Bye bye MVP Status. 2011 and beyond
Back in 2005, spurred on by the examples of independent, strong, smart people within this community I decided to break the shackles of permanent employment and hit out on my own. This saw me building what’s proved to be a very successful career and business which I’ve loved to bits. 2011 will be a big change for me and my life, the largest in about five years (which whilst it might not sound like much is proportionally a lot of my life! ).
From January I’ll be joining Microsoft.
What I’ll be doing is joining the Services division here in the UK as an Application Development Manager.
Role Purpose
The purpose of the ADM is to provide our customers access to a wide range of product and application development expertise to help software developers accelerate the development cycle and produce successful applications. This can be accomplished by direct collaboration or by facilitating access to other resources within Microsoft.
By maintaining a long-term relationship with their customers, an ADM becomes intimately familiar with the customers’ development environment. The technical tasks performed in this role include general “how-to” strategic advice, solution architecture assessments, workshops, prototyping, application design reviews, performance benchmarking, code reviews, porting/migration assistance, configuration management and general development consulting.
The ADM gains an understanding of their customers' development organizations' impact on overall business, their development goals, and their pain points - which is used by the ADM to ensure their customers' success with developing on Microsoft products.
While the ADM is assigned as the primary contact for the development efforts of a company, the ADM may leverage other ADMs or even other groups within Microsoft to provide the best service possible, especially if escalation services are necessary. The ADM acts as the escalation manager to bring in appropriate technical expertise (primarily Customer Services and Support) to manage incidents to resolution. The ADM follows up to ensure either product improvement within Microsoft or appropriate development skills are built within the customer's development environment.
Team/Department Mission
Microsoft Application Development Managers (ADMs) strive to be the best in software development. Working with cutting edge technologies we play a pivotal role in the delivery of industry leading solutions within the UK’s most prestigious enterprise organisations and software houses.
This is high value technology consultancy. We generate great customer satisfaction from our long term engagement model. This gives our customers the confidence to allow us to become their trusted advisors helping to architect, design and implement their solutions.
Key Accountabilities
• Work with key UK customers to provide innovative solutions to their development problems, helping to architect, design, implement and test solutions throughout the development cycle.
• Build an on-going trusted relationship with customers by improving their development processes and deliverables.
• Delight customers with your technical breadth knowledge, demonstrating a willingness to engage and work with other resources to solve difficult technical challenges.
• Transfer knowledge to customers through effective communication and engagement style
• Liaise with internal Microsoft communities (such as our development teams in the USA) to represent the interest of customers and drive product improvements
• Remain technically competent in a broad range of Microsoft products and technologies
• Support your peers though deliverables into internal and customer engagements, contributing to an environment for learning and creativity, contributing to others’ success.
There’s a little marketing blurb here: -
http://www.microsoft.com/microsoftservices/en/uk/adc.aspx
Sadly I’ll not be able to make it to the MVP summit as an MVP any more as the status gets taken off me pretty rapidly, evidently awarding one’s own employee’s is seen as cheating, who’d have thought it?
I will continue to be involved with the ASP Insiders & work closely with the Web Platform and Tools Team, not only because of what they all mean to me both personally and professionally but also because it’ll be a big part of my job to help connect experts, and what group is better than those guys to find experts.
Some of you know I’m involved heavily in DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper and the UK Community, this will continue and if anything should increase. The guys and gals that I work with over here won’t let me go so I’ll be pushing that both within my role and outside of it as I always have. It’s VITAL to me that DDD stays independent of Microsoft as that’s it’s true strength – that check and balance.
Products and Projects worked on by my business’ will be handed over to the loving care of others so that they can continue to be worked on and serviced. This is all very woolly at the moment and when there’s more concrete information I’ll announce it.
Thanks everyone for your support over the years and I look forward to working with you in 2011 and beyond.