Use the Salesforce Luke

Salesforce has been the big focus of this week. Me and a colleague (Andrew in Aberdeen) are going to be taking over responsibility for maintaining and updating Salesforce for the four clients (Boots, Leonardo, Thales and Clydesdale Bank) that use it for customer relationship management. Whilst not requiring too much attention each week to keep things running smoothly, the software is expansive and easy to get lost in so there is going to be a fair bit of training before we can take over the reins in March.

After an introduction to what each account specifically uses Salesforce for (Thales uses it for purchasing, Leonardo do some contract work for example), I began playing around in a developer environment; getting comfortable and running through some test scripts much like I’d done in Oracle Fusion. Yesterday I had a trip out to the Preston office for a day of knowledge transfer. A lot was covered, starting with the basics of how case management works for Clydesdale Bank who have the simplest out of the four systems. This was broken down in to more detail and expanded to include parts relevant to the other accounts. Potential problems were detailed throughout as they came up, such as how changes to one interlinked custom field could have effects down the line and potentially break part of a different account’s process. Workflow rules, forms, layouts, standard vs custom objects were some of the other topics covered; all the while gaining useful insight into the history and practices of the accounts and of Salesforce.

Finally, we touched on a large 2020 upgrade that we’ll have to undertake this year. This is from the current Salesforce Classic to Salesforce Lightning: a sleeker, new build with better functionality that’s been under development for the past few years.  The knowledge transfer was really useful, and I’m excited to have a mini-project like this that I can take a lot of responsibility and independence on. Hopefully I’ll feel the same way come March!

Gradlife

This week has seen me pulled in various directions, taking some knowledge from each. I’ve learnt the basics of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and how your average webpage uses this for security before going further in depth as to how Rolls Royce systems use this to ensure their servers are secure and an overview of the connecting processes for this. Alongside this, I also began research in to Salesforce, the cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) that DXC maintains for a handful of clients using it for customer relationship management (CRM). Finally, I’ve begun to run through various walkthroughs of tasks in Oracle Fusion Financials, exploring the parts of fusion I’ve been given access to and becoming comfortable with the software.

This afternoon the UK graduate intake had a large Skype meeting to discuss the grad scheme with senior management. It was a valuable opportunity for a direct dialogue and was good to deliver pros and cons we had found so far as well as listen to futures plans. Personally, I gave a brief insight in to the digital immersion course as this is a hot topic for the other graduates who are keen to experience it, and management who are close to confirming changes and improvements to the course. I also helped to organise the Q&A, acting as a quasi-Dimbleby to make sure questions were lined up ready and the discussion flowed smoothly and logically between the two sides of the meeting. There was a lot of talk about looking to continually enhance your skillset and seeking out or creating opportunities for yourself to improve. Whilst not necessarily a new idea to hear, it did give a bit of a motivational kick and start get me thinking along those lines again.

However, a small point stuck with me the most which Shafiq Kalla touched on. He explained whether we’re moving vertically, laterally or externally in the future, people will be looking for the rationale behind our stories so far and how it relates to the next step. If there is a rationale it will show ambition and drive as well as giving context as to why you’ve been learning a set of skills. This leads to the point you should always be considering if/how what you’re doing is going to be beneficial to you, and is it taking you in a direction you want to go.

Digitally Immersed

Happy New Year, in this blog post I thought I’d give a brief roundup of the digital immersion course. The app itself hit setbacks towards the end of the project as a database proved tricky to integrate with our existing program, however we did manage to create a login system using the No-SQL Firebase by Google. It allows you to remotely set passwords and email addresses to be used to access the rest of the app through our login page.  Amazon’s DynamoDB was also close to achieving the same result, with cosmetic changes required but difficult due to Amazon’s own UI integration. Below you can see a selection of screenshots of this login and the rest of the app.

 

 

Login page
Main menu
First step of entering personal details
Entering card details
Claiming back an assessment day expense
One of the tutorial links to other services
A FAQ page accessed through menu button

 

For a small team coming in to this project with no experience I think we all feel fairly pleased with what we’ve made. We received positive feedback about both the app and our working methodologies, with many of the problems encountered mirroring those of real world projects. Below you can see how we would continue if carrying on:

presentationscreen1
Slide taken from our final presentation – link below.

As well as this, our opinions and thoughts on the course can be seen below:

presentationscreen2
Slide again taken from the end of our presentation.

A full overview of the course can be seen in more detail through our full Digital Immersion Course Presentation.

On a personal level, I feel I now have a decent grasp on what agile means; working in sprints and with Kanban; and how to work independently as part of an IT project. Making use of each others individual skills as they developed throughout this project was a key part of how we learned to work more efficiently, and I feel more confident in approaching problems with unknown solutions now.

In terms of improvements, I think the course could have done with some more regular feedback throughout the weeks, possibly something to mimic customer interactions so that adaptations have to be made at points throughout the project. It’d also be interesting to hear the thoughts of someone with prior IT or agile experience as they would presumably find it less useful when joining from a digital background. Overall however, it felt as though it got us up to speed and was a good use of time.

 

Ps. Normal service to resume on the blog with updates every Wednesday!

 

Gitting Better at This

A fairly quiet week this time around, with progress continuing on the on-boarding app. The team struggled to combine our separate builds of various pages and sections at first, with it turning out more difficult to merge projects in android studio than first anticipated. We tried uploading to GitHub through DXC’s own service however we hit a brick wall of permissions and ended up using private accounts to share our files with each other. GitHub is definitely something I want to explore further despite our troubles with it on this project. In our latest sprint retrospective an interesting point came up that although combining projects had been a blocker and taken many combined hours to solve properly, now it’s a simple 5-minute job for us if we want to add a new page in. Alongside this, we have two new graduates who are being integrated in to the team who we’ll be able to teach these skills a lot more quickly than it took us to learn them by trial and error.

