I am very pleased to announce that I have accepted a position as the Vice President of Engineering at Asynchrony Solutions, Inc., a leading agile development firm based in St. Louis, MO, effective May 1st, 2006. I’m thrilled to take this new position, as the spirit, principles, and values of Asynchrony very closely mirror my own — honesty, integrity, agility, openness, and all that other good stuff. In my new role, I will be responsible for helping align the agile project processes and practices with the larger business goals of the organization, developing an entirely new training division specializing in agile development and management practices, creating a .Net development practice, acting as a mentor to Asynchrony’s growing body of agile coaches, and managing several development projects for our clients.

I am unbelievably excited about this opportunity. I will be stepping away from day to day development tasks in part (not entirely!!!), but I will be responsible for helping to set the overall agile direction of the entire company. My goal is to publish as much as I can about our successes (and failures if allowed ), further the art of agile project management, and develop an effective way to sell defense contractors on agility wrapped inside their CMM-based processes. I truly want to be as transparent as I can about my activities, as I haven’t seen anywhere nearly enough published about this part of agility.

The one downside to this (and it is a tremendous downside) is that I’m going to have to leave the patterns & practices team at Microsoft. I have had an incredible 2–¹⁄₂ year run with them, I have had the opportunity to work with and learn from some outstanding people (Tom, Scott, Peter, Brad, EdJez, and now Jason and Don, plus too many more to mention), and I would not trade that experience for the entire world. Contrary to what outsiders might think, Microsoft is an incredible place to work — everyone you meet is consistently brilliant, helpful, and they all get it. Think what you may about the corporation Microsoft — they have amazing people. And mostly, I want to thank Jim Newkirk for having the faith in me to bring me into p&p all those many months ago, despite the objections of Scott and Naveen  I’ve known Jim for 10 years and consider him to be a very close friend, and I do thank him for all he’s done.

I do intend to keep up this blog, still writing about technical topics as I can, but I’ll also expand its topics to include more management-based learnings. I’m excited about this, and I can’t wait to start.

Yours truly,

Brian Button
V.P. of Engineering
Asynchrony Solutions, Inc.
http://www.asolutions.com