Leave-taking and New Horizons

Over the last 2.5 years, I have worked with a number of charities, and had a fabulous time doing it. I've met some great people, with real passion for what they do, who are making a difference in the lives of the people they're helping. I was a part of that. I never delivered direct services. Instead, I helped them do better, more effective work, often through technology. It was my great pleasure.

And now it's time to move on.

I have done what I can, and found, looking back, that things were not working for me. The issues had nothing to do with our clients, or our mission. I leave behind some people who will continue to pursue working with charities with passion and drive. They will carry the torch, and continue to change the not-for-profit sector for the better.

I am moving to new opportunities, which I was too captivated by to pass up. While a lot of the work I've been doing over the last few years has been with small charities, I now have a chance to apply what I've learned to large organisations throughout London, the UK, and the world.

Many organisations have been caught out by the rate of change in technology, over the last 10 years. Traditional job roles, hierarchies, and silos, don't work when technology makes it easy to put something in front of a customer in a few minutes. The imperative to make sure everything is 100% perfect before releasing is being eroded by the idea that rapid change, and rapid recovery, is more valuable to customers. Monolithic projects taking 24 months are being replaced by very small iterations that take 12 hours. Releases which used to keep teams up late at night on a Friday, and over the weekend, are being replaced by releases which take 3 minutes and happen constantly throughout the day.

This is the future, and companies want it. They want to be able to be more responsive to their customers. They want to be able to make rapid changes. They want to be able to make changes in one system without affecting an unknown number of other systems. We will help deliver it. We help make that possible, with agile development practices, microservices, continuous integration, and configuration management, largely in cloud environments. That, alone, is pretty fascinating. And it requires changes in how companies work.

Change creates chaos. Poorly managed chaos results in failed projects, unhappy customers, and poor morale. Every change has ripples. The bigger the change, the bigger the ripples and the more likely to cause unforeseen problems. Unmanaged change has a tendency to fail, over the long term. While you can change individual processes, how the company thinks about those changes can stay the same. When the change agent leaves (a consultant, a local champion, or senior stakeholders), the old ways reassert themselves, slowly blunting (and often reversing) the changes. That's where I come in.

My new role will be to help organisations figure out what change they want to make, figure out who needs to be involved, and figure out how to achieve it. This will overlap with the technical changes that are being implemented. Working in tandem will make things more effective than either of us working alone. Together, we can change culture. Together we can change technology. Together, we can change everything.