With our work merged the next big task is to implement a database to work alongside the app and store information such as names, passwords and addresses. Half the team have been researching this whilst we worked to format our different pages and make a more coherent product that’s also in line with DXC’s branding. Today I have been working to create a custom taskbar to be implemented across every page of the app; with company logo, page titles and a drop down menu for FAQs and settings included. Next week I’ll post screenshots of the finished (demo) product which might give a better overview of our work, thanks for reading!

Hackerman

Thursday and Friday of last week our scrum team took a break to help with a hackathon being run in the DTC for students from Newcastle, Northumbria and Sunderland Universities. It was good fun to be a part of an active event like that and see how differently teams worked and came up with their own solutions. The brief was fairly open, to begin development on an app that could help autistic users through the use of wearable tech and Amazon Echoes. There were some really smart students, with excellent technical skills that put our ropey Java understanding to shame. We were able to judge and award marks on how well the teams were working however, looking for agile techniques and good communication. Ultimately the best teams were those that fully understood the depths of the brief and really considered all options and factors surrounding the problem, not just the pure technical development.

We’ve continued our sprint this week on our own app and I’ve found the progress made with functionality a surprise. I was naturally leaning towards wanting to do more work on design and usability where I felt my current strengths would lie, however I keep end up trying to implement small new features to the banking pages of our onboarding app that I am responsible for and getting sucked in to these technical challenges. After a lot of YouTubing and StackOverflow posts it’s good to finally get a small feature working (such as a drop-down menu or connected activity) and I’ve been able to help others in the team quickly work them in to their pages as well, agile at its best! The next few days are looking like they’ll be a challenging rush to connect all our bits of work and I’ll report back in a weeks’ time how the finished demo looks.

Digital Immersion Heaters

I’ve spent my past week beginning a digital immersion course: a month of training with the other Newcastle graduates designed to flesh out all of DXC’s favourite buzzwords. It began with understanding how a scrum team operates, and the in-person training delivered by certified scrum master Will McLean was really helpful in getting a solid understanding of the process and its benefits. We all agreed that we came away from the first few days with a much better understanding of scrums than the online tutorials had given us. Next up was learning about Kanban and its use in projects to influence productivity. This included an interactive “board game” that exemplified how hard it was to keep track of so many simultaneously moving factors, but ultimately lead to a better understanding of what we could control to boost profits on a second run through of the game.

We are now working as a small 4-man dev team in a scrum simulation with the goal of producing an onboarding app for new DXC graduates like ourselves. Whilst coming up with clear plans of action quite well, sprint progress has been slow at times due to our unfamiliarity with the software used (first Visual Studio before switching to Android Studio). However, it’s rewarding when the YouTube tutorials and fixing of code pays off to create a small result. We’ll see how the app is coming along in a week!

First Steps

Hello world! I’m starting this blog to document, share and consider my time as a new graduate starting with DXC Technology as part of the oracle delivery team. I’ll be covering what I learn, projects I’ve been a part of, and how well I’m finding the experience of joining a massive organisation like DXC.

Over the past few weeks I’ve had all manner of company policy and structure thrown at me, as well as more interesting insights in to Bionix™, Platform DXC and the use of scrum teams to provide agile transformation for businesses in need of a digital upgrade. These opening salvos of information gave way to setting up various systems needed as part of work and HR. The highlight of this was trying to solve why I was blocked from IT support, with the slight hurdle of having no access to IT support… Needless to say it can be a frustrating process at times but it’s to be expected with so many legacy systems from two merged companies. If a silver lining was to be found, it’s taught me the value of why organisations should invest in their IT and not rely on ancient, legacy software.

As well as this, I’ve begun my introductions in to the world of oracle and the financial services it can be applied to. My manager and all-round metal-head Craig Mercer has been taking the time to guide me through oracle financial processes such as P2P (procure to payment) which have so far seemed extremely logical and thought out, especially when oracle cloud is used as part of it. No doubt it’ll start to get more complex and a great deal more confusing as time goes on but for now I feel I’ve been keeping up alright.

Finally, each week I’ll have answers to questions set by my team to test my learning. This weeks can be seen below:

What are the 4 c’s of oracle?

  1. Chart of Accounts – This is split in to segments for balancing, cost centres and the core accounting with others for any trackable product details required.
  2. Currency – Set definitions for currencies and their conversions as different currencies may be used between transactions, ledger accounting, generated reports etc.
  3. Calendar – Ledgers may require different periods of time (accounting calendars) which will depend on the specific needs of the organisation at hand.
  4. Accounting Conventions – Brought in with release 12, accounting methods are defined at the individual ledger level meaning that for accounts spanning multiple countries, local regulations and standards can be adhered to.

What are the differences between chown, chgrp and chmod?

Chown is a command used to change a files user and the command can only be used by privileged users, for instance gaining access with sudo su.

Chgrp is similar however it will change the files group instead, where a group will be made up of individual users.

Chmod is used to change the permissions of a files user, group and others. It uses a number system where 4 = read, 2 = write, 1 = execute and 0 = no permissions. For instance, if chmod 730 was used the user would be able to read, write and execute the file (4 +2 + 1 =7); the group would only be able to read and execute the file (2 + 1 =3); and any others would have no file permissions whatsoever (0).

Any answers here may not be 100% but are my understanding of the areas after a bit of research (any future grads reading hopefully it helps but don’t take it as gospel!). I’ll hopefully have the next blog out Wednesday and then weekly installments from there.

Thanks for reading

James