Small Talk - Blog by Houratious Albert

 Are you a parent new to Australia, thinking about how the education system works in Australia? Are you thinking of a way to contribute to the local community? Joining the school council may be the answer for you. As a parent, you can bring your perspective to the school and if you can bring your knowledge in an area of expertise like Building, Finance, IT, HR or Education, or Event planning that would be great. In 2019, when my son started school in Australia, I knew little about the education system here, having not attended school in Australia myself. I saw a call for nominations to the School Council I was keen to take up the opportunity.  I really wanted to get involved in his education. By contributing to the school in this manner, saw a possibility of learning more about the education system here and doing a part for the community around me. It has been a great learning experience for me in return for my time commitments. So what is involved in volunteering as a parent ...

Culture, diversity, and sustainability are the defining keywords of the present-day workplace.  Leaders and employees alike are searching for the magic formula to understand and theorise abstract and far-reaching concepts like culture and diversity. Current ways of achieving diversity that organisations and leaders adopt are to include observable diversity like ethnicity and background into consideration when forming teams. This is amazing progress compared to 10 years ago when I was rejected for jobs in small companies at the final stage of interviews because of “cultural fit” and not due to technical or leadership abilities.  Today, that is not just unacceptable, we are in a world where people actively try and work against such biases. That is a pleasant and welcome change. Where the trouble starts is after the formation of a diverse team.   Leaders and teams will not be able to harness the power of Diversity of thought if we are unable to...

Short Version (TL;DR:) Having delivery managed the team that won the IT News Award for health category 2021, on a very high note, I am moving on from Readify / Telstra purple as part of the current redundancies at Telstra. I am evaluating my next career move to join an organisation that enables me to contribute to a purpose that makes a difference.  Long version:  Last week, the project that I delivery managed, CHRIS, won the IT News award 2021 for the health category. The week before, I was confirmed of my redundancy as part of the current round of job cuts at Telstra along with 1400+ other colleagues. It couldn’t have been a better time, as it gives me the opportunity to end my current chapter in the organisation on a high note and with a swell of pride for my humble contributions, while walking among giants. From my early days at our tiny office in Docklands as a consultant, intimidated by the brainpower around me, to my current position leading the same state/squad in Vict...

  Here are three obvious but sometimes overlooked ways to advance your career. This is a short reminder post to help you land your next role. 1. Target a well-defined role. Understand the process Speak to people who have gone through the process Understand the expectations of the new role from the decision-makers. Find a mentor to keep you guided.  Ensure visibility to the decision-makers. 2. Be prepared for chance opportunities. Look out for roles where your current skill set is transferable. for internal roles, you can look out for temporary positions especially if you are working for large organisations. Most organisations have an internal and external job board. Keep an eye out for new opportunities.  3. Create your own role Be observant to the problems around you. In some cases, you might find that there is a large gap in responsibilities that are not covered by any role. Carve out time in your schedule to take up one of these problems created by the responsibility g...

This article is not a direct address to a problem statement, but a journey with me to certain philosophies that I have entertained in my quest for personal growth. There is a short and effective way to look at personal growth which I will come to in this article, one that I believe will help you to be more closer to peace with the practice of personal development.  I am thankful to many people in my life, for instilling in me a desire for personal growth in my life.  Both my parents have always been open to learning and cared to share some of their struggles with difficult choices and dilemmas associated with scenarios. A few school teachers stood out in vocalising their own personal learnings and set an example by embracing the incompleteness in spite of not being required to do so. I was fortunate to have attended a school that celebrated learning and instilled pride, largely thanks to the unconventional principal that held office there. The themes you can notice in these ex...

A big part of any leadership role, be it team management or managing a large portfolio, leaders are expected to provide decisions on various matters. Leaders would want their teams to be empowered in decision making, and making good decisions comes from preparation and practice.   So, How do we make good decisions?   Here is a cheat card of 5 steps to enable you to make good decisions. Let us take a hypothetical example.  e.g. You would like to organise training for a few members of your team. Convert the activity to a business case and find the concepts  This is the most difficult step. More often than not, as employees in an organisation, we expect us to be guided through a problem at hand. This is where thinking like a leader makes a person stand out. Instead of someone and receiving a decision we can look at the factors and concepts that will affect the scenario. Let u...

