Principal Consultant
Readify hired the top 5% of (.NET) software engineers in the market and were considered one of the premium Microsoft consultancy in Australia.
Note: Readify were acquired by Telstra in 2016 and have since become part of Telstra Purple.
My role as a Principal Consultant was diverse. I:
- Lead teams of consultants across multiple accounts and engagements, mentoring and providing delivery assurance.
- Acted as a virtual CTO, working with client senior managers and executives in a billable capacity.
- Worked in a technical pre-sales and account management capacity.
- Shared state leadership of around 60 consultants in Victoria.
- Assisted in cross-practice delivery across development, data and analytics, as well as innovation and design.
- Acted as the primary escalation point should any issues be raised by Readify consultants or client stakeholders on the engagements that I was responsible for.
Accomplishments
- Significant involvement in the generation of millions of dollars of revenue as a part of my contribution to the pre-sales process.
- Championed Readify to some of our larger enterprise customers resulting in addition engagements for our consultants
- Lead ThingSpace (Readify's internal equivilent of Thoughtworks' Tech Radar)
Skills
Projects
Enterprise Customer Engagements
I worked with a major multi-national client (approx 700 engineers) on various projects.
- I led and contributed to a significant architecture review of a major new product for that organisation. The findings of this review were used as the basis for remediation actiivties based on identified issues.
- I conducted a DevOps assessment, which was then presented to the global executive team. This lead to additional investment in DevOps practices.
- What was initial leading 1 team on a product stream of work, led to an additional 2 teams based on the success and velocity of the original team. The development management could see the capability and ability to meet commitments of our teams above that of other teams (including those provided by our competitors)
Virtual CTO
I acted as a virtual CTO for a cloud-based SaaS business where their CTO needed to delegate some responsibilities. I was primarily responsible for mentoring their .NET and C++ engineers to give them direction and upskill them on architecture and design practices for a major new version of their product. I also assisted the business in investigating the suitability of newer technologies (e.g. graph databases, GraphQL) over existing approaches
Eventually, the board decided to move to a primarily offshore model resulting in redundancies and I needed to assist the business and some of the affected employees with the transition.
Vendor Relationship Gone Bad
I worked with a client who did not come from a tech background. They had invested a significant amount of money in a new product that they wanted to launch, and they were not happy with the resulting work of the vendor that had been tasked with delivery.
I was brought in to assess if what had been done was reasonable given the time and money invested (it wasn't) and educate the customer on delivery and vendor management to see if the situation could be salvageable. The client then asked us to build a product backlog and determine a ballpark cost for what it would involve for us to take over and rescue the project.