I have career coach. He is one of the nicest, kindest people in the world. He is Stuart Blake. Reach out to him here: https://maximiseyourpotential.co.uk/ or here: https://stuartblakecareercoach.com/
He requested I put together a list of five projects that I deem significant for one reason or another. The reason is to showcase some achievements. As this site, including the blog, are to all intents and purposes an extension of my CV, it’s not unreasonable to post them here too.
I know that some of you reading this were also involved in one (or more) of these projects. I specifically have not mentioned names for privacy reasons, but if you want, I am happy to edit this and include you personally. Just let me know.
Preamble:
While putting together this list of projects I am proud of, it invokes memories of the people. There is no project that ever involves just a single person—that would merely be a string of tasks and not meet the definition of a project. These projects required an ensemble cast to take them from start to finish, and if I were to list all the people involved here, the list would rival the end credits of Lord Of The Rings.
I am certainly no Peter Jackson. If I were to appear in these credits, I would probably be the production coordinator. A production coordinator manages the “behind the scenes” logistics, which can include renting equipment, hiring crew members, and coordinating talent. In addition, handling the paperwork needed to organize the production.
I wouldn’t even classify myself as a project manager. I cannot. Primarily because I had project managers working for me. I merely create the playing field, define the goal, assemble the people, give them the tools and support them through achieving the goal.
This list of achievements is down to a great team. People who are very good at what they do and if I asked them now, they would all happily work with me again.
Finally, looking back through my project notes, I am amazed how much stuff I have actually forgotten. Fortunately, I find it fairly easy to scrub obsolete technological information from my long-term memory in favour of current solutions. This trip down memory lane has been a fantastic nostalgic exercise.
Thank you.
Five Key Projects
Overview:
In thirty years within the IT space, the number of projects I have been involved with, created, orchestrated, managed, measured, brought to fruition is not an insignificant number.
Narrowing these projects down into a project showcase is a significant task. Questions asked include the likes of:
- How would you include project ‘a’ over project ‘b’?;
- Why does this $10k project feature over the $1m one?;
- Why is a five person project included when a forty person project team has been overlooked?
Projects have been selected, not necessarily on scale, but on business benefit, ROI, as examples of innovative ‘out of the box’ thinking, or because they led to industry change. The choice of showcased projects demonstrates a wide range of skills and technologies. After all, there is no benefit in highlighting five projects that are all so similar in type it becomes repetitive.
I do not list projects in any particular order of size, value, importance etc, but hopefully when viewed as a whole, demonstrate a well-rounded collection of experiences.
Project Name: AfterIAmGone.com
What problem does it solve?:
How to release important information that would be very helpful to the bereaved when they are dealing with the fallout of the loss of a loved one.
Description:
We built the AIAG service to assist loved ones move on more easily by having access to important information that may not have been shared earlier.
The team has created an online service that releases sensitive information on someone’s death.
AIAG is an application that is installed on you PC or runs independently on our website. Using the application, you can specify the location of important information that you would like to share with a loved one upon your death and/or a folder containing sensitive information that you would want automatically deleted. This allows you to share important information that will be valuable to the ones you love such as the location of your will, or delete any sensitive files that may potentially be distressful for them to know about for example, embarrassing home videos.
If the application is not able to communicate with our servers for a predefined period of time, the relevant action is carried out.
We send a notification to a friend to confirm your death using a shared password before anything is actioned to guarantee information isn’t incorrectly shared or deleted, or if you don’t want to involve anyone else you can use our special ‘self notify’ option.
Key Technologies / Skills Utilised:
Investment Strategy, Business Strategy, Data Integrity, Data Protection (GDPR) and of course the technical aspects of HTML/PHP/AWS/SQL/UI/UX
Why this project features in this list:
When I got involved in this project, they had already completed the technical design. There were several shortcomings that the original technical designer had not foreseen, but… What I realised from the outset was that the value of this business was not in the technical solution, but in the collection of relationship information. My role now is to manage the external investment phase of the growth and its acquisition.
Project Name: World’s first SaaS solution
What problem does it solve?:
How to provide a standard set of applications and shared data to employees around the world while creating a supportable infrastructure that doesn’t require IT staff in every location.
Description:
The solution comprised NTAS, Citrix Server (who until just recently was still MultiUser Windows), our recently purchased recruitment application, MS Office, a new Intranet from where you launched the applications. Physical links were a combination of symmetric and asymmetric digital links with a carrying capacity of approximately 19kbit/s per user. Interesting with user’s work patterns, this distils down to 5 users in a 64kbit/s link.
This was done with the technology available in the 1990s. If I were to undertake this project now, instead of point-to-point connections from each office to the Global Switch Datacentre in East London, I would employ much larger low-latency Internet links and secure the data transport using an encrypted VPN.
Key Technologies / Skills Utilised:
WAN/LAN/NTAS/Citrix/AD/SQL/Data Integrity/Data Protection (DPR)
Why this project was chosen:
What we did here was groundbreaking for two reasons:
1) Historically, office computing used a centralised model. Dumb terminals connected to a single centralised mainframe. The onset of the graphical user interface (which was in most cases Windows) started a distributed computing revolution. This brought about a whole raft of problems that include managing multiple copies of data; users moving from device to device and having their own desktops; centralised management of account information; licences and the cost of them, and finally, of course, support. This project started the trend of supplying highly graphically rich applications while maintaining centralised control of the environment and data.
2) Centralising the solution outside of the organisation and renting it back on the per user per month basis created what was effectively the world’s very first Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. This is a model that today we are seeing adopted by more and more software vendors. This project was 1997, and it wasn’t until around 2004 that Gmail was launched, 2011 that office 365 was launched and SaaS delivery models became the favoured method for software distribution. Of course, this largely because from an investment standpoint, a business that had a recurring revenue income model had a P/E Ratio significantly larger than a traditional business (sometimes as high as 30:1).
