Resignation Letter

Writing a resignation letter is not a straightforward task, although I did write mine in an hour. It was quite rushed at the time because I'd left it for too late, and was under pressure to get it out in time to fit in with my contractual notice period.

There are lots of example letters online, effectively the broad outline of this letter should contain:
- Introduction -  start with the intent to leave the company
- Body - some reasons why you made this decision, and thank the company for the experiences gained
- Conclusion - try to close gently, aim to keep the ties, don't burn any bridges

So this is how my last resignation letter went:

RE: Letter of Resignation effective Monday 21^st March 2011 (8-weeks, ending 13^th May 2011)

Dear Colin,

After considerable thought and soul-searching, I have decided to resign my position as Senior Project Manager/Principal Engineer at NDS. I assure you it was not an easy decision to make especially because working in a culture like NI was a long awaited dream of mine, as it would have allowed me to experience what it’s like to work with new ideas from the ground-up, something I always aspired for, in the hope of running my own start-up one day.

As you know, I left the country of my birth, South Africa (SA), over 10 years ago leaving behind all my family. Due to personal circumstances and obligation to family, I’ve decided it’s now time to return home. I’ve managed to verbally secure a job offer with the local SA broadcaster, but nothing has been formally agreed yet nor has anything been formally signed. Regardless of this fact, my decision to return home has been made, and I’ve already begun preparations for the move, aiming to be in SA at the end of May 2011.

Thus, in keeping with the terms of my contract of employment, the notice period being 8 weeks, effective from Monday 21^st March 2011, this makes my termination date to be 13^th May 2011.  As agreed we could renegotiate the exact end-date mid-way through this period around 15^th April, but at present, I am keen on working the full notice period.  I will aim to complete as much of the work expected from me during this period.

I value the past 8 years experience with NDS. I’ve had the opportunity to work in different areas of the business, and with teams from around the world, having built-up a good network. I’m confident that this experience will be very useful to me in my future career.  If NDS ever sets up an R&D/Professional services/Delivery office in SA, I would hope NDS would contact me to discuss potential opportunities for working together again.

Yours Sincerely,

Muhammad Khan

Senior Project Manager/Principal Engineer

My BBC Interview 2010 - Questions exposed

Last year I experimented with the market as I was feeling rather undervalued and not appreciated at work, more so looking for positions that offered more senior roles that wasn't being made available to me at the time. One of the companies I applied to was the BBC.  BBC is considered the grandfather of broadcasting not only in the UK, but quite possibly world-wide.  They have quite an intense application process with setting up an online profile, online testing with scenario videos, psychometric tests and the lot.  Should you pass all the screening, you will then be offered an interview - I'm happy to say I made it to the last stages, competing with 3 out of an original batch of 30 applicants - however, we all know how that ended :-) Not successful, bottom-line, BBC thought I was carrying too much process baggage and not agile enough; as well as I didn't have prior line management experience which is what they were seeking for the technical team leader role.

Anyway, my interview was a surreal event because I wasn't applying for one role. They laid out the following possibilities to me: Technical Team Leader, Project Manager, Programme Manager, Scrum Master.  So I was subjected to a varying degree of questions. In retrospect, I think I came off a bit too confident, strong, and determined to change the world.

I will now share with you my responses to the questions that opened the path for the face-to-face interview:

Q1 - We’re looking for strong technical leaders: excellent at designing & delivering complex solutions while at the same time motivating & inspiring a team. Please give an example of an IPTV/On-Demand/Interactive TV project you lead from concept to deployment (2000 character limit).

[BSkyB Anytime+ HD On-Demand/Interactive TV (1943 characters) 2008-2010]

A highly visible project to secure NDS’s position in the Middleware market for the foreseeable future, involved seamlessly  replacing an existing Middleware (OpenTV) on multiple STB platforms (deployed 2 million+ homes), with no noticeable difference to the user, plus the addition “Anytime+ Progressive Download”. A new Middleware & device driver model, consisting of 80 components with a 200-person development team geographically dispersed: 2 UK sites, France, India & Israel; as well as working with suppliers worldwide: Broadcom, Amstrad, Samsung, Thomson, Wipro, Red Embedded & S3Group. The project is often described as “not only changing all four tyres on a car whilst you’re driving, but also giving the engine an overhaul & the body work a re-spray at the same time!”

