Here is the logbook of Sarah, my daughter, who is doing her observation internship in ninth grade. She will be observing me all week at work in my mainly Parisian tribulations to discover what professional life is like—at least, mine. I’ll let her speak, without distorting her words, I promise.
Day #1, 9th Grade Observation Internship, Sarah P.
We got up at 6:00 AM to catch the 7:50 AM train. My father is used to working on the train; he takes it every week. He has an apartment in the Marais (Paris), close to Place des Vosges and Saint Paul Church. My father, with two friends, created a company called smartview. There are three bosses: consultants in organization and microsoft. If a company wants to organize a project but doesn’t know how to proceed, my father’s company will help them, explain certain things to them.
In this profession you have to make yourself known: on social networks (twitter), and also through their blogs/sites, or through conferences. This first day, we did a lot of train travel: Montpellier-Paris, Paris-Strasbourg. My father made a few phone calls, and browsed twitter: that’s part of his work. He doesn’t have a fixed schedule.
Day #2, 9th Grade Observation Internship, Sarah P.
Strasbourg, conference at Château de l’Ile. (Atlassian Tour, Netapsys/Smartview)
With Stéphane and Aurélie from Netapsys, Alexis a client of Stéphane and my father.
My father is an agile coach. What is agility? It’s a set of improvements or updates that take into account competitors, future users, with teamwork. Netapsys is a computer engineering company (development, tooling, etc.). Smartview is a consulting firm.
Agility? We no longer know what agility is, everyone calls themselves “agile”. It’s mainly about responding to performance. Agile is the marketing word, it mainly means “complex”. What do we need to do to make it work? Have a motivated team, clear objectives, interest people, make them accountable for projects; do finished things in small pieces, do the most important things. You can have the right to be wrong. My father was very relaxed talking about it. I think this work interests him a lot and that he takes pleasure in doing it, which is important to me in choosing a job.
Tools and methods (Stéphane and Alexis). To put a project together end to end you need to know where you’re going and keep a logbook. Thanks to certain tools like Jira this can make the task easier for companies. Alexis talked about his experience with this tool and his results. After a break, they made a circle with the chairs, to have a “round table” and answer some questions. I quote Alexis: “we are not trainers but deformers”. I have the impression that people don’t like change (even me for that matter) and so certain people must be needed to get them out of their comfort zone.
What I really liked: The round table, it allows answering everyone’s questions, we could see who was really interested.
What I liked less: the “advertising” side of the presentation, trying to sell a product, it’s not very interesting for me.
Conclusion: I really liked the conference even though there are certain complicated terms that I didn’t understand.
