Role Purpose
The purpose of the ADM is to provide our customers access to a wide range of product and application development expertise to help software developers accelerate the development cycle and produce successful applications. This can be accomplished by direct collaboration or by facilitating access to other resources within Microsoft.
By maintaining a long-term relationship with their customers, an ADM becomes intimately familiar with the customers’ development environment. The technical tasks performed in this role include general “how-to” strategic advice, solution architecture assessments, workshops, prototyping, application design reviews, performance benchmarking, code reviews, porting/migration assistance, configuration management and general development consulting.
The ADM gains an understanding of their customers' development organizations' impact on overall business, their development goals, and their pain points - which is used by the ADM to ensure their customers' success with developing on Microsoft products.
While the ADM is assigned as the primary contact for the development efforts of a company, the ADM may leverage other ADMs or even other groups within Microsoft to provide the best service possible, especially if escalation services are necessary. The ADM acts as the escalation manager to bring in appropriate technical expertise (primarily Customer Services and Support) to manage incidents to resolution. The ADM follows up to ensure either product improvement within Microsoft or appropriate development skills are built within the customer's development environment.
Team/Department Mission
Microsoft Application Development Managers (ADMs) strive to be the best in software development. Working with cutting edge technologies we play a pivotal role in the delivery of industry leading solutions within the UK’s most prestigious enterprise organisations and software houses.
This is high value technology consultancy. We generate great customer satisfaction from our long term engagement model. This gives our customers the confidence to allow us to become their trusted advisors helping to architect, design and implement their solutions.
Key Accountabilities
- Work with key UK customers to provide innovative solutions to their development problems, helping to architect, design, implement and test solutions throughout the development cycle.
- Build an on-going trusted relationship with customers by improving their development processes and deliverables.
- Delight customers with your technical breadth knowledge, demonstrating a willingness to engage and work with other resources to solve difficult technical challenges.
- Transfer knowledge to customers through effective communication and engagement style
- Liaise with internal Microsoft communities (such as our development teams in the USA) to represent the interest of customers and drive product improvements
- Remain technically competent in a broad range of Microsoft products and technologies
- Support your peers though deliverables into internal and customer engagements, contributing to an environment for learning and creativity, contributing to others’ success.
Key Success Criteria
- Customer satisfaction
- Consistently demonstrates concise and effective communication with customers and employees
- Occasionally leads sharing of best practices with team community
- Consistently establishes and maintains working relationships with internal support delivery teams, customer support teams, customer contracts and material representatives
Knowledge, Skills and Experience
1) Essential Experience
A strong business background in Fortune 500 and/or development experience with large complex business applications. The ability to move between high level design review and “roll up the sleeves” type of assistance across all phases of an application development project. Consistently practices strong organizational, communication, project management, negotiation, and problem solving skills. Development consulting experience is highly desired.
This position requires 30% travel.
2) Technical/Functional Skills (must have some of the below)
- Programming Languages (VB, C/C#/C++)
- Visual Studio Team System (VS, TFS)
- Application Lifecycle Management (MSF/Agile/CMMI, build, testing)
- Application architecture
- .NET Framework 2.0/3.0/3.5/4.0
- Connected Systems (WCF, WF, Windows Server AppFabric)
- Identity Management (WIF, ADFS 2, Claims-Based Identity)
- Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) etc.
- Rich client application development (WinForms and WPF)
- Web application development (IIS, ASP.NET WebForms and MVC, Microsoft Ajax)
- Rich Internet Application development (Silverlight)
- Cloud Computing (Windows Azure Platform, Windows Azure AppFabric)
- SharePoint/MOSS/Office platform
- SQL Server/RDBMS and related technologies like BI & Reporting Services
- Expression Tools
- Integration technologies like BizTalk
- Exchange - Unified Communications, Communicator, Mobility
3) Personal Attributes/Interpersonal Skills
- Self Starter
- Ability to manage multiple competing priorities
- Commitment to continued personal development
- Excellent communication and political skills
4) Qualifications
BS in Computer Science or equivalent experience. Strong demonstrable development experience/expertise in the above technologies is desirable
Special Requirements/Additional Information
- Driving License
- Weekly travel required, UK based
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer and supports workforce diversity
