Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.
John Lennon (1940-1980)
I currently work as a Senior Project Manager and Information Management Consultant at Storm ID Ltd – a Microsoft Gold Partner in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Professional history
I began my professional career in book publishing in London in the early 1990s after completing postgrad research on Mikhail Gorbachev in Soviet Studies. And after Amazon.com launched (September 1995) I became interested in the web and as a consequence starting working furiously.
Over the course of the next three years I realised, very quickly as it happened, that I was far more interested in the internet than I was in traditional print publishing. And, after studying for an MBA in Technology Management, in 1998 I transferred as a junior e-Business Consultant to The iGroup in Computacenter in London.
At The iGroup the colleagues who became my friends – some very technical, others not – were at the time far more talented than me. I was also lucky in that we focused on Microsoft technologies in the corporate space and thus I gained a whole new education on Microsoft Site Server and SharePoint Portal Server 2001 (… can you imagine!). Thus, I learnt a great deal – not all of it necessarily good, true or useful – about project management, solutions design using web technologies, business anlysis, intranets, portals and corporate information management.
All good things must come to an end, however, and in March 2002 I packed my bags, left London behind (and the offer to join a new breakaway start-up company from Computacenter) to move to Edinburgh where I now live with my Canadian partner. These days I wouldn’t trade this setting for anywhere else in the UK.
And during a few frustrating years working on Knowledge Management in the Scottish public sector, I came across Storm ID. And while I left the public sector, and worked freelance for 18 months – in London and in Scotland – I never quite lost contact with them.
As such, I joined Storm in mid June 2006, and have been there ever since.
Professional interests
Fundamentally, I am interested in solution design and business analysis, despite being formally trained in project management (PRINCE2, MSF, etc.). I still retain a love of working on corporate information management, but at Storm I have also learnt a lot about public facing websites (and their various patterns and nuances) from some talented colleagues. There are, as well, great technical people at Storm and – although they may not realise it – every day I gain from them and learn something new.
I am not especially technical (and would never pretend otherwise), although I have now read incredibly widely in the field – a throw back both from being a very idealistic student and a longstanding inclination of mine. This includes technical books, where I have tended to focus more on solution architectures and patterns rather than on “how to do it”. However, even in the latter area I have attempted to learn, but sadly it just doesn’t interest me enough to sustain the effort.
And SharePoint …
In my “second career” I’ve grown up with SharePoint – from SPS 2001 to 2003, and now into MOSS 2007.
And at Storm, although I also work on bespoke web solutions, I have been heavily involved in a lot of solution implementations on MOSS 2007 in a Scottish setting – websites, portals and intranets. Thus, I’ve gained a fairly deep appreciation of what MOSS can and cannot do. This experience makes me like this product more, not less. I have also read very widely about what has become a very “bookish” product, all the while learning about information management, collaboration, and the development of websites and intranets/portals.
Now with SharePoint 2010 on the way, I am involved – along with my more technical colleagues – in Microsoft’s technical preview programme for the product. This is a great learning opportunity for me and few others at Storm.
Thus, my SharePoint interests are both technical and non-technical. Basically, I am interested in the interface between the two, and also about solution design on the platform. And while SharePoint is a product, with all the strengths and weaknesses that implies, I believe it has extraordinary business potential if implemented well.
As a result, despite the frustrations, I like both sides of this platform, although I will never be “developer-level” on the product.
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