I had global accountability as Middleware Dev. Owner, overall project management responsibility for delivering feature completeness within the set timescales; managing a team of senior architects (design authority), 200-person development/integration team to deliver a backlog of 200+ work packages.

My engineering background allowed me to build rapport with development teams, gaining project-wide respect, as highlighted:

• Quickly gained architectural design knowledge, allowing me to hold technical discussions with the customer without needing to include senior architects.
• Participated in customer defect review meetings in negotiating issue severities, assigning ownership & allocation to component teams (usually the job of chief architect)
• Conducted impact assessments of change requests, before passing on to architects for review (Software Migration, Download, IPv6)
• Mentored Hit Squad teams consisting of senior engineers, in resolving critical issues (steering performance improvements, providing tools to find memory leaks), sometimes spending late hours with engineers going through code (shared OpenTV knowledge)
• Produced much-valued technical status reports on critical issues
• Proactively drove the setup of the end-to-end system for home field trials allowing people access to latest builds via software download
• Appreciated the technical challenges placed on engineers, often siding with the engineers that “it cannot be fixed any sooner without consequences”

OPTIONAL ADDENDUM: Additional Responses to Q1 from a senior engineer, technical leadership perspective

[Speaking EPG – Interactive/Accessible TV (1987 characters) 2007-Present]

This example may not immediately appear to be relevant to the question, however I think it’s worth sharing as I strongly believe that strong technical leaders must possess great vision, determination & an unfailing desire to succeed through persistent perseverance.

For the past 4 years I’ve created a following both inside & outside of NDS for the need for accessible, usable EPGs targeted at the aged for independent living, blind & partially sighted, dyslexic & the illiterate by spearheading the concept of a Talking EPG: a STB with built-in speech synthesis.

This was a project “greenhouse” outside of work hours, purely out of interest & a passionate desire to add value to people’s lives. Despite many obstacles - I had little networks & influencing-power, NDS being a large company – I pushed the idea from a concept, simulator, demo to prototype on real hardware to engagement with customers - in the years to date have now inspired a team of 7 people contributing to my greenhouse project.

I kept abreast of Middleware roadmap (as I was working in the IPTV HeadEnd group at the time & wasn’t involved with STBs) & decided to experiment with the platform. Working closely at the driver level, I ported an open source speech engine, complete with voice dictionaries & databases & got a STB to perform real-time text-to-speech synthesis.

To provide a realistic experience, I partnered with another project that was working on a simple zapper middleware, providing the platform exposing the service information, menus & graphical text representative of an EPG experience.

Having integrated the two projects together, we were successful in demonstrating a simple zapper EPG in 2007, speaking out menus, key presses, channel information, reading a book from a text file, speaking out the time, changing different voices, etc.

I created an open API framework that could be used for integrating commercial speech vendors, & published the API for recommendation into the official middleware product, where it’s currently under review, the original audio stream requirements were approved & included in the current product build. The feature has also been added to the product roadmap, making it a success.

I’ve persistently spreading the message, still seeking external interest, all in the background. I suspect this will remain a passion should I end up with the BBC!

[DirecTV USA – Interactive TV (1974 characters) – 2003-2004]

This project can be summarised as porting of a DVB stack to DirecTV’s DSS APG domain, implementing a new EPG, resulting in excess of 200K lines of code in ~6 months, currently deployed in 30 million homes.

I was part of a core team of 3 people that eventually grew to a team of 12 as the project matured. I was heavily involved in the gap analysis phase, where I had to understand the DSS system, the structure & APG protocol creating a mapping to our existing implementation in the DVB domain. We inherited EPG code from a previous project that was quite mature & exclusive to the DVB domain that included conditional compiles for different projects, for a PVR profile. The code was huge, complicated & new, it meant investing time to understand the code, identify all API dependencies, highlighting APIs that needed changing, defining new APIs, identifying the useful & useless code, removing conditional defines. It also involved understanding & correcting the architecture model of the EPG.

