This time last year I blogged about my first year of employment with Thoughtworks. Not surprisingly, one year later now marks my second year and like all good things is a nice time to reflect on what things have happened since then. The best place to start is probably to see what I wanted to change last year and what has happened since then.

(From Last Year) Single-Project Consultant
Anyone who has worked in Brisbane understands that the commercial scene is not as broad as Sydney or Melbourne, and a consequence of being Brisbane-based (or is that bound?) means that I only got to work on a single project whilst I was there. I understand the commercial reasons behind it, but I think the same reasons pair rotation is important also apply to project rotation – consultants gain invaluable skills and spread knowledge, techniques and practices continually adding to the value of the organisation and to the clients they work with. Two years on I have now been on three different clients and four different projects, and I am now about to roll onto a fourth client.

(From Last Year) Lack of Travel Opportunities
Consulting brings with it the threat of constant travel, but being based in Brisbane didn’t bring anything with this. One of the programs Thoughtworks offers to its employees is an Exchange Program that enables people to transfer to the different offices (UK, Canada, India, China, USA and Australia) for a year to try living in a different country. I opted for working in London and it has been a fantastic experience since arriving in August last year. I have even visited an English seaside town for one of my projects but I do prefer experiencing all that London has to offer for the rest of the time that I will spend here.

(From Last Year) Further Feedback
One of the greatest things about working from the London office is the sheer number of people that you have access to on a regular basis. I imagine the other Australian offices would be different to Brisbane, but it’s great that you can bounce ideas around and discuss different topics with more than just a handful of people.

In terms of more formal feedback, the UK is setting great initiatives with project roll-off reviews and annual reviews. It really isn’t too hard getting other colleagues to give you feedback informally.

What Other Great Things Happened?
I am continually stunned by myself to see how my skill set continues to expand in so many different areas because I get to talk with and work with really bright people. It is especially more apparent when I pair program with people just how many more patterns, refactoring, testing and development techniques and principles I have learned.

All of these things I am now trying to share with more people. Last year I presented at an internal conference (one of our fabulous so-called “Team Hugs”), and was accepted to Agile India to present a Ping Pong Programming Challenge (but unfortunately couldn’t make it due to certain circumstances). This year I’ve submitted proposals to both XP 2006 in Finland and the Javazone conference in Norway both for later this year. I think it’s a great opportunity to share what knowledge I’ve gathered and get more feedback from industry fellows.

I am now dabbling in several new languages, some old and some new and am also now focusing on expanding on skills outside of just development to become a more well rounded consultant. My current focus is developing skills on being an agile coach because I have found clients tend not to understand a lot of the principles and I have found a team will be more effective if the team performs a number of the basics. As you may have read in previous posts, I am now currently building up a catalogue of retrospective exercises that I have found useful and what others might find useful. My personal beliefs have also significantly changed or perhaps even strengthened. I strive consistently for building self-empowered teams, not only because I think it is more successful but I think it is more fun and frankly I would rather have fun whilst working.

I did a little bit of sales work early on that was really just showing clients the way we work and the way that we do things, something I found quite interesting. It was nice that we could polish off some of the work that we did, turn it into a demo, and give it to people who were interested in doing things a different way and having them say, “Wow.” It’s such a rare opportunity that we get to do this on our projects and be appreciated by our clients.

So the good: Meeting and working with loads of other TWers, doing a variety of development and non-development roles, great amount of personal and professional growth, and all the things to improve from last year did improve.
More to improve on: Sharing this experience with more people and developing skills in even more areas.