The first day at Visma was filled with excitement. I travelled from Stockholm to Oslo the day before, after two months of doing nothing, the brain was well rested and ready to work. Questions started to stack up; Who are the other trainees? What is going to be my first project? And what in God’s name does “EBITDA” mean?
My very first project was comforting as well as challenging. The task appeared to be simple: “Automate the creation of Incident Reports”. Nothing more than collecting the data from one place, structure it, and put it neatly into another place, right? Oh, you silly graduate! Of course, nothing is that easy once you start. Because people change their minds. What was once the stakeholders’ demands are now history. I learned this is what it is called being agile.
Working in this agile fashion seems inefficient some days. When you’ve been coding for two days and when the third day comes, the code is useless. But you evolve, you learn what questions to ask and how to use the knowledge you got from school. And you got help around you. Throughout my project, I had my project owner Erik by my side. Erik taught me.Net, he taught me Tableau and he taught me the importance of eating cheese every Friday morning. In the end, you also realize that being agile in a project is the best way to deliver something of value.
During my time in the town we call Oslo, I managed to, together with Erik, deliver a recurring report of the availability of certain Visma services, a button to automate the creation of incident reports and a database modelled to ease future analyses. The first two months of the Trainee program lived up to my expectations. I got to write code, I got to write a specification of requirements, making sure it was followed up, and I got to experience the real world in product development. However, I’ll probably never understand what EBITDA really means.
