Christmas 2015 Holiday Status Message:

Actual message:

It's always a good idea to use a break to do those business-critical tasks that build up over time. A recent consultant's report as well as internal focus groups have revealed a number of areas of the Treloar domain that need attention. The current list of enhancement requests to be prioritised and scheduled over the summer holidays include extrahome user-interface refresh, including window enhancements; intrahome update, including consistent application of branding and colour schemes throughout the site; review of the information architecture for the library, with particular attention to the science-fiction and fantasy sub-site. In addition, the current approach to storage management in the study and toolshed is clearly not working well in support of either efficient space utilisation nor retrieval times. Switching from a JIT to a forced garbage-collection approach should yield benefits here. The result should be an improved environment for all users and a better customer experience.

Post-leave update:

I am back in the office and dealing with the 1010 emails that are the inevitable consequence of a rigorous commitment to digital detox over my summer holiday. As a result, replies may be a little delayed until the end of the week.

For those interested in an update on the summer holiday tasks listed in my out-of-office email, the following summary may be of use:
- forced garbage-collection on the study and toolshed storage subsystems has resulted in greater space availability, improved retrieval times, and increased UAT scores
- library information architecture review is still a work-in-progress, but the increased space availability will allow for greater flexibility in storage allocation options
- the intended branding and colour-scheme overhaul was not achieved during this set of sprints, but has been prioritised towards the top of the existing task list; importantly, updating the colours of the kitchen chairs to match the oven (rated as very high priority by management) will be accomplished on time and within budget