Friday will be my last day at IBM and on Monday I will become an Agile Coach/Trainer for hire, via my open little company: Pure Agile Consulting (sorry no website yet).

I've had a nearly eight year run with a great bunch of people. First at Databeacon and our .NET Rich Client (tip of the hat to Robi, Dave, Marc, Tony, Patrick, Suzzane, Ralph and briefly Hans) - little did you know how far I would take those crazy ideas around unit testing, milestones and reflection. Then Cognos for the death of Corinth and rebirth of PMRC (add to the list Sasa , Viktor, Daniel and Johnathan), PMMT (Brenda, Brian and Steve - aka Chad). Finally IBM and Agile Coaching with people too numerous to name.

Sometime ago I realized that I was no longer passionate about coding and that my interests lie in coaching and mentoring Agile Software Development, TDD etc. Along the way many of you have given me the chance to do coaching/mentoring work and for that I'm grateful. I'm also grateful to everyone who put with my all to frequent harangues about why Agile/TDD etc was better than what we do today. One of the things I have learned since is to ask questions, listen and then harangue :-) Thanks to everyone who helped me evolve

Special thanks to:

• Robi for teaching me a lot about quality and for helping me to get better at writing good code
• A big thanks to Sasa who took a chance on Scrum and put up with a someone who was telling him how to organize his team.
• Ralph for giving me a chance to coach and for keeping me through three rounds of layoffs.
• Guillaume (and the whole BUDDI team) for letting me use BUDDI as an occasional test bed for my coaching and facilitation skills.

An interesting side story on the number of people at each company: Databeacon was ~60 people when I joined and ~30 when we were acquired. Cognos was about 3,500 and IBM is about 400,000. So each time I've been acquired I've joined a company that was 1,000 times larger than its predecessor.

It's been great working with everyone and I look forward to crossing paths again.

My permanent email address is mark@mlevison.com. I would delighted to connect with anyone on Facebook or LinkedIn (yes I've dissed LinkedIn before).