The biggest challenge for the EPG was on developing the complicated new features of DTV, whilst at the same time reusing as much of legacy code as possible. I led, through a team effort, the de-construction of the EPG, fixed the architecture to adopt the model-view-controller pattern allowing us to work in isolation, independent of the user interface screens, the model & controller could be written separately. We identified further services that we could make independent, called “engines” that provided the screens with the functionality desired. We were able to develop the UI, work on the services & controller in parallel, & with a few integration points synchronised could deliver incremental functionality & experience together. I also took the lead in defining the shared services that implemented generic algorithms that served the needs of many similar use cases avoiding the need for repetitive code.

Of particular note, the program grid was the most complicated code of all that I’d written from scratch in two weeks, comprising over 30000 lines of code, which to this day, has remained largely untouched. We maintained a strong preference to maintaining the architecture UML model, the engines, controller & model were updating along with important sequence diagrams so that everyone on the team would have a source of documentation for reference.

Q2 - Using the example that you provided above, tell us how you ensured your project met the original business requirements & was of acceptably high quality.  How could you have improved it further? (1000 character limit).

BSkyB Anytime+ HD - On Demand/Interactive TV (1073 characters)

High-level features translated to system requirements, then to product-use-cases, realised through Work Packages (WP), a self-contained unit that can be tested & verified tracing back to original requirements.

Code quality: MISRA standard, Zero Compile/MISRA/Lint warnings, 100% API & Line Coverage, 65% Branch Coverage, 100% test mapping, used static analysis from KlocWork, Blackduck for open-source violation.

Multi-level test approach, unit tests, component-group, Middleware suite of 1000+ regression test cases targeting 98% pass rate, stability & performance tests – build fully automated, testing at all levels driven by continuous integration tools.

I helped resolve key defect process problems: clarified severity criteria (Showstopper, Major, Minor); published a workflow for importing customer defects, defined project-wide defect process. Reported metrics regularly, target zero showstoppers. Managed regular root cause analysis & iteration reviews.

I instigated specialised on-site teams (Hit Squad) fixing critical issues; evangelised Microsoft’s “Eat your own dog food”, enabling home testing catching critical issues early.

What would I change?

Start full stack testing early in lifecycle, better traceability at full stack back to requirements. Do continuous delivery at full stack.

Q3 - Using the example that you provided above, tell us how you went about instilling/ enforcing agile development methods where they did not exist, or reinforcing where it did. (1000)

BSkyB Anytime+ HD - On Demand/Interactive TV (1090 characters)

NDS adopted Agile company-wide in 2006, changing the physical layout of the office-space providing floor-to-ceiling whiteboards, break-out areas, meeting rooms for Scrum & associated software tools; as well as a manifesto for software development.

Mature process: WP backlog, incremental feature development, continuous integration, parallel delivery to customer, releasing early, releasing often, 6 week iteration cycles that evolved naturally to 3 week cycles, later to 1 week deployment cycle. Development teams are self-managing, owning local backlogs, managing team progress independently. Regular meetings, metrics & reporting were already in place to gauge project progress (Velocity, Planned VS Actual, Burndown).

What agile methods did I change/reinforce?

• Identified waste in QC, turning 3 weeks QC cycle to 1 week, synchronised with our release cycle. The problem was that defects raised in QC were 4-5 weeks out-of-date with the current build.
• Recommended customer-support team on-site to collaborate, resolve & fix key issues on the spot, unblocking QC.
• Managed daily Scrums, XP, brainstormed, mentored engineers, getting hands-on with debugging & code reviews.
• Kicked off one-roof-integration teams bringing together geographically dispersed engineers & testers to share the team experience.

Review: Dissecting the Hack: The F0rb1dd3n Network by Jayson E. Street, Kent Nabors, Brian Baskin

This book is interesting in that although it tells a fictional story of how two hackers innocently & accidentally fall upon and help prevent a serious threat to national security, everything about the technology is all real, and explained in good enough detail to make anyone interested in security threats, wanting to learn more. 
The book is divided into two parts: Part story, Part references. The references can be used again and again to sharpen your skills in being more security conscious or paranoid in your every day activity, beware of the bit-trail you leave behind.

Ideas...kick-start

I plan on sharing my ideas I've had in the past as well as those that I'm considering now. No, I'm not mad for sharing these because I'm actually looking for people to comment, criticize, guide, mentor, advise, collaborate or even find partners in pushing some of these ideas forward.

