November 2015

The Bane of Work Life in 2015 - Organizational Standards

  • Posted on: 18 November 2015
  • By: Jay Oyster

Working in corporate America, one is surrounded every day by the endless jargon of endless variants of organizational standards theory. In the manufacturing world, it was all ISO 9000. In the IT world, everything is all about ITIL. And everywhere you go, you see the religion of Jack Welch, the high holy Six Sigma. And there are sub-variants for particular areas of operation. Project management has Agile and Scrum. Purchasing has LEAN. Every department has a well-branded theory these days.

Do you know what the point is of all of this? It's really quite simple. It's to get people to do what they would have done anyway if anybody had any common sense.

Trued Up the Legs and Thoughts on the Hardness of Silver Maple

  • Posted on: 16 November 2015
  • By: Jay Oyster

Working the tenons on the legsThe last time I tried to rush on this project, I just about screwed up the legs while trying to cut their tenons on the table saw. Over the last couple of days, I got back into the shop and basically treated these like I would a handcut dovetail layout and preparation. Since I don't have a good workholding surface at this point, I've gone back to simple tools and simple solutions. First, I took the two front and two rear legs through the surface planer so that each pair has the same width and depth. The lengths were already accurate. Once that was done, I used hand tools to fix the tenons. Since I glued the legs up from planks of varying thicknesses, I ended up with tenons that are not exactly the same  distance from the front and back of the legs. Instead I focused on the side to side location of the tenons, and making sure that the shoulder is accurately at the same depth all the way around on all four legs. 

I got them to a point where they won't embarrass me when assembled. The tenons, though differing sizes, are all square and beefy enough to hold offset pegs. And in any case, the exact locations of the mortises for these tenons will simply be traced from the tenons themselves after I assemble the whole undercarriage into one assembly. I'm still working on dimensioning the boards for the stretchers. Since I have no boards thick enough to function simply as stretchers on their own, each of the four will once again be a glue up of a wide board and a thinner board. I probably need to sharpen up my planer blades. This maple is HARD.

Finally got the dimensions and the tenons right on the workbench legs

Named as Manager of IT Asset and Vendor Management at WellStar

  • Posted on: 16 November 2015
  • By: Jay Oyster
Asset Management - Tracking down all the loose threadsAfter working for about two and a half years in various incarnations of the WellStar IT PMO, I've now been promoted to head up a new team. I'm still staying within the IT Administration department, But I'm taking on the job to create a unified Asset and Vendor Management team. We'll be responsibilble for standing up and/or expanding our IT CMDB (Configuration Management database) and an asset management tool. The current small team in place already handles IT maintenance contracts and assists with IT purchasing, but we will be greatly expanding the processes around tracking assets and vendor performance. Personally,  I'm very excited about this. It gives me a chance to both feed my analytical side, expand my management responsibilities, and I sincerely hope, help out a worthy organization grow and improve itself. WellStar is a not-for-profit healthcare organization in Northwest Georgia that I've found to be surprisingly progressive for a large enterprise in the Southern United States. I'm especially pleased with how proud WellStar is to be one of the best employers for women in the country. And I have to say that WellStar has about the most diverse team of talented professionals that I've ever worked with. 
 
WellStar Health Systems logoSo . . . I'm going to be very busy over the next few months and years taking on this new challenge. And from what I've seen . . . this kind of IT asset management initiative is at the core of the modern IT world. It's both interesting to me, and I feel, important. Improved management of IT assets is a key area of improvement for making sure that large organizations start to truly benefit from all of the innovations and technology we've seen come into the world in recent years. It's a marshalling of forces to better address the issues of the modern world. But first things first, I wonder where all of our printers are?