As part of our ongoing process improvement at Readiness, we run through our successes and failures. Last year we delivered projects where we really “nailed it” – receiving an “Outstanding” project rating from one of our partners. This was good to hear and nice to review. However, we had delivered on two projects where things were not so great. One delivery was late and another had real technical difficulties. Hmmm….

Both project managers and their respective commercial teams said that the projects were “fine”, and one was actually so gracious enough to blame the underlying technology.

Not us, or our platform.

That said, these projects linger as a bit of experiential scar tissue for me personally.

Bizarrely (but maybe not so), this experience reminded me of a blog entry by Jeffery Snover, posted exactly nine years ago on November 7th, 2014 called Working with Microsoft. Jeffery’s posting was a “cri de coeur“, an impassioned response to some of the challenges and failures when trying to create something wholly new. For those who don’t know, Jeffery Snover is the father of PowerShell. He was thinking how to solve administrative problems using secure, object-oriented code while everyone was still using CMD files. So, yes – ahead of his time.

In thanks for his incredible devotion/passion for his pet project, Microsoft was initially not impressed and Jeffery remarks:

When I was doing the prototype for what became PowerShell, a friend cautioned me, saying that was the sort of thing that got people fired.

I didn’t get fired.

I got demoted.

Creating new stuff is hard. The whole act of creativity, but definition is odd.

It’s funny what a difference a year makes. Now, we have delivered the core functionality of an entire application lifecycle tool (Assurance), are working on patents and optimizing delivery.

We have (now successfully) automated Discovery, repackaging, conversion, testing, QA and publishing to Intune. In fact, our partners now just script these tasks (yes, of course using PowerShell) and probably don’t realize how much is happening behind the scenes.

So, “Thank You” Jeffery for both the inspiration, and for PowerShell.

Greg Lambert