Marshall & Swift/Boeckh #

For some reason I know that the date I started with this company was December 5, 2005. I was with them for quite a while and in some ways it was a bit of a dream job as far as location goes. They were based in downtown Los Angeles and I took a Metro train into downtown from Simi Valley, then went downstairs from the train terminal to the subway station and rode a subway for 2 or 3 stops and came up to the office. I really loved this as it also gave me a reason to leave on time as I needed to catch my train. There was no crazy working late to finish something up, there was always tomorrow and most of the people there had the same situation so no one needed to feel guilty about leaving the work behind to get home on time.

I was working there for over a year when I got this special project to help collect data that was used to feed their calculation engines when I first got a real understanding about what MS/B did. They could give you the current cost to replace your house based on some dimensions, location and a few questions. It gets the data to make these calculations by phoning suppliers of certain raw materials and then these calculations are used to calculate the cost of other items and the area in which you live. It is very formula driven and uses a lot of stats. It was then that I realized that this was the perfect company for Mary as she had just finished her MBA and loved statistics. Both of these things, real-estate and statistics where things that she loved.

I made some good friends there and one in particular was in the QA department. He wanted to get out of QA and more on the business side so he got to be a Business Analysis. These are the people that actually write the requirements that I would then develop against. The thing that Ed and I found so crazy about this process was the amount of boiler plate was currently in gaged in this. I often when get one of these requirement documents and highlight the things that my team would have to work on. In a 50 page document, I might have a page of things that we would work on. The other BA that I had issues with argued that we never read his documents. I read them and I could tell that he never read them because the copy paste that he would do to write these documents did not always make sense.

Anyway, I worked on a project with Ed and although he was told to create these big documents he would make a single page document for me on the things that I would need to work on. Then one day Ed tells me that he is leaving. His daughter is finished High School and going to College in Portland so he was moving. Sad as it was to see Ed go, I also saw this as an opportunity to get Mary in here and maybe she to show Rob what a real Business Analysis could do. It took a while but I did get her in and it was fun riding the train together and working in the same office. We even managed to work on a couple of the same projects together. However, they also did not get the brilliant abilities that Mary had to provide. They assumed that Mary would come to me for all her ideas, not realizing that these were her’s. The best thing that I did for her was to leave the company and then they saw how good she was and promoted her to Product Owner and she continued to build her empire.

One of the things that I did while I was at MS/B was to get them to move from using Visual Source Safe to Team Foundation Server. As time went on we started with just version control but soon we were starting to use more and more features like build and deployment. We could not seem to talk our QA folks to get on board, so one day we were at the Microsoft Office, right across the street from us and they were doing presentations. One of the presenters came from the QA background and lived in California. My manager said we need her to come in a talk to our QA people to get them on board onto this platform.

We got Anna to work with our QA folks and even had meetings that included all other various departments to getting more automation with the product. It was so good to get to know Anna and she could see how much I had already done here with the product. By this time Mary was getting pretty much done with Marshall & Swift as Rob was just not getting it and causing all kinds of frustration. If Mary left, well that was my last hope for this place cause the developers were okay but those requirements were a really big problem. There was a project that went to an off shore team in India and it was built exactly to the instructions that Rob game them. Yes, instructions not requirements. Rob included the how in his requirements document. One of the many things that just drove me crazy about what he did under the guise of a Business Analysis. No one wanted to fire him because he had 6 kids. Anyway that whole plan of his was unworkable and was had the shortest life span and was sunset pretty early because it caused too many service calls and a maintenance nightmare.

I worked on the Phase II of this project with a stellar team and our parts worked so well but Rob and I butt heads a lot on this project because he was being stupid, didn’t really understand the product he was developing. I had a good repor with the product owner and he and I saw eye to eye and more than once Rob had to walk back to his desk with his legs between his legs. The problem was that our phase was sitting on top of that unstable phase I that Rob wrote and was unchallenged by the offshore team.

It looked like Mary was going to quite so if she was gone I did not want to stay here so I reached out to Anna because she knew which shops were already deep into TFS and it would be an easy step for me to take to go there without having to convince people what you could do with this product. I did not hear from Anna for quite a while, I guess she had gone to Europe for the summer or something. When she got back read my email and introduced me to her boss Chris. I had an interview with Chris a couple of weeks later at a restaurant in Burbank where Mary and I got off the train at the Burbank Station had my interview with Chris. Yea it was a bit weird having Mary at my interview. Chris was pretty sure that they wanted to hire me and he was trying to figure out if he could fit Mary in somehow. Anyway, they had me do a TFS presentation with Chris and Becky remotely and I got the offer. Put in my two weeks using my PTO (I had 2 weeks vacation) and I was off. Working as a consultant for Notion Solutions which was then bought by a Canadian company out of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada as a TFS ALM consultant.