Noor Naddour

6.30 AM

Morning! If I had to choose two things that I love most it would be clouds and transport. When I was deciding on a place to live, I wrote a program that finds a Brisbane location which is as close to as many existing, upcoming, and committed-funding public transport infrastructure options as possible (train stations, bus stops, ferry terminals and active transport). Somewhere near the Milton Mango is where I call home now! However, I didn't expect to be looking out onto fleets of clouds every other day. I guess I was just lucky.

7.30 AM

Mediterranean Breakfasts (and Arabic Coffee!). I speedrun cooking food, and I am up to be challenged on that. Lunch: Bolognese Pasta from scratch – 15mins. Breakfast: Egg wrap, salad, coffee, and watermelon – 15 mins

8.00 PM

Active transport is one of the best ways to move with a dual purpose! Whenever I go to work, I take my bicycle onto the Brisbane River Loop. Building large public transport projects provides a huge benefit to our society. Active transport is special to me because it provides an additional quantifiable benefit which is better health—not just a time benefit!

8.20 AM

I park my bicycle at work, wondering "whose bike is it making friends with?" Given that I work in a large government organisation, it is very hard to meet everyone. It's even harder to know what everyone does. As a grad, having awareness about where I sit within the organisation is important. With all the unknowns ahead of us grads, it's important to take every opportunity possible.

8.30 AM

Elevator newsfeed. One way my workplace shows care is by the elevator newsfeed. Sometimes it's about our hearts, other times it's about protecting the oceans.

9.00 AM

My work desk. I love having plenty of screens to organise my work content. In the morning, I check my emails and all the material that is still open from yesterday. I sort everything out to:

1. What I need to care about today,
2. What I will have to do in the near future,
3. What I am tracking the status of, and 
4. What I care about for my long-term career development.

I try to have a plan for how to grow as well as what's on the to-do list for the projects at hand. Any merge between the two is a Big Win (even if it was for the shortest period of time!).

10.00 AM

Work! Using digital to improve the sustaiblity of our infrastructure. Being part of a public serving organisation that cares about our infrastructure is a lucky shot for me. I am geniunely inspired by the fact that my organisation has highly reputable and respected professionals who care about our infrastructure's sustainability. I think of the Structures team as the ‘bridge fairies‘. Today, I am preparing deliverables (reports) that discuss a coding sprint our team is providing as a service. The challenge is: ‘in a week's time, what software development can we build, with the proper business analysis done beforehand, to satisfy a business need?‘. Fortunately for me, I play an important role in this sprint: the SCRUM Master. Our team is hoping to develop this rapid software development capability as a service to provide to the rest of the business.

12.00 PM

Meeting with the team. My team is awesome! We align very closely in our values and I value making time for and memories with the team. Our team is made almost entirely from graduate cohorts of the Digital Graduate Program delivered by Queensland Government Customer and Digital Group, except our manager Lachie (he graduated a long time ago). 

1.00 PM

Lunch! Lunch is about making a habit to relax during the day. Sometimes, having lunch happens later than expected, other times work is right on track. What matters to me the most is that our team has a semi-ritual of having lunch together. We talk about random topics during this time. 

2.00 PM

Back to work. Agile methodology has revolutionised project managment. This month, our developers, data and business analysts are blocking out a week to do an Agile sprint. Our team has an unwithering spirit and an appetite to tackle business problems digitally. By transforming raw data into actionable insights, our work helps to enable data-driven decision making. With the blessing and support of my manager, I am helping gather all the pieces of the puzzle pre-sprint. One of my tasks is to ensure that my team is provided with workable data quality. As the saying goes: bad data in, bad data out. 

3.00 PM

Lean improvement capability brings streamlining business operations to the forefront. According to the American Society of Quality (ASQ), an enterprise should pass through Lean before it passes through Agile. I am helping build our team's Lean as a Service (LaaS) capability by creating a library of knowledge about the methodlology. Given that this method stems from a Japanese philosophy, the operational knowledge is ordered into karate belts: white, yellow, green, black. 

5.00 PM

End of day! Going back home is a time to decompress. Once I am home, I focus on other things I care about. I love to learn and I love to chat about my day to my partner. It's a time for personal reflection and development. It's also a time for cross-disciplinary learning and learning from his experiences. What our collective knowledge holds is orders of magnitude more valuable than individual efforts to learn. I never underestimate another person's points of knowledge. Currently we are reading philosophy: I am reading Spinoza and he's battling with Plato.

9.00 PM

Night night! The CBD looks amazing at night. Finding something to look forward to is how I go to sleep. What am I looking forward to this evening? It might have been developing fully fledged data pipelines in my organisation, building a website that sells pretty candles, or learning more about constructivist mathematics. My motto is: ‘Everything's the same as everything else (if you look at it from the right angle)’. The purpose of this motto is to break down barriers between disciplines.

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