Looking back at 2013…

At the last day of 2013, I decided to look back at 2013 and write down how I experienced it.

First, I determine if my predictions of 2013 came out or not. I expected the year 2013 to be really crazy after Microsoft’s 2012 Christmas Gift: System Center 2012 SP1. I have to admit, it didn’t become ridiculously crazy as I expected.

Despite all efforts to introduce customers with the cloud, many organizations are not completely ready for it politically.

The first half of the year was quite turbulent and challenging for me. I was involved in quite a challenging project for a customer of Microsoft Consulting Services. The technical part was OK, it was the politics that made it challenging. Because the PoC phase was a part-time involvement, I had quite some time to do some little stuff as well. After a lengthy PoC, I was finally able to finish my part of the project and I was very happy to hear that the customer and Microsoft Consulting Services were very satisfied with my performance. This is an experience that nobody will take away from me and I consider it an honor to do something with Microsoft Consulting Services. Microsoft, thank you for that…

After that, I did a few other projects that were a little bit smaller but I was able to be successful in those as well. I am happy that my customers gave me very good feedback about my performance and they explained to be very satisfied. Microsoft taught me to put great effort in customer satisfaction and I start to understand why…

One other major highlight was my first (and also the last 😉 ) attendance at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) in Las Vegas. I learned a lot of new things, I started to develop an interest in Virtual Machine Manager 2012 and I really look forward to work with this technology a bit more. I met a lot of great people of the community and apparently some people knew me as well (also from outside The Netherlands). I found that rather interesting, I didn’t know I already had quite a reputation in the field…

From a technology perspective, I didn’t really expanded much at all. My projects and my focus stayed a lot with Configuration Manager, only the stuff related to ConfigMgr were introduced to me, Windows Intune is a good example of this.

An overall development I start to see is that I am more and more involved in conceptual challenges organizations face. It’s nice that I can introduce technology such as ConfigMgr to help achieve their goals, however I have to ask my customers what they want to achieve with the product. The gap between understanding the technology and discovering customer’s needs is becoming bigger and bigger. I find great pleasure in helping customers understand what goals they want to achieve. The technological solution becomes less relevant and starts to lose my interest more often. The greatest satisfaction can be found by successfully translating business needs to a technical solution. My colleague Marthijn van Rheenen received quite a nice quote at MMS 2013: The correct order is People -> Process -> Technology. I couldn’t agree more with this one…

Finally, I can also look ahead a little bit and think about what to expect in 2014. For that I have my own quote: Automating Automation…

In order to be successful with that, I need to discover workflows in order to automate them…

For me it means a lot more PowerShell, I need to determine my focus for 2014 as well. I believe it’s going to be Operations Manager and maybe some VMM, Orchestrator en Service Manager…

And last but not least: The end of Windows XP and Office 2003 is near (it’s about time). I expect great challenges with that as well. I believe 2014 will be the year of the end user. The end user, not some IT manager, will tell me how he wants to work and we need to facilitate…

Have a great 2014…