There is life after Microsoft — but it’s different
5 months ago, I left my great-cozy-beloved Microsoft job, to join a small automotive company, with the promise of a near greenfield experience and the liberty to shape the digital workspace in this company, as I would see fit.
I left after spending 9 year, 11 months and exactly 24 days in Microsoft, mostly, because the ideea of a new challenge was more attractive than that of steady growth and comfort.
“Is there life after Microsoft?” — was one of the most often heard jokes on the mothership.
This is a story of life after Microsoft.
Leaving the nest
I announced a couple of months in advance of my 10 years work aniversary that I am looking for opportunities outside of Microsoft. There were a couple of offers from inside, but nothing to really tickle my interest.
The deadline I had, was to be gone, before the 10 years aniversary.
As it is, I found myself with just one month to go, and no new job.
A frenzy of interviews followed — many great jobs, but in the end I picked up the one that came with the most opportunities to build new and exciting experiences and products.
It was a bitter sweet farewell… meeting most of my international team just 2 weeks before leaving was especially heart wrenching.
What I learned: take more time for such changes, and also take time off between jobs.
The first days
I spent my first weeks with the new employeer in the corporate headquarter in Germany.
It felt like taking a plunge into deep cold water. One schock came after the other.
The first surprise was when I arrived: while going through onboarding I was assigned a Windows 7 laptop. Windows 7? Windows 7? I felt like the earth was crumbling under my feet. After having the latest and greates hardware and software for ten years, was I really in a place that still uses Windows 7?
The disappointment must have been visible… cause in the end I actually did get a rather nice Windows 10 machine (the same model I had in Microsoft).
Second schock was while going through the existing infrastructure — best practices be damned, nothing seemed to follow official guidance. There was an highly overlapping software portofolio: underused produts, badly used produts, never used products… It looked more and more like an IT engineers/managers nightmare.
And this experiences kept coming at me for the first three — four weeks or so. Was this a mistake?
What I learned: be very clear about what you want — and learn to manage your expectations.
Low hanging fruits
Back in the local office, and after meeting my team, we started to discuss about the actual needs of the business and what were the immediate actions we can take to help out.
A couple of PowerBI dashboards here, some people introduced to MS Teams, a couple of Azure Functions there, a small page customization over here, and we started getting a lot of positive feedback from our users.
I started being excited about the new job, and mostly about the possibilites. This was the right place for me to be… up into the fight.
Adrenaline
Given the initial feedback — excitment was starting to build-up.
All the cool things we could do…
Some basic calculations showed that we could actually decrease costs… a lot, while increasing the overall quality of service in a considerable manner.
A couple of fellow IT warriors were quickly found, and we started preaching the new IT productivity ways to everyone who was willing to listen.
During this 2–3 months we actually saw utilization of services skyrocketing, adoption of new products seemed imminent and every day was a joy to come to work.
A strategy was concocted and we started converting people to our cause left and right. Ohhh those good days…
What I learned: think long term from the beginning.
Cold water
After the first push — I slowly noticed how we started to loose momentum.
Almost every week we had major incidents that would take precious time away from working on the rollout of new features: unexpected service failures, patches pushed by providers without consulting, infrastructure failures, poorly written code riddled with bugs, zero documentation…
The migration to O365 and other modern tools was stalling.
Instead the effort was going into stabilizing the existent platform, where failures were happening faster than we managed to patch them. The support we had from some of the departments was starting to crumble. The initial shock and awe was gone. Back was the bickering about how IT cannot deliver.
Some of the solutions we developed seemed to be meerely hacked together — far away from the smooth, modern, streamlined experience we were dreaming off.
Days mostly consisted of endless sessions of trying to fix over complicated workflows with no documentation, looking into data or procesess that went belly up, patching platforms that were ripe for the graveyard, fixing problems caused by fixing other problems…
The nights are reserved for dreaming of a world without old versions of Nintex, sites badly coded, databases with no backups, data with no archival, software that is so misued that it cries… and all the other nightmares.
The plan
So, here we are today, ready to go back into the game. For this I have a plan, and simple rules:
1. Reduce the scope of our efforts — we cannot fix it all. Not at once, and not fast. Users will have to wait. We focus fire on some products / services that are most critical. We studied the support tickets and had discussions with key users, looked at the business impact and isolated two or three topics that will be in the center of our work.
Rule: We will not work on more than 2 projects at a time. (we are a small team)
2. No compromises on quality. We will continue to deliver on low hanging fruits where we feel we make no compromises. But as soon as I suspect we are in danger of falling short on our targets, we take the long way.
Rule: Quality before quantity.
3. Focus on people — regardless on how good the products are, the people using them are more important. Training our users, establishing relationships, understanding their exact needs.
Rule: When someone calls or writes, I immediately answer, regardless of what we are working on at the moment.
Requiem
When concocting my plan to leave the mothership, I had this idilic view of how I will take all the knowledge, experience, leadership and communication skills, I gathered in the last 10 years, focus them on a rather small target and in matter of months start an IT revolution.
I learned by now, that many of those skills and aptitudes, worked well in the context of the large and well oiled organization that Microsoft is.
Life is a bit tougher out here: infrastructure is not perfect, resources are limited, resistance to changes is more real, not everyone is an expert, nor passionate about technology, the right answer is not always the correct choice.
Would I go back? Probably not!
Having left the mothership feels like growing up: I am in the real world now, and I will conquer it!