Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Still Working for BillG

So after yesterday’s old news, here is some new news.

I am leaving Microsoft and my job as the architect for the MSF methodology. I am taking up a new position as the Senior Director for Software Engineering at Corbis. The company is owned by Bill Gates. So I might be changing employers but my ultimate boss remains the same.

In any career move, like this one, the decision is always complicated. People might want to jump to conclusions. There have been lots of people leaving Microsoft recently. However, whatever people may conclude, I loved working for Microsoft and I thought I had a really cool job. Working on MSF as part of Patterns and Practices and Visual Studio Team Architect was a great place to be. The team is changing the way we engineer software and manage software projects. It’s been a privilege to work with each and every one of them and I wish them all well. I have made many friends at Microsoft.

However, when I took the job I told Sam Guckenheimer that I could only do it for two years. After that I needed to get back to managing a team and leading people doing real work. If I stayed too long in the MSF ivory tower I’d lose my credibility to talk about management and agility and software engineering. So when the chance came up to go to Corbis and get back to leading a team I jumped at it.

Just as I have sad feelings about leaving Microsoft and an unfinished job with MSF, I am equally excited about the opportunities and challenges at Corbis. So stay tuned to Agile Management blog. I’m not going away. Instead I’m going to show how to scale agile and achieve enterprise-wide results.

[Oh and I won’t mind the easier commute from Ballard to downtown Seattle - giving me back about 60 minutes of every day.] Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, MSF, Microsoft

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

MSF Now Part of Patterns and Practices

I’ve been a bit slow to get this news out. Over the summer we reorganized the MSF team in to the Patterns and Practices team and moved our offices to building 5 on the Redmond campus. We now share the beautiful new collaboration space that the PnP created. The plans for this were laid when Ward Cunningham and Jim Newkirk were on the team.

Before I share some photos of the new space, I want to be clear that MSF is still part of Visual Studio Team System. What actually happened was PnP was merged in to the VSTS team. After that was completed it made natural sense to move MSF in to the PnP team. I joked that we were putting all the non-revenue generating things together in one bucket but actually what we did is put all the practices and guidance and methodology things together in one team in the one collaborative space.

As part of the reorganization, Steve Elston takes over as the Group Manager for MSF and Sanjeev Garg is our new Program Manager. There is a slightly modified role for Randy Miller who becomes the Product Planner for MSF. Meanwhile, my title was changed to Process Architect.

I’m also incredibly excited to announce that Alan Wills has joined the team as Software Architect. Alan has a strong background in methodology with his work on Catalysis with Desmond D’Sousa in the 1990’s. Adding Alan adds some significant intellectual horsepower to our team.

Mean while we have collocated the team in one of the flexible collaboration work spaces in building 5. Finally, the MSF team gets to be agile. This will greatly enhance our productivity and quality and I’m very excited about our next release of MSF - which is being targeted to coincide with the launch of the Database Professional version of VSTS (sorry, I won’t talk about dates ).

Here are a few pictures of the new flexible work space in building 5. It’s a PnP experiment to show how Microsoft can build a work environment for agility and agile practices.

This is the entrance to the wing of building 5 where the new space has been built.

This open collaborative space is mostly reserved as “hot” or “jump” stations for contractors and visiting staff.

This is my new office. The offices are smaller than traditional Microsoft personal offices. However, they have sliding doors to save space. They also have glass walls and doors to let light through in to the central collaborative working spaces.

Notice in this second one, how the walls can move.

And here is one of those. The space can actually be configured in to different sized rooms. This is one of the larger ones.

And here is another one. Note the different layout in the room.

The tables are designed to take two flat panel monitors using these flexible brackets.

Many of the walls are glass to allow light to penetrate deep in to the building. Some of these are opaque and double as whiteboards.

There are also some small rooms for private meetings, conference calls and brainstorming sessions.

We also have a social area with a big screen - ideal for watching World Cup Soccer games.

The collaboration spaces have sliding glass doors again to save space and allow light in to the room. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, MSFT, Microsoft, Patterns+Practices, MSF