations of Europe and the US, so I worry about the connection and how clear will it be to understand the people presenting remotely. Luckily we have an amazing team that thought of everything and the presentations went on with only 10 minutes delay in total and the teams did amazing. So much creativity and skills! 3D printing, mobile apps, web apps, for customers, kids, for internal processes…we had a full range of awesomeness and a lot of fun.
SUNDAY
No work today. The Hackathon was hard work but we still have to do post Hackathon work, such as paying prizes, making internal announcements and editing the video trailer, but all that can wait to next week. Time to unwind a little bit :)
MONDAY
Back to business as usual mode with the Swiss Re team. Business as usual for me is talking to the customer and the team to understand where we stand and were we are going, preparing JIRA so the team knows what do we need to achieve, refining requirements. And coffee, lots of it! Brexit sort of stopped the work of the team today, that was an unexpected surprise…
TUESDAY
Business as usual sounds nice, a day of full focus to one project, but this is Backbase and things happen fast. So today after the team stand up I am interviewing a candidate for a business analysis position and right after talking to nearshore partners about the DNA we look for in new hires. Then there is finally time to work on the Swiss Re project again, but not for long. A project in Ecuador also needs some support so there I go, switching to my mother tongue to give a hand to our UX consultant Celeste North based in Mexico. Multiculturality and variety, I don’t complain ;)
WEDNESDAY
Day off….a bit of time to relax and recharge.
THURSDAY
Mailbox full, agenda full. Today there is a lot about new hires, interviewing people, attending to presentations of strong candidates who are advanced in the process of becoming colleagues, lots of coffee and Skype calls while switching to the regular project tasks. It is enjoyable to talk to people from different backgrounds and cultures, still, our task is to test they are a good fit for our company, so putting some pressure here and there, asking difficult questions that have no right answers and giving back the feedback to recruitment. The day flies away!
FRIDAY
Time to party again! This one is starting early…9 am and the music is on top volume at the office and champagne is flowing. Backbase has just closed an important deal with a big Indian bank. We see already some colleagues flying over there for longer periods, Backbase is on conquer the world mode!
Today we have our company summer party, some interviews in the morning to later hit the bus to Bloemendaal. The weather is not on our side, but still some colleagues were brave enough to go into the colds waters of the North Sea. It is just the perfect closing of the week to later enjoy the weekend at home with not many plans ahead..until next Monday.
