What do I have to offer and what you get out of it.
As I’ve decided that my next role would not be a permanent position, but rather on a contract basis, there were a couple of key things I needed to consider. As a contractor, what do I have to offer a company? Over my career so far, what experience and skills have I developed that provides maximum value to a business in a short period of time, and sets them up for success going forward?
I have worked in leadership positions in highly regulated environments and been responsible for technical strategies and roadmaps. I’ve developed and grown departments, fostered engineering cultures that drive innovation and produce quality products and set up recruitment and succession plans. I’ve grown practices and procedures to ensure businesses are compliant, consider regulation and security as part of design and built bridges between professions for a high level of collaboration. I’ve assessed pre-loved systems and supported teams in bringing a second lease of life to them, making them maintainable, sustainable and valued again. I’ve 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, to have strategic roadmaps in place 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 experience in technical design, ensuring that those responsible for the systems have the support and advise needed to build and maintain the right systems.
With this in mind I’ve structured the following service offerings which can be adapted to fit businesses tactical and strategic needs. These give a view on the value I can provide to businesses and their teams.
1. Technical Assessment and Advice.
When most people think of Technical Architecture, this is the category of work that immediately comes to mind. Often this can involve assessing existing tech to propose solutions to an emergent issue or it can be the design of a new system to address a problem or need.
I can offer support on a short term (tactical) basis and/or can produce a long term (strategic) plan for businesses.
Tactical Technical Assessments
This is the most appropriate engagement if the business has a specific and scoped problem it wants solutions to. It is also a good option if you want to try out engaging my consultancy before committing to a more strategic engagement with me.
For Tactical Technical Assessments the company would give a problem statement of the issue they need solutions to. Examples may include:
- Scoped project engagements. This can include improvements to performance, cost efficiencies, resilience or security for a specific product or area of the system.
- Scoped migration projects. Including migrating to a different technology or tooling choice and/or data migrations. The size of the project would determine if this was a tactical or strategic engagement.
- Tender Support. I can support in doing the research, write ups and justifications required for contractual tenders.
- Compliant Architecture (PCI, GDPR etc). For either existing or new projects, I can consult on how to design a compliant system.
- Data design. Projects may include plans and proposals for ensuring compliance (contractual or regulatory) in data systems through design.
- API / Event Design. Consulting on contracts and design of patterns for data in transit.
In general terms an engagement of this type might look like the following: firstly, I will work with the key stakeholders to understand the business needs and expectations. I would also get the view from domain experts such as Lead Engineers and Product professionals about the problem area and the impacts of what has been identified. I would then research and develop potential solutions to the issue, showing the cost, value and longevity of each approach. Once a solution is agreed with the business, I would develop a roadmap for implementation and handover with the teams to ensure they are aware of why the solution has been selected, what the alternatives were and how to complete the work.
The outcomes of this form of engagement may include:
- Assessment of problem statement area and gap analysis.
- A deck of solutions with an evaluation of each. The evaluation will likely cover the cost, value, risk and longevity of each approach.
- Documented target architectures.
- Implementation plan / roadmap for the solution approved by the business.
- Fully documented handover to stakeholders and teams to enable them to enact the changes.
Strategic Technical Assessments
There are a few reasons why a company has reached a point where they need help with the technical strategy. A common cause is having engineering teams that have autonomy to make decisions, but without the communication lines in place to have cohesion. This frequently occurs with companies that have gone through significant growth.
Examples of work that may require strategic technical assessment include:
- Complex project engagements. This would be for a assessment and change that is large in scope and where I would need to engage with the company to drive the full rollout of the change for a significant amount of time.
- Large migration projects. A large size can be indicative of time frame to complete, complexity/size of the impacted system or degree of the product suite impacted.
- Strategic technical direction. This would be an assessment of the system as a whole, gap analysis, defining target architectures and setting up the business with roadmaps and processes to support.
- Tender Support. For large contracts I can assist with the tender support, gap analysis of the contractual needs and develop roadmaps for how to meet the technical needs asked of your contractual agreements.
In general terms an engagement of this type might look like the following: I would first have conversations to understand the businesses goals and values. Then I would conduct a technical assessment of the whole platform/system impacted and have discussions with the teams working on them. Using this information I would put together a deck of candidates of work for prioritisation in a roadmap. For each of these candidates I will share an analysis of the cost and value of the change, as well as options for varying longevity of the change. Once presenting the pack, based on what is agreed, I would then shape the technical roadmap and put in place a process for managing the roadmap going forward.
