I have finished my interim role at Essex CC – which led to a lot of people thinking I’d left Notbinary – just in time for Notbinary to disappear and for me to once again change my LinkedIn details which should further muddy the waters.

The company has gone full Megazord and combined with Disruption, Arthurly and Human+ to create Foundry4 – a technology consultancy with its sights set on institutions and enterprises that are facing up to the hard realities of digital transformation beyond the ‘low hanging fruit’. It promises to be an interesting time as we find our rhythm and identity as this new entity.

What does it mean practically for me? Well mainly just the release of not having to explain to every client and talk audience that it isn’t ‘non binary’ and not a comment on fluid sexuality (always great coming from a middle aged, white, CIS guy) feels like a win. Additionally it will be interesting to work with the Disruption team as was – they published a tech magazine, wrote white papers and organised tech conferences amongst other things and we’ll be working closely with them to build the profile of the new company and I do love a bit of product propaganda and storytelling.

I suspect my role will evolve a little but at the moment it is firmly in the TBD column as a bunch of other practicalities are sorted. I also suspect that from the outside it will look like I’ve taken a step backwards – there are inevitably a lot of Chiefs to find appropriate roles for when something like this happens and I’ve never been too hung up on things like job titles – that said I am angling for an actual job description of some kind for the first time since I joined!

My favourite thing about the new company (so far) is that we are explicitly calling out ‘product management’ as one of the services we offer – building a practice that provides coaching, interims, training and leadership across our software engineering work wherever possible has been something I’ve wanted to be a part of since I left the public sector and now we are going for it.

Anyway – exciting times and thanks to all the folks who made it happen. It has been a LOT of work for people these last few months and I wasn’t involved at all so just get to enjoy the end result.