What is your journey in the Telecommunication sector?
My journey in the Telecom sector started at Evoluta as a Support Engineer. I remember being the fourth employee when I joined. As a company, we established a modern version of “Please Call Me” and subsequently expanded to a variety of services over time When I left, six years later, I went to SICAP, an international company. I joined them as an Integration and Support Engineer, assisting the whole EMEA region. There, I worked on various systems, such as device management and learnt much more about how solutions are designed. After two years, the company closed, and I joined Gemalto. A while later, I moved to Concurrent Systems. Then I left to return to Evoluta, who had now become Conor, as a Support Manager.
Coming back was simple; I quickly felt at ease and adjusted to all of the modifications made to the systems I previously worked on. Besides, our product and service portfolio had greatly expanded due to the merger of Conor and Evoluta. It was a lot of fun and excitement.
Later on, Conor was acquired by Adapt IT, and the structure of the company changed in terms of development and operations. As a result, squads were created. The team was then embedded within the different squads, and each squad was assigned a Tech Lead or a Manager to help supervise projects. At the time, I had been appointed as the leader of the Fusion Squad. The Fusion Squad was the middleware platform for one of South Africa’s largest Mobile Network Operators. I arrived at a time when we were embarking on the most significant migration of the charging platform for that MNO, called CCS (Converged Charging System). My team and I managed this project in collaboration with the customer, and we were able to complete it effectively.
I also served as a Systems Analyst, reviewing the requirements we receive from the client and sometimes redesigning and aligning them to the current designs that we have in our environment, while ensuring that we meet all of the project management and contract timelines.
What does it mean to be a Project Team Leader? What do you like in your work?
What I like in my work is the opportunity and ability to solve problems. Those problems always differ, but then you have to come up with a solution. The term Project Team Lead means that you’re constantly dealing with new projects as well as finding solution to arising challenges.
Moreover, being a Project Team Lead is about implementing processes to ensure that your team is able to deliver projects effectively. This includes simply tracking and monitoring projects to ensure that no obstacles derail or hinder project completion. The other component is management, which involves checking in on people to ensure that they are being taken care of and have all of the tools necessary to successfully complete projects and eliminate any obstructions.
“Describe the most innovative change that you initiated and how you implemented the change?”
There are numerous things that have been put in place, but I think of two that have had the greatest and most significant influence from a Fusion standpoint. The first was giving the teams additional flexibility to dynamically modify platform configurations without needing new developments. The second is the DevOps Continuous Integration, continuous deployment, where we were basically (from a security standpoint) ensuring that our code is secure throughout the build and development cycles. While pushing things to the point where developers can have their code checked for security vulnerabilities and have automated deployments to the environment.
“How do you ensure quality in your deliverables?”
The first step is to ensure that everything has been thoroughly tested. Preparing as much as possible for deliverables, gathering as much information as possible about what is necessary up front, and then using that knowledge, either jointly or post-design, to check for gaps. The second tip is to always look for dynamism, scalability, and resilience in the design.
If you could change your work today, what would be your dream job. Will IT still be on your shortlist?
IT will most likely remain on my list. I’ve spent so much time in IT that I can’t think of anything else. For example, I was not too fond of medicine because of the blood. When I thought of blood and working with people’s blood, I was like, NO. I think just being within the IT industry itself is everything. Maybe my role would be slightly different. But it will still be in the IT field because I think I just love the challenges it brings. I would even expand it to Technology because both fields are about solving problems. However, IT is generally limited to the software side of things, but when you expand to Technology, it becomes much broader because Technology is about providing value through innovation and improving our day to day lives. Technology could be applied to several industries such as Agriculture, Health, tourism, and bring a significant advancement or even solutions to the industry needs.
What are the three words your co-workers use to describe you?
I will say calm, focused and intuitive or also unique, multi skilled and persistent.
