Options

I am currently considering my career options.  After a year working part time I believe I have a very sound understanding of the opportunities and constraints associated with Adult Onset Still Disease and its affect on work. 

Very briefly the good:

• I have a lot of time for learning and maintaining my expertise (in addition to my formal working day) and for thinking and reviewing
• This equips me well for advisory and planning roles
• I work an extended day from home
• I need to do a lot of low intensity exercise, which also allows me to make phone calls and listen to technical briefings/conferences etc

and just as briefly the bad:

• I need to work mainly from home
• I only work between 4 and 6 hours a day
• I am most suited to longer term work, because of the day to day variability of the conditions
• I am better working in a supporting rather than leadership role

I have three main options that I am considering with my company:

• Working within a Product Management team, which is primarily concerned with managing the products and services we provide to customers through their lifecycle.  This means making sure that we correctly position the products to customers and sales/marketing, that the products and services meet the customers requirements and that products and services continue to meet the customers requirements and we continue to make an acceptable margin on them until we manage their retirement.  The particular team I am interested in has a scope of end-user and workgroup computing solutions and associated infrastructure services, which is my area of expertise.
• Working within Infrastructure Architecture, which is less focussed and is mainly an organisation established to manage the provision of architecture resources to projects in as efficient a way as possible and to ensure that those architects develop and deliver – where possible standard – solutions according to a well defined process.  Ideally these solutions are instances or combinations of the services that are being product managed by people in the Product Management teams described above.
• Working within Consulting, which is driven more by customer intimacy and the need to deliver business value than by the need to deliver standard services.  However it is probably just as unfocused as it – like Infrastructure Architecture – is comprised of a succession of assignments, with less long term focus.

I currently favour Product Management, because it is a smaller team, leverages my expertise most, and my role would be primarily focussed on advisory and longer term planning and positioning.  However the other two alternatives have their advantages.  Infrastructure Architecture has a large pool of assignments upon which to draw and a good peer group of architects to work with.  Consulting is more flexible and more value driven.