Experiences at Avanade

Senior Manager
Global Market Development

August 2005-Present
* Manage Global Delivery team of 40 people, scaling the team from 10 to 40 in a year.
* Team consisted of 3 Project Manager; 18 .NET Developers; and 19 Developer in Test.
* Directed the team toward a successful integration of a Scrum Agile method of development reducing release schedules form a typical 9 months release cycle down to 3 months.
* Delivered 12 new assets or updated assets in the past 2 years. Assets utilized regionally for customer delivery projects accounting for 70% of Avanade's total revenue.
* Responsible for the development, training, and delivery of Avanade VB Migration Center of Excellence based in Delhi, India. Team is responsible for providing pre-sales; estimation, and delivery support to VB migration projects.
* Maintained 20% personal utilization and for my team onshore
* Developed new Support offering to accompany a broader Application Maintenance solution, creating a great confidence with our customers in our assets and commitment to ongoing support.
Technologies:.NET 2.0-3.0; VSTS; Team Foundation Server (TFS); Visual Studio 2005; Windows Vista; Office Suite 2007; InfoPath 2007; Project 2007; MS Dynamics Enterprise Library 2.0-3.1, SharePoint 2003 and 2007; Windows Mobile 5.0.
Methodologies: Avanade Connected Methods; Accenture Delivery Methods; Microsoft Solution Framework; Scrum; Agile Methods; Test Driven Design (TDD);...

Be a superstar .NET coder

I'm an IT Consultant for Microsoft Dynamics AX.

Member of the executive team that formed the company and grew it to $650 million in revenue in seven years. Lead all go-to-market activities for application planning, development, renewal, integration, and. outsourcing, which together comprises 70% of company revenue. Scope includes custom development, SOA, mobility, business intelligence, and enterprise collaboration. Created and managed the P & L for the business intelligence practice. Started the application outsourcing business and grew it to 22% of company sales in 18 months. Lead a R & D team of 60 people onshore and offshore (in India and Manila). Lead Avanade's involvement in various Accenture / Microsoft initiatives including: Enterprise Performance Management, Intelligent Contact Center, and Enterprise Mobility. Lead creation of sales and marketing materials. Created an internal open source program for harvesting and reusing IP created on customer engagements. Managed ISV relationships. Conduct press and industry analyst briefings. Speak at industry conferences....

1) System Engineers = Jeans, t-shirts and tennis shoes.
2) Solution Developers = Jeans, t-shirs, and dress shoes.
3) Project Managers = slacks/jeans, collared shirts, and dress shoes.
4) Upper management = slacks, dress shirts and dress shoes.
5) Business Developers wear the same attire as the client....

Great! I carpool with a friend on the express lanes from Mercer Island, and then get free parking with him at the garage that his work pays for him to park in.

1) As Avanade is a technology consultant, I am immersed in an environment at the forefront of the technology industry.
2) It is exciting to be surrounded by foreigners at work.
3) Avanade is located 1-block from Seattle's famous Pike Place Market, which allows me to enjoy delicious food every day....

Avanade provides a wide variety of experiences as a consulting organization so I would submit there is no 'typical' day accross the organization. Therefore:

If you are on an engagement, you wake up in your hotel, complete your preparation, commute briefly to the customer site. At the customer site you will be working with the project to plan for the rest of the engagement and to work through implementations of the technology that we have been engaged with. You can always expect heavy microsoft involvement and a heavy front-end planning process before we are ever to a point that servers get configured. Depending on the time compression involved in the project, most of the time you finish near regular business hours and commute back to the hotel. From that point on, your time is yours. Often the evenings are spent getting dinner as a group or going to play pool, etc. The after-hours camraederie that is engendered during an engagement is one of my favorite parts of being on-site as a consultant.

When you are not on an engagement, you are on the bench. You wake up in your own bed, walk the 10 steps to your computer, sit down, and work on training acording to the development plan that you and your career manager have set out for the year. You do this until end of business or until you want to stop, whichever is later, and then you continue on with your evening. Bench time is extremely flexible, it is up to you to manage your schedule. Understand that Avanade has some base expectations about your general productivity on the bench but how and when you get things done is driven by you....

Understand that you are entering a consulting organization with a deep expertise in the Microsoft space. The consultants are (generally) smart and highly certified. Even management have Microsoft experience and technical knowledge. That being said, you do not have to prove yourself every minute of the day. A common thing to see for new junior consultants is usually the nervous conversation steering towards thier own experience. This is understandable. It is usually because the new consultant feels insecure, I know I did when I joined avanade. The truth of the matter is that your position amonst your peers is really going to be determined by your project work over time and your contribution to the common mailing lists we have at Avanade.

During your first few weeks, concentrate on learning how avanade does things, complete the many trainings you will be assigned, and read all the documentation you are given links to. No one expects you to be THE expert right out of the gate so relax and try to make your first few weeks about learning what you can that you did not know about us or the company systems, and less about connecting everything around you to something you have experience with....

Avanade uses a four stage interview process. The first step is the recruiter interview. This interview provides the feel for the recruiter to understand if your values and career goals are a good fit for avanade. Do you like to train? Are you interested in constant learning? Are you willing to fight hard to stay on the very front edge of technology? Is travel going to be a problem?

The second interview is a technical interview with either a System Engineer or an application developer, depending on your specialization. In this interview, you can expect to be asked a wide range of questions accross the board to generally cover the gamut of your area of expertise. During this interivew, the interviewer will take the time to work with you on assessing your questions about Avanade and the experience as an Avanade consultant.

The third and fourth interviews are in-person usually back-to-back. In this interview set, a director and another technical consultant will meet with you in person, ask questions that are more focused to your particular skillset and experience. The second technical interview is a chance for another technical specialist to get an idea of how you answer questions in person, how you conduct yourself in a technical situation, and how you present and explain answers. These are highly relevant skills in the consulting environment that may not neccessarily be required in a normal support or operations environment.

The directors job will be to integrate all of the knowledge and recommendations in the first three interviews and then use that information to take a deeper look at the HR and soft skills side of your career experience. The director will utlimately be the one to make the up or down decision on whether or not to extend you an offer....