I like doing workshops more than presentations. The main reason is that you get more engagement and if you can convey a concept by activity, it stays with you longer. A common trait I have noticed is that some people like to have clarity on how the workshop is going to play out, and some don't mind the suspense. Expectation management is important when starting the session. Feedback on activity-based workshops tends to be positive and sometimes, the participants request a follow up one. Almost all participants enjoyed the forced interactions and group activities. Showcasing or talking about team or individual outputs of activities creates a sense of accomplishment and ownership of the concepts/ideas. Some of the workshops I have done so far include: Design Thinking Empathy Mapping Project Handover Time Management

People in creative jobs often speak about being in the zone. Being aware of being in the right zone can boost your confidence to face your challenges better. Returning to work after a 5-week break, I really wanted to be in zone for work right from the start. My trigger came from a TED talk video by Ray Dalio on - How to build a company where the best ideas win. Certain references in that video jolted my memory and gave me the needed jump start to be in the zone. Search for your inspiration and you will find it. Here is the link to the video that gave me mine for the day. https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_dalio_how_to_build_a_company_where_the_best_ideas_win  

In this post, I talk about my experience and learnings from volunteering at the MyRoad program run by Beacon foundation . The program aims at providing career guidance opportunities for high school students in remote schools all around Australia with a focus on female students in particular. The aim of the program as I understand it is to provide exposure to the world of regular jobs; what can be expected in a working environment and to encourage students to continue further education. I was introduced to the program via my current employer, Readify. There are a few highlights that I found from my participation. 1. Structured mentor preparation The mentor training materials itself makes this volunteering program worth attending. The materials provided include very good guidance on working with young children, being mindful of cultural differences, etc. 2. Structured delivery for consistency The mentors are given a script that they can follow. This is carefully crafted t...

7 Practical Tips for Customer Engagement Here are a few practical and high impact tips that I have learnt and used multiple times to enrich customer relations. 1. Stating the obvious Most people who make decisions are under some sort of pressure to come to a conclusion. Some like to think through and come to a conclusion, but more often than not decisions come out as a response to something as opposed to a planned outcome. It always helps to call out the obvious impacts of a decision even if you think the customer is experienced. Here are two examples: Delay of work due to reprioritization: This is a frequent one in projects. Change of mind on priorities can have a flow-on effect for current work underway. Paraphrasing as "So, just confirming, you want us to stop working on X and start working on Y" has several times had the customer come back with "Oops, no no, I thought we can get both done on time. Thanks for calling out." Addition of cost due...

The business landscape has changed over the last decade and more and more customers today are referring to online sources as the first preference to either make decisions on purchases or do the purchase itself. IT can be a complex and expensive world to navigate for someone starting a small business and in many cases, it is an afterthought and not taken into account during initial planning. Here are a few steps that will help you to think about IT and how you can start simple but still plan ahead when considering to open a new business. Selecting a business name Once you have shortlisted names that you like, to avoid a name that is already taken or closely resembles a brand or name that you do not want association with, you can check these four sources Business registry Most countries keep a registry of business names where people can look up information about an existing business.  In Australia, you can check this on the ASIC website .  Trademarks V...

Tried many things, finally what worked is to change AMD switchable graphics settings to run VS installer in power saving mode. <end of post >

www.workingdays.com.au is a great site for calculating the number of working days specific to Australia. Highly useful for calculating pricing etc. for project management.

I tried an activity game with my 4y old son for measuring objects in his room using blocks to learn relative sizes. However, he soon got bored by it. Noe that he has an interest in animals and he has a small collection of animals gifted by his grandma, we decided to do the measuring up game again. After watching a couple of videos on youtube to know that this is something zoo keepers and vets do in real life, the engagement and interest spiked. We borrowed the Stichting tape and kitchen scale, measured up the animals and filled in our little zoo book by noting the measurements against the animal name copied from a textbook.

1. Make sure you are using cat6 cables everywhere. Cat5e has a speed of 100 mbps max and cat6 supports upto 1 gbps. 2. Have enough data points throughout the house ... especially where you plan to keep .... modem/router, TV,  Playstation / Xbox,  home surveillance, study desk, landline. 3. Get Internet connected at lockup stage so you have it at handover. 4. Using the Internet,  test all ports at handover. I missed this. I think one of my ports doesn't work. 5. Have a NBN box in the garage with 2 extra power plugs. 6. Have all the data points in the house connected back to the garage/ ur preferred place like a hub. 7. Have two data points at the place where you are planning the router/modem tracing back to the garage or your hub. This is so that you can switch it around.

Octopus Deploy Tip - Feature Branch Channel Create a feature branch channel as the default channel and configure the lifecycle to only deploy to dev. This is to help feature branches from being deployed to production.

To view request headers of incoming requests from IIS, you can use failed request tracing in IIS to include status code 200. This would log successful requests too and you can view all request headers in the "request details" > "general request headers" section. 

Windows 10 anniversary update wiped out my PC's Hyper-v role Wiped out Net Nat and other network settings. Make note of all your settings and roles before you install the update.

If 1) Umbraco admin tree is not showing up and 2) is determined not to be a problem with the trees.config file and 3) Clicking on any of the navigation elements gives you          Request error: The URL returned a 404 (not found):          views/propertyeditors/undefined/undefined.html Check permissions on the website folder for iis users. Easy way is to give machinename\users full security access on the folder.

Quick Tip - Enable failed request tracing in IIS for status 200 to log Request Data and search for GENERAL_REQUEST_ENTITY in the resulting trace file.