An ALM/DevOps consultant’s life – Working for clients big and small, near and far

I am writing this as I sit in a small Inn in North Adelaide and wonder at the wide range of clients I work for. As an IT professional specialising in Microsoft’s Application Lifecycle Management suite I tend to travel a lot and work with clients that range from small teams of 3-5 developers to incredibly large multinational organisations. This is an aspect of my job that I absolutely love.

Working with small teams is very rewarding as you can usually bring about change much more quickly and easily see the results of your work. Working with large organisations is also very rewarding as they face a very different set of challenges and often it’s like trying to change the course of an ocean liner with just a paddle. That’s not a complaint mind you. Large organisations typically require you to develop and hone a different set skills and can be just as rewarding as working with small teams.

So this brings me to my night in an Adelaide Inn. For the next couple of days, I find myself in South Australia, working to educate a small group of testers on how they can test applications using Microsoft Test Manager and TFS 2015. I look out the window of my accommodation and see a small suburban streetscape from my ground floor window. It’s a relaxed and calm view.

I think back to exactly two weeks ago when I was staying on the 52nd floor of a hotel in New York’s Midtown just a block away from Times Square. Looking out that window revealed a very different scene with many iconic high rise buildings and the Freedom Tower in the distance. On that occasion I was teaching a large group made up primarily of project managers, business analysts and testers how to use TFS 2015 to manage a large multi-million dollar project. The client was a large media company familiar to millions of people worldwide.

The travel can be tiring, my body often doesn’t know what time it is, but all things considered, I love my job and look forward to the next set of different and interesting challenges that await me next week.

NYC_Skyline