Project Name: Smoogle
What problem does it solve?:
How to automate data entry (in this case coding of CVs) when the original data is not standardised in any way.
Description:
Devised a web based recruitment solution that can match a candidate to a job before he/she enters search criteria. The same system can be used to measure the performance of recruitment consultants. The technology is applicable to any organisation which needs concept matching.
Created and implemented an automatic CV handling tool that receives, codes, replies, forwards and enters approximately 15,000 CVs per week into a database. We estimate it to save the organisation close to $1,000,000 per year. The technology applies to any industry with volume processing requirements.
An interesting example of the sensitivity of the system was the Bayesian structured, multi-dimensional data-cube we created at The FiveTen Group in 2007 was so well tuned that after training, the system could determine the ‘mood’ of the author. But it was not an easy road to get there. The first model used wikipedia to do the language training. Our system developed what I can only describe as a dialect—it spoke scientific! The second attempt used dmoz.org to get a more rounded data-set for language use ended up tarnished with colloquialisms and foul phrases. The learning done on these early systems was by us and not the machine.
Key Technologies / Skills Utilised:
Bayesian (Montecarlo and Markov Chain) Statistical Analysis/Large Scale Data Collection/Data Integrity/Validation/Business Strategy
Why this project was chosen:
This project was 2007. It is really only since 2020 that we see in the market the use of Machine Learning take off. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence products are now commonplace, although I take exception to the use of either of these terms and set a very high bar to determine if a product meets either of these criteria.
See https://larcombe.tech/ai-or-is-it/
Project Name: Wide Area Network rebuild
What problem does it solve?:
Imagine a single company having a thousand employees split between three buildings, all within walking distance of each other, but the people in each building rarely even speak to each other, let alone work together effectively. This was the challenges with the Texas Instruments Sunbury/Ashford campus. They originally connected the three sites with 64kbit/s leased lines. This was barely enough to transfer e-mails and would fail completely with attachments.
Description:
The project to was install point-to-point connections to a collapsed backbone FDDI (Fiber Distributed Data Interface) switch which resulted in major cost savings for the company and eased the IT management burden. The network supported several services, including Novell, NT and UNIX. I simultaneously planned and co-ordinated a migration from NetWare to NT.
To achieve the project goals, we installed one of the first FDDI switches in the UK with 8.2km of fibre, providing Texas Instruments (TI) with an 800% increase in capacity and better redundancy utilising cost effective dark fibre owned by a local cable TV company. The method was novel. Nobody had collapsed an FDDI backbone in this way before. It was picked up by the trade press and an article was published in Network News, [30/4/97]. It described the installation of the FDDI switch, relocation of routers to edge devices and collapsing the backbone. The project included taking the local network, from a routed design over three sites connected via 64Kb leased lines to a single 8.2km FDDI ring model incorporating Ethernet switches and HP 100 VG at each site, and removing the archaic IBM Token-Ring technology. The new solution allowed me to incorporate specialised services such as an LU6.2/SNA gateway for connection to the TI Mainframe in Houston TX., automated network management, monitoring and even packet sniffing/capture from remote locations, and an automated fax transmission server (big at the time!).
Key Technologies / Skills Utilised:
WAN/LAN/Server/Strategy/Budget/Finance
Why this project was chosen:
From a technological standpoint this was World leading. The concept to collapse a backbone internally in a single device had never been done – hense the media interest.
Project Name: Assimilation of acquired business infrastructure
What problem does it solve?:
When putting two (or more) businesses together because of merger or acquisition, there are several internal company functions that are duplicated. HR, Finance and IT are examples of these. With the number of acquisitions we executed between 2006 and 2009, the assimilation of these internal services became our area of expertise.
Description:
Everything starts with information. From the earliest interest in a business through all aspects of due diligence, if you can collect the right information, in the right way, and organise it in an efficient and usable manner, then you can plan the integration to be executed in the most painless and seamless manner. I say ‘painless’ because people resist change, and it is the pain of change that causes this resistance. There are many reasons, including but not limited to:
- Company culture clash
- Different management styles
- Communication difficulties
- Clash of egos
- Different work schedules
- Disputes over resources
- Conflict over company values
- Turf wars
- Resentment over job losses
With the creation of a single global IT infrastructure centred in Hong Kong, (the only reason being that HK was the only data centre location globally that I could get ~65ms round trip times to every global office) it was possible to standardise the management of the user data and execute a fast and relatively easy transfer experience.
Eventually, we ran voice and data over SDSL links to local Internet providers, created secure VPNs to the data centre and supplied apps back via thin client. The system worked so well that the remote apps loaded faster than local. I designed the new infrastructure in such a way that with IP telephony, we could install voice switches in each office, giving free desk-to-desk calls around the world. We then ordered trunk lines in country centres, reducing call costs. Then we routed international calling over our private network utilised a remote trunk. It reduced international call cost to the same as national.
As acquisitions progressed, we consumed their IT staff and licences—adding them to a group MVLP (Microsoft Volume Licencing Programme), allowing licences to be ‘moved’ around the World in a follow the sun model. This effectively meant that the number of Windows/Office et al. we could reduce licences required for the business to one-third, as it was only necessary to have a licence when the application was in use.
Key Technologies / Skills Utilised:
LAN/WAN/Data Integrity/DPR/Business Strategy/Communication/HR/Business Intellegence
Why this project was chosen:
Although IT and data assimilation are only a small (albeit key) part of a merger or acquisition, it can be one of the most emotionally painful experiences for the user/employee. To remove this from the pain item list was actually a big win and one I and the entire team were very proud of. From a personal standpoint, this is where my business skills and technical skills intersect fully.