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Consultancy Thoughts
It’s been a while since I blogged, so I thought I’d give a heads-up and explain what I’ve been up to.
I’ve been changing what I do for a living over the last few months. Over the course of that time I have discovered more about myself, this sector and what we are lacking in the region than I ever imagined I would.
When I created Vagueware Ltd I was so tired of meetings after four years in academia I would do anything to avoid them. I basically wanted to sit in a room and write Rails code all day, every day. A year of that made me realise I’d taken a wrong turn. It took me another year to get the guts to change it, and start thinking about what I really care about doing.
Over the last few months I have been asked to sit down with more and more companies and just listen, absorb, and respond. A person has an idea on how to improve services in a sector, they don’t know how to deliver it, they might not know how to finance it, who should they speak to, what skills are they lacking, can I help? I listen, discuss, think, do some research, think some more, discuss some more, write a report and take them forward.
All of a sudden I’m having to connect paid SLAs of hosting providers with finance forecasts. I’m trying to understand the politics of a business and connect it to Agile web development processes. I’m helping people who didn’t know they could be a dot.com six months ago work out how to connect to a billion people as quickly as possible. It’s absorbing, fascinating, tiring, but ultimately what I was hoping it to be: optimistically human.
You might think it’s nice work if you can get it, but it’s absolutely shattering. I’m averaging 80 hours/week now (I’ll be hiring in the next couple of months, so if you like the sound of all this and want to come and play, do get in touch), and I typically don’t feel my head hit the pillow. I am exhausted and need a break, but I have never been so excited about my client portfolio.
In the next few weeks I’m hoping to get back to writing up articles here on innovation in the software space, but for now, I’m too busy doing it to write about it…
