(Photo above - Norwegian team member with UK team member)

Back in London I worked with two new ATS joiners to set up the UK Deliver Centre part of the support team. These guys came fresh out of training and our Deliver Control Services (DCS) bootcamp where they spent two weeks learning the ins and outs of the development lifecycle and how teams within the DCS help to support projects. This included a five day Administration course of our Configuration Management tools and a 1-day training session on our in-house tool, Moose, led by myself and fellow colleague.

Due to the nature of the client we worked for security was a must and so our access to the servers in Norway is via secured laptops which directly open a Citrix connection to Norway’s infrastructure. This is all a bit technical for me but I know how to use it and that it works! We will come into work for the standard UK hours and take over support from Norway, who start at 7am our time, to provide configuration management and build expertise. Every day we have a call with the team in Norway to discuss the open issues and actions for the coming day and this is built on status sent out from the previous night.

Our daily tasks include looking after incidents from the developers around the configuration management setup and monitoring environments, builds and deployments. We have a tool setup which pings and checks the environments throughout the day displaying a nice multicoloured screen over in Norway informing the developers of the environment status. Also we are constantly developing new tools to help with processes that are required regularly on the project and these can be the best part of the job.

An example of this is that one of my UK colleagues has set up a website to generate many different kinds of reports that the client requests. These vary from querying our defect management tool to our service request tool and environment statistics. You will never run out of a tool to produce within our line of work, you just have to realise that it’s there to be developed!

This section of our work has been going on for about 6 months now and within this time the Norwegian team has visited London and we have repaid the favour back to Oslo. Both visits resulted in the mandatory night out helping the teams to get to know each other better as sometimes the distance can make working together awkward. Now we just have to setup another visit over there so we can go and ski!