Since many of you asked me about it, I thought I should write a short recap on my first week of work at Avanade. I'd like to be short, so I'll comment with just 2 words: impressed and overloaded.

Having worked always in small and unstructured companies I was impressed on how many well established procedures there are, especially in the project management and project development area.
After installing software on my laptop I went through a 3 days long virtual course on the project management and development: it my first time in a virtual class room, and I really liked it.
Another thing that really impressed me is that Avanade developed its software lifecycle platform (SLP) on top of Visual Studio Team System. There is a nice paper on the MSDN about this as well (in PDF).

And overloaded because after being impressed by the procedures, I also have to try and assimilate all of them.

But at least I'm not alone in this: Daniel Moth, Compact Framework guru, felt the same when joining Avanade in 2005, and my friend and Subtext founder Phil Haack, when joined Microsoft, had the same feelings about working in a big company, that thinks about long term achievement instead of just getting things done "by yesterday" as (kind of) always happens with small companies. Avanade might not be Microsoft, but the approach is the same.

And last, I'd like to greet all the new hires that attended the introductory course with me: I hope you will subscribe to my blog .