I'm pleased to announce that eBay has personally asked me to return to be a pivotal part in their strategic move of splitting PayPal away from eBay. As many of you know I was the Sr. Architect of eBay's migration from 2007 to 2010. It was an upgrade of EPIC proportions that made several headlines as it was done on time, and under budget in four months!
Believe me when I say it was not easy the first time. We had so many talented and super smart individuals on the project, as our project manager would always say…it was the All-Star team! For this second round, I'm super excited that I will be joined by a talented team at Slalom Consulting and some new eBay faces to prepare eBay not only in the splitting of the two companies, but also in an upgrade to SharePoint 2013! What is particularly exciting about this project is that this will be my first project where two companies are splitting rather than merging. The dynamics will be incredibly different. There will be a large amount of legal requirements around the split and it will require complex rules around how the data will be broken apart. Some well known names in the business consulting space with experience in splitting companies will be on hand to help carve out these incredibly complex rule sets and I just can't keep my excitement levels down for what I know is going to be another EPIC project.
Unlike last time, which had a single environment, there will be two. And thusly, we will have two architects working in concert to drive each of the platform migrations at the same time in the same migration window. This will present challenges that were not present the first time we did this. Over the next few weeks before the project begins its official kickoff, the talented team will have already identified many of these, and we will be in a position that puts us many weeks ahead of where the last project was when we started (having a project plan from the last project helped a bunch)!
So there you have it, I'll be heads down working this and another major project and hopefully we will be able to deliver our results as best practices/tips and tricks at the MS Ignite conference in May!
See you in mid 2015!
Chris