For starters, I thought I'd kick-start with some of my own similes/metaphors on ideas as touched on in an earlier post. I will start by quoting from What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World and then share my own:

Ideas are like ______________________________________

because __________________________________________

therefore __________________________________________

• Ideas are like babies because everyone think theirs is cute, therefore be objective when judging your own ideas ideas 
• Ideas are like shoes because you need to break them in, therefore take time to evaluate new ideas
• Ideas are like mirrors because they reflect the local environment, therefore consider changing contexts to get more diverse collections of ideas
• Ideas are like bubbles because they easily burst, therefore be gentle with them
• Ideas are like the measles because they are contagious, therefore hang out with other people with ideas if you want to get them yourself
• Ideas are like spider webs because they are stronger than they appear, therefore don't underestimate them

Now, for my own, not-so-great examples:

• Ideas are like ice cream because under the slightest heat it melts away into non-existence, therefore be prepared to handle the heat when your ideas come under scrutiny

• Ideas are like seeds because seeds must be nurtured and cared for to grow into something beautiful, therefore ensure you provide the right environment for your ideas to seed & grow

• Ideas are like a house of cards or playing Jenga, where the house/tower can fall crashing down by the mere extraction of a seemingly innocuous piece, therefore be very careful in doing your homework or analysis before sharing your idea for scrutiny....

I have six months to live...

"You caught us at a bad time Muhammad...  I have six months to live, maybe two years if I'm lucky to survive chemo..."

Valerie couldn't contain herself much longer. I had unknowingly walked into a very distressing situation at my neighbour's house yesterday, around noon. I had a spare B&Q voucher (15% off) that the old man Tony is always interested in and I'd unknowingly walked into a family situation dealing with really harrowing news. Me, with my jokes of them leaving their doors wide open, with the keys in plain public view for all to see, their lack of security and how I wouldn't have the luxury of being that safe in South Africa...I didn't have enough time to read the situation, and then Valerie lay that bombshell "I have 6 months to live..." and I was shell-shocked. I knew they had been to the hospital for the results, but I wasn't prepared for that result!

I immediately went over to Val and gave her the best sympathetic hug I could muster. Moments of silence. I didn't know what to say. "I have 6 months to live, cancer of the blood they tell me. Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML). All of this from a sore throat! It's all over the body...I will have to undergo intense chemo for 6 months, stay at hospital for a month at a time. I'm too old for a bone marrow transplant...We're waiting for the hospital to get back to us....I'm not going to visit you in South Africa Mo!" 


What do you say to someone in this situation? Val is in her sixties, Tony in turning 70 this year. Val & Tony live on their own, they're absolutely 100% independent, much to my admiration. They've travelled the world, they're more active than me to be honest. Truly hard-working British commoners these folks are.  We've been neighbours for going on to 5 years now, but we've only got to know them after 2 years - Tony had seen me doing some really tough landscaping out in my front yard, I'd been toiling away for weeks and he'd come over asking me if he could take the dirt away for a job he had (will save me the 100 quid). It turned out he was a retired electrician, doing odd-building jobs and he was about to close shop nearing 67 years old at the time. We hit it off nicely from there, he helped me with completing my garden and then helping out with odd jobs I had at the house, very recently helping me with my roof, flooring, bathroom shower and driveway gate in my preparation to get the house in order for the move back to SA....Val and Tony have won our respect, love and friendship. When my parents were over, my father and Tony had a great time together. I wish I'd grow old and independent as Val & Tony were...

Val & Tony are always keen on holidaying, taking breaks and were quite spontaneous. This year alone they did a stint in Canada, the Bahamas & Holland. Not once would they complain of their old age or ailments (compared to most Asians), they maintained a sense of dignity, secrecy and civility - very prim and proper, very English-like.  And when news as sudden as this hits you, you really are left speechless. There were no previous symptoms, all Val had was a sore throat. She'd seen the GP, been for X-rays, blood tests - nothing out of the ordinary. GP was letting it ago, but Val insisted she didn't feel quite right, "I knew deep down something isn't right" so GP requested full blood tests, and then it showed up.

