It was hard not to be curious….

Derrick Hill — Mon, 10 May 2010 06:40:31 +0000

When you see a job advertised with a title like

General Manager for Discerning, Developing and Delivering
What the Customer Wants

it is hard not to be curious. In particular, I’d never had a job title that needed an acronym before - “GM 3D WCW” has a sort of geeky attractiveness about it, so I had to come and have a look.

So, after having spent quite some time with Paul and the others here at Global-Roam - including the opportunity to “pitch” for the role, I came to the conclusion that this was a job that I could enjoy in a company where I could make a real difference. Thankfully Paul agreed, so here I am… I’ve always believed that recruitment decisions are some of the most important ones you make in a business, so the care and attention that Paul gave to this process was certainly one of the things that attracted me to the company.

After operating for ten years it seems to me that Global-Roam has built itself a solid customer base through some innovative products, and the challenge is now to grow this business dramatically over the next ten years.

There are a number of practical things we are going to have to do in the short term to set ourselves up for growth.

We have had some staff changes lately with Adam and Stephen moving onto other opportunities and so (re)building the development team is a priority for me at the moment. We are fortunate to have Eamon Hetherton rejoin the company after a few years travelling around the world and gaining experience in other development organizations, and we are currently advertising for another Senior Software Engineer. Obviously this person will be a key individual in our three member software development team and so we are being fairly careful about who we appoint to this role. So if you are a highly skilled .NET developer who can make things happen and would like to be involved in everything from strategic architectural decisions to putting out the bins…then give me a call.

Another thing we are doing at the moment is reflecting on where the product set is up to, and building a roadmap for where we want to take the products over the next year or two. As a first step we have been taking a tour around the country visiting quite a number of customers. In the last couple of months I’ve managed to see first-hand how the applications are used – this has been an fascinating experience because the products are deployed in environments that range from high-tech trading rooms in the high-rise offices of electricity generation companies to the (often equally high-tech) shop-floors in manufacturing plants like cement factories, paper mills, and steel mills.

The product roadmaps will guide us as we start to make some decisions about the technical approaches that will take over the next few years. As with all successful software products, our applications are carrying a reasonable amount of legacy at the moment and we will be planning how to refresh existing technologies and enable the rapid development of existing and new products. Certainly there’s room for the use of some of the newer technologies that Microsoft has introduced in recent years, and we will be turning these to our advantage.

As with all businesses, we have to keep the plane flying while we are looking towards the future, and so we are currently completing releases of NEM-Review and deSide that have been in progress for a little while now. NEM-Review is in the final stages of testing, and deSide is in the final couple of weeks of development before it enters a final test cycle. We are going to use agile software development practices as the foundation of our software development process, and so we have started using elements of SCRUM including backlog management, planning meetings, 2 week iterations, demonstrations, and retrospectives. It usually takes a few iterations to get these simple practices embedded in the team, and between staff turnover and travel we still have a little way to go to make this routine, but I’m confident that will happen over the coming months. One of the key elements of agile methods is continuous improvement and so we’ll adopt that approach by incrementally introducing better practices and techniques as the opportunities present themselves.

If you are interested in my career highlights you can read a little about my background on Linkedin here http://au.linkedin.com/in/derrickhill45, and if you are interested in our Senior Software Engineer role please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam » Derrick Hill

It was hard not to be curious….