On Sabbatical!

February 16, 2009

Photo by fergusonphotography, November 2008

Apologies for recent silence — it's been quite a while since my last post! There are reasons for that, though — some big changes in both my professional and personal life have kept me busy for the past few weeks :)

First: I've left the UK and moved to New York City! My partner has been transferred here to join another group within her company and I've followed — I believe in the benefits of co-location ;)

Next: I'm taking a one year sabbatical from Important Projects. For me, moving to New York has meant getting a work visa, which is pretty difficult to do so if you're self-employed — much easier to do if you find an organisation to hire you for a long-ish contract, work with you on the paperwork, etc.

So: I've taken a one year contract with The Economist to help them move to Drupal and to adopt Scrum!

It's an exciting opportunity for me — the work The Economist will do to move to Drupal will benefit the Drupal community (The Economist has a very progressive open source strategy, IMO), which will, by extension, help NGOs using Drupal. The experience I gain in helping The Economist adopt Scrum will help me help NGOs adopt Scrum (which I believe NGOs should do, not just because of the benefits, but because of the inherent values of Scrum — more on this in a later post).

I'll miss the friends I've made in London over the past 3 years, but look forward to seeing them when I'm back there from time to time, and I'm happy to report that
Drupal for NGOs will live on — thank you in advance for taking over organising responsibilities Robert Castelo et al :)

I still plan to post here when I feel I have something interesting to say, and until then, all the best! And let me know if you're ever in New York :)

agile, drupal, enterprisescrum, importantprojects, nptech, opensource, projectmanagement, scrum