I was unprepared for this situation, finding the right words was difficult. In situations like these, I guess just being there, your presence is enough.  I couldn't mention anything religious, not because I'm Muslim and they're not, but more so because although they are Christians by name, Tony has no patience for religion or God, so I couldn't mention typical cases like "God has a plan for you, put your trust in God", etc. I just hope Val can find something to hold on to over this massive transition - maybe it'll be God, maybe something else, but somehow she has to come to terms with this news. "Sleep on it, you're tired. Take each day as it comes. You know we're here for you at any time, just let us know how we can help....Is there anything you wanted to do that you didn't have a chance to....Yes, actually I'd love to see the London Eye...but if chemo is going to start next week, I won't get that chance"...The London eye, right in our own backyard, and they've not had a chance to go there... :-( I will try to help them realise this in the limited time I have in UK.

I've got a month to go before the relocation move to SA, leaving friends to deal with this difficult situation. I'm gutted really...

Looking at Tony and Val with different eyes yesterday, it seemed like they'd aged ten more years...bad news can have this effect on you.  Tony needs to be strong, I fear the worst: he will resign to the inevitable and his active life as a handy-man keeping himself fit despite his age will tail off...I pray he finds something to hold on to...

I can only imagine what last night must've felt like for Val...getting old is one thing, finding out you have a life-threatening disease and knowing you're not fit-enough to see it through, probabilities of survival are low, is another thing altogether....

This is a first for me, I'm still trying to come to terms with it.... In the past I've seen people who were sick, you just knew they're not going to live long (my once healthy brother-in-law who had severe stomach cancer dying at the age of just 32) I'd been home to SA specifically to see him, he was in a terrible state, I knew then he wouldn't survive, you could see what the chemo did to him....

But this case is different, the opposite end of the spectrum. Here is a person just over twice my age, who has lived a full life, who on the surface looks as normal and healthy as any person in her age, to be given the death notice. Being in your late 60s you somehow prepare yourself, but you think you have time to prepare...

Review: What I wish I knew when I was Twenty by Tina Seelig

Tina Seelig runs the Entrepreneurial Thought Leadership at Stanford, a very impressive programme with guest speakers from all the top companies sharing their experiences of past failures and successes - invaluable insights freely available for download.  If you're seeking out knowledge to be a successful entrepreneur, then I highly recommend you visit Stanford E-Corner website.

Back to the book: Very well written, easy language in direct conversation-style, brings out the message in clear and simple terms. Although this book could be seen as yet-another-self-improvement-book-on-leadership-innovation, in that it provides stories and insight's into other people's experiences & resultant lessons learnt; it is unique in the following aspects:

• References to real classroom exercises being taught at Stanford. Don't be fooled into thinking this is a student text, the example challenges can be given to any company team and will be equally, if not, more challenging than the classroom experience
• Tina touches upon subjects that are generally considered taboo
• There is an element of realism, practical advice that is good food for thought
• Topics are light-enough to leave the reader time to analyse his/her own personal situation (For example: the bit on "Failure Resume" (FR) really got me thinking, so much so that I exposed version 1 of my draft FR here)

Another topic that got me going was from the chapter "Turn Lemonade into Helicopters", Pages 129-130, which I'll quote below [I am still working on my own similes :-)]:

...In my course on creativity I focus a great deal on the value of recombining ideas in unusual ways. The more you practice this skill, the more natural it becomes. For example, using similes or metaphors, to describe concepts that on the surface seem completely unrelated offers tools for revealing fresh solutions to familiar problems.....Teams are asked to come up with as many answers as possible to the following statement:

Ideas are like ______________________________________

because __________________________________________

therefore __________________________________________

• Ideas are like babies because everyone think theirs is cute, therefore be objective when judging your own ideas ideas 
• Ideas are like shoes because you need to break them in, therefore take time to evaluate new ideas
• Ideas are like mirrors because they reflect the local environment, therefore consider changing contexts to get more diverse collections of ideas
• Ideas are like bubbles because they easily burst, therefore be gentle with them
• Ideas are like the measles because they are contagious, therefore hang out with other people with ideas if you want to get them yourself
• Ideas are like spider webs because they are stronger than they appear, therefore don't underestimate them

All-in-all, this is a useful addition to my book collection. It will no doubt be used time and again as a reference.  Don't be fooled by the title, the lessons taught are relevant to anyone throughout their personal/professional life, 20s, 30s, 40s and beyond...