We are excited to introduce this week’s Friday Feature— @Drew Madelung! Drew is Technical Architect at Concurrency, a Midwest-based consultancy. He has experience in a number of technologies but specializes in content management and business process improvement. Drew received his first MVP award in 2017 for Office Servers and Services.
Drew Madelung
Job Title: Technical Architect
Company Name: Concurrency, Inc.
MVP Profile: https://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/PublicProfile/5002285?fullName=Drew%20%20Madelung
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmadelung/
Tell us a little bit about where you work and your role in the organization.
I am a Technical Architect on the Productivity & Collaboration practice at a solutions integrator in the Midwest called Concurrency, Inc. Concurrency is an award-winning IT consulting agency that envisions, architects, and integrates across all Microsoft enterprise platforms.
My team concentrates on the Microsoft collaboration stack centered around SharePoint solutions. I have been working with SharePoint in some form for 8+ years. I work with enterprises of all different sizes on projects based on both on-premises and Office 365 implementations. My most recent projects have been centered around: Office 365 migrations, overall cloud roll-out and adoptions, and improving business process using the Microsoft provided tool sets.
How was the transition from development to consulting? What made you decide to switch? How did it shift the skill sets required in your day-to-day work?
I have been consulting over 4 years now and I think it would be a hard switch for me to jump out. The shift from working at the same place every day was jarring at first but is worth the challenge. Looking back, I wouldn’t say there was one thing that made me want to move to consulting but a few. The first main factor was the diversity of work available. When you work at one place for a while, you are working on the same systems and solutions every day. It can be hard to find opportunities to work with the latest and greatest Microsoft has to offer. Once I moved to consulting, I shifted from working with systems because it was all I had, to learning everything new that was rolling out.
Another factor that drove me to consulting was around the ability to deliver a great project but then being able to keep moving on to the next great project. The structure of daily activities and retroactively supporting things moved to a proactive approach. There are no longer internal projects that sound like good ideas that never start. You are always working towards innovation.
For me, the change in skill-set for consulting was around breadth of skills. When working in the same SharePoint environment every day you quickly become an expert in your SharePoint environment. You have built things that fit your businesses needs. When you look at someone else’s SharePoint environment, it will be different 100% of the time. You now must be adaptable to understand the needs of what other businesses do and correlate them to a technical or process solution. This required me to learn more and push harder to stay on top of as much tech knowledge I could.
With such frequent changes to cloud technology and product updates, how do you keep up? What are your go-to resources for the latest information?
There is no way to keep up with everything. What I try to do is keep up at a detailed level within my primary technology stack. I wish I could learn everything about Dynamics 365 or learn all about Azure Stack but there is just too much information to digest. The only way to keep up is to dedicate yourself to keeping up. You must change your mindset that keeping up with technology is just an option, I believe it is a requirement. I try to dedicate time every week to reviewing places that I know I can get the latest information. As I am centered around the Microsoft productivity stack, these are my main resources:
- Office Blogs
- Tech Community
- Social networks
- Conferences/Events/User Groups
- All the amazing folks in the SharePoint community and their contributions
- Office 365 message center for more targeted new things
If you could give one piece of advice to someone starting a career in IT (either transitioning or a young professional), what would you tell them?
Listen more and learn more. There are a lot of very smart people in the IT world and you can learn a ton from them. It can be as small as soft people skills to detailed technical information. I believe that you could read all the tech books in the world but until you either do it yourself or talk to someone who has done something you will never fully grasp it. If you need help, find someone who can help and learn from them.
You’re very active in the IT Pro Community, from speaking at events, sharing on the Tech Community and posting your tips and knowledge on your personal blog. Overall, the IT Pro Community is an active and engaged community. Can you share the value that the community has brought to your career and what drives you to share back with the community?
People will deliver better results if they know more. You will never know everything but you should be able to find someone that can help and that is what the IT community can provide. Everyone becomes smarter if there is more information available to them. There is no way I would be where I am at in my professional career without the folks out there in the SharePoint community. I think there is a reason that there is such power with social networks, we work better when we are connected. I am just trying to do my part to keep the wheel turning.