The Consultant started his career in 1987 with IBM in the UK. The first role was in Application Development and was excitingly titled “Programmer/Analyst”. Working on IBM’s payroll with very legacy technology was eye-opening. I quickly realised there had to be a better way than this.
Later, working on a salary increase planning application, I was faced with challenges similar to those the early Agile pioneers also faced. On my own, I came up with backlog and sprint as embryonic ideas that I used to help me succeed in a difficult situation. The result was a highly satisfied group of customers, improved efficiency and quality of development and the renewal of trust between the user community and their IT service providers (whom I was one of).
Moving on, I saw the bright lights of the sales division and jumped. Training as a Unix engineer in the very early ’90s, I had the most fun ever helping IBM and then Amdahl sell very powerful Unix servers across the UK and Europe. On the way, I learned a huge amount about how data centres work, what infrastructure really is and how to tackle the various issues faced by the people who were buying very powerful systems and trying to extract value from them.
After several other job moves and learning a variety of new technologies, I was given an interesting opportunity. An old school friend of mine had an older brother who owns an electronics company. He had taken on a student during the university vacation to develop a PC application to work with their electronics products. It had not been fully completed and the products had been further developed since, leaving the PC application obsolete. My challenge was to renovate the PC application and bring it up to date. The technical challenge was that it was a C#/.Net application and I didn’t know those technologies.
I spent the 2010 Christmas period learning C# and .Net programming and went to work in January. I was successful but the important spin-off was when I agreed to help the Commercial Manager of the business find a CRM system for him to use. That introduced me to Microsoft Dynamics CRM and the owner of a Microsoft partner company, who assured me I could teach myself Dynamics CRM and be a Functional Consultant, working for him.
The rest, as they say, is history. I may tell you about it over a beer or two some day.