The outcomes of this form of engagement may include:
- Gap analysis of the systems.
- Documented target architecture.
- A 12 - 24 month roadmap of work.
- Processes for technical roadmap and integration into existing product roadmaps and planning.
- Solution and implementation plan for first 3 - 6 months of the roadmap.
Example Delivery Approach
Both tactical and strategic engagements for technical assessment and advice will typically follow the below structure. All of my engagements will be tailored, so there may be a degree of variation.
- Phase 1: Discovery & Assessment. A focused discovery phase to establish a deep understanding of the business context, current architecture, and organisational design.
- Phase 2: Strategy & Target Architecture. Synthesis of discovery findings into a coherent technical strategy and target-state architecture.
- Phase 3: Roadmap & Proposal. Translation of the agreed strategy into a pragmatic, prioritised roadmap.
- Phase 4: Handover. At the conclusion of the engagement, a structured handover will be conducted to ensure continuity and enable the client to progress delivery independently.
2. Engineering Topology Assessment and Advice.
As well as being a senior technical leader, I have worked as a people leader enacting cultural change. This has included: building and growing teams/departments; promoting quality software through establishing processes, best practices and communities to support teams; building pipelines for recruitment, career growth and stability in organisations and organising team structures around systems to ensure more efficient and stable delivery of change. Technical products are always impacted by the people using them as well as the people building them. Sometimes the means to improve on issues in delivery or stability is best solved through changing culture and topologies rather than the underlying technology.
There are a variety of technical professions I have experience conducting this work with including engineering, security, architecture, product and delivery.
The areas I can assess and advice on include:
- Engineering Topology. Engineering team structure and how it impacts delivery and stability of the systems they are responsible for. I would identify challenges and provide advice for how to change the structure to resolve these issues.
- Engineering Quality. Assessing the current ways of working and then advising on practices, processes and tooling that can be introduced to safe-guard the quality and compliance of systems. This includes advising how to improve the experience for engineers.
- Incident management process. Introducing process and practices for incident management including post mortems, how to conduct root cause anaylsis sessions (RCAs), planning remediation and prevention actions and identifying and addressing trends in incidents. I can also provide assessments for tooling and services which can help with all of these processes.
- Introducing architectural functions. This can be either through building and growing an architectural team or advising how these responsibilities can be developed in existing engineering teams.
- Recruitment and progression. Advising on recruitment processes, progression lines and succession planning.
- Cross function collaboration. Improving collaboration across engineering and other functions (e.g. infrastructure or security); leaning into Devops and SecOps cultures.
It may be the case that as part of strategic technical change I will advise considering some structural or practice changes to help a business meet its goals.
3. Leadership and Strategy Coaching.
I have a lot of experience coaching individuals to help them reach their full potential as technical leaders. This has included lead engineers and architects of varying levels of seniority.
The coaching sessions will be run on a regular cadence which would be agreed at the start of the engagement after a discussion about the persons level of experience, the areas they want coaching and if there is a specific project they need the coaching for or goal they aim to reach.
Ideally these coaching strategies would be sponsored by the persons place of employment. Some of the areas I will offer coaching on will include:
- Leading a specific project. This would include managing planning, roadmapping, appropriate stakeholder engagement, working across teams and gaining buy-in and trust. Through regular sessions I would support the person, advise and help them identify the best way to manage the project.
- Strategic systems thinking. During sessions I would provide advise and techniques to allow the person to identify work, raise it and plan into a companies roadmap.
- Growth and development plans. For the first session we would work together to understand the persons strengths in their role and identify the areas they are weaker in. Through conversation we’d agree their career aims and I would support in developing a growth plan for how they can address the areas of weakness.
- Managing a technical team. To coach those who are responsible for managing technical teams. This includes techniques for managing work in the team to share and strengthen members skill-sets and managing high-performers.
My approach and experience.
Above I’ve written out some of the services I can offer to businesses. 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.
Key experience
A lot of my experience is shown on my LinkedIn, and I would be happy to share a CV with anyone who wishes to see it. I’ve worked in companies of all sizes from startups to large enterprises. I have a breadth of technical experience, and am a senior technical leader.
Some key points of my experience include:
- Worked in highly regulated environments (multiple FinTech companies).
- 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.
If all the above sounds great: what next?
First of all, thank you for reading this far!
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 in the near term or want information for consideration later down the line, I am more than happy to have a chat. To arrange, the best way to contact me is on LinkedIn.
For me personally, 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.
Hope to hear from you soon.
J.
