What do I have to offer as a contractor?
I’ve decided that my next role won’t be a permanent position. Instead, I want to work on a contract basis.
With this decision there were a couple of key things I needed to consider. As a contractor, what do I have to offer a company? What experience and skills have I developed that provides maximum value to a business in a short period of time? How do I set up businesses up for success going forward?
I needed to consider myself as a product.
What I Offer as a Contractor
Over my career, I’ve worked in leadership positions in highly regulated environments, responsible for technical strategy, roadmaps, and team development. I’ve learned how to set businesses up to succeed, ensuring that teams, systems, and processes are ready to deliver efficiently and effectively.
Some of the experience I can leverage to help companies and the teams that work in them includes:
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Worked in leadership positions in highly regulated environments and been responsible for technical strategies and roadmaps.
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Developed and grown departments, fostered engineering cultures that drive innovation and produce quality products and set up recruitment and succession plans.
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Grown practices and procedures to ensure businesses are compliant, consider regulation and security as part of design. This involved building bridges between professions for a high level of collaboration.
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Assessed pre-loved systems and supported teams in bringing a second lease of life to them, making them maintainable, sustainable and valued again.
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Designed and reviewed designs of technical architectures to check that they are appropriate for the needs of the business, are secure and compliant.
All this to say, my skill set lies in setting up businesses and teams to succeed. I can set up strategic roadmaps and the processes and culture to ensure that the teams are set up to deliver efficiently and to a high level of quality. I’m also experienced in technical design, ensuring that those responsible for the systems have the support and advise needed to build and maintain the right systems.
You can explore my full range of contracting services here.
My Approach: Consultative, Collaborative, and Sustainable
Where I believe the true value I provide is in how I approach work. It’s important to me, and to the success of the projects that I drive, that I make efforts to ensure those who are implementing and investing in the solutions understand why they are appropriate, are bought into the solution being the best option and have what they need to maintain it going forward.
From my experience, the best solutions come from working with domain experts and the teams that interact with these systems every day. I provide a level of insight and expertise to identify solutions and how to achieve them, but it is my responsibility to ensure that the people implementing the changes and maintaining those systems going forward understand the justification for those solutions. As part of providing roadmaps and rollouts I would need to make sure that the team have the necessary training and experience for the solution to be appropriate.
This approach is consultative. I want to ensure that any change I propose will provide value to the business, but also won’t be detrimental to the experience of the teams supporting it.
Throughout my engagement I will bring the supporting teams along the journey. I will make sure we have clear communication lines and that I am being transparent with all the work I conduct and the research and reasoning behind my proposals. Throughout, I will garner feedback from stakeholders at all levels to make sure that the proposals are practical. At the end of the engagement, I’ll hand over everything needed so that the future of the work will be successful.
Throughout my career, I’ve aimed to be a good scout: “leave places a little bit better than when you arrive”. In my view, the most lasting way to do that is to interact and work with the teams who will continue the work long after you have left.
I’ve found that the best solutions come from working closely with the teams who use and maintain them every day. My approach is consultative: I provide insight, guidance, and strategy, but I make sure that the teams responsible for implementation are fully supported and empowered.
Key Experience & Impact
I’ve worked with companies of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises, and across highly regulated industries, particularly in FinTech.
Some highlights include:
- Engaged in multiple platform migration projects, at all levels including change in hosting provider, onto better suited infrastructure and changing languages and frameworks used.
- Managed governance and compliance assessments and audits including PCI v4, GDPR and ISO 27001
- Completed Security and architectural reviews for tenders for contracts with clients.
- Driven a culture of best practice across teams for techniques and practices including observability, testing, security, governance, IaC and CI/CD.
- Developed and planned architecture and strategy for multi-cloud environments across Azure and AWS.
- Built and grown teams across engineering and architecture.
- Led technical change and strategic initiatives aligned to business objectives inc delivery efficiency, cost reduction, resilience and client onboarding.
- Managed roadmaps and teams with a focus on supporting products and business needs across security, infrastructure, engineering and architecture.
If there are any specific asks, I’m happy to share whether I have appropriate experience or not in an early stage conversation.
Next Steps
First of all, thank you for reading this far! This was a long one.
For full transparency I’ve had early stage conversations with a couple of companies about potential opportunities. If you are interested in hiring my services later down the line, the best way to contact me is on LinkedIn.
Next for me: I’m going to continue studying for my exams during my time off and I will be doing the admin required to set myself up to contract. I will be writing about those experiences as well, as I’ve had a few people reach out to say they are interested in this journey.
I look forward to working with you.
J.
