36 Leaving Microsoft… for MSNBC

18 March 6th, 2006 by Hans 12 Bjordahl :: 7 9 37 10 Comments

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Change is in the air. I’ve joined MSNBC as a group manager on the MSNBC.com technology team.

Granted, a move from Microsoft to MSNBC (a separate but closely associated company) isn’t all that far : ) , but I can tell you after two short weeks on the ground at MSNBC that it already feels like I’ve covered many, many miles.

The opportunity was appealing to me for a lot of reasons. I’ve been a news junkie since day one; as a kid, devouring the local paper (starting with the comics of course) was a highlight of my day. I was a journalism major in college, but took a technical path after graduation that found me in the thick of the dotcom boom and subsequent bust.

Today I devour the daily papers online, and in the face of an accelerating shift in how people get their news, I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to move right into the industry’s sweet spot. Adding to the appeal was the fact that this is a fast-track, A-list team with a lot of ambitious leaders who are rapidly reengineering MSNBC.com to take full advantage of everything NBC has to offer on the broadcast side and everything Microsoft has to offer on the technology side, all in the interest of delivering the best possible news experience online.

Is it working? I’ll quote you some recent figures:

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Bug Bash is a comic strip written and illustrated by Hans Bjordahl. Bug Bash is a comic strip about technology: managing technology, the business of technology. It's about project management and managing projects through the dull world of Rational Rose, use cases, and requirements. Functional requirements, user requirement, functional specifications, design specifications, call it what you want but it's still the bane of project managers. And when you're done with that, you can think about all the fun that comes with timelines, scheduling, estimates (PERT estimation anyone?) and resourcing until Gantt charts are coming out of your ears. Let's not forget the risk management in the software engineering life cycle. Maintaining the project is just as much fun, managing what was initially set out in requirements and trying to keep feature creep / scope creep in check with change management. If any of these words send nightmares to you, the project manager, then this site probably rings true with you. (Who Links Here?)