The week of Team Receptacles – Chelsea

We often get the question, especially our consultants: what exactly do you do at CAPE? We would like to show you, based on stories from our employees, what exactly we do, and what a working week as a consultant at CAPE looks like. That's why we started 'the week of', in which we give an insight into different CAPE teams every week. We kick off with 'Team Receptacles' (yes, every team makes up its own name 😉). In this blog Chelsea tells more about her week and where the team name 'The Receptacles' comes from. Enjoy reading!

Monday

So, the weekend is over. It was my birthday last Friday, so pretty much the entire weekend has been dedicated to my birthday, but now my first working week can start as a year older. Monday at the beginning of the day I always start filling in my hours from the previous week (phew, I know, I should actually do all this on the days themselves). This Monday was quiet for me in terms of meetings, so I was able to work in Mendix. At the moment I'm working on setting up a super cool new app within one of my projects at PostNL. Today I was able to take great steps in this direction. In the evening I went boxing, sports really help me to clear my head and really let go of work so that I can sleep well at night.

Tuesday

Tuesday was a lot less quiet in terms of meetings. When I look at my agenda at the start of the day, I see that I only have some time off around lunch. That's because today is sprint change day. Within CAPE and PostNL we work via the Scrum methodology. This means that we develop in short iterations of 2 weeks, and at the end of each iteration we show what we have been able to deliver and plan what we will tackle in the next iteration. Today many of these “Scrum Rituals” are scheduled. In the evening my CrossFit training was on the schedule. I recently started doing this and I can also lose my energy here.

Wednesday

Wednesday I went to an introductory meeting with a potential new customer. This was my first time attending such a conversation. Very fun and educational! I really like that this space is there, so you always learn something new and you can continue to grow where your interests lie. Today's conversation has given me more insight into how I want to organize my career path.

Thursday

The day started well on Thursday! Normally I'm not much of a morning person, but today I managed to drag myself out of bed for a run before work. While sweating, I already banged on my laptop to answer some e-mails. There are also many meetings scheduled for today. The PI event will be held within PostNL next week. This means that we will look a quarter ahead with all kinds of different project and development teams at what we can tackle. In many projects, a lot is dependent on other teams, which we try to map and manage as well as possible during this event. Prior to such a PI, each team is asked to estimate the activities to be planned in a 'T-shirt size'. When all teams that are going to work on an issue have made this estimate, it is given a priority and then planned or not within the PI. Because I am currently working on projects within 2 teams, I am very busy for both teams to get the issues as clear as possible in order to be able to issue a T-shirt size estimate. One of the things I did today to clarify a certain piece of new functionality is to discuss a new Solution Design with my colleague Terence. Before we start building a new solution, we first think about how we want to design it. This is then visualized in an architectural plate of the landscape and the application (see image below).

Friday

Then it's time for the last day of the week. Pre-Corona Friday was always the day that all consultants were not at the customer, but at our head office in Enschede. On this day, everyone often discusses the week. Friday is always a very pleasant day for me. Especially because at 4 o'clock there is already a nice toast to the weekend with a wheat smoothie. Today we close the week really well because tonight we organized an online cooking workshop with the CaFeCie (The CAPE Party Committee) (of which I and a lot of other #Receptacles are members). Just thinking about it makes my mouth water.

Have a nice weekend everyone! 

PS The name 'The Receptacles' came about because the team is working on solutions for PostNL. A 'receptacle' is a name for something where packages are collected, such as a bag, roll container or pallet. Because the team also does all kinds of different things with/for PostNL, we actually consider ourselves a kind of 'Receptacle' 😃

Chelsea - business IT consultant

Chelsea Veenstra
Business Consultant