Working together

Eleven years of product work. A global Linux estate, government cloud at a million requests a minute, and AI products now. The judgement is the same at every size.

Four things I get hired for

• Automating a process that is manual today. Re-keying between systems. A form that should fill itself in. An approval chain living in someone's inbox. A spreadsheet that quietly became business-critical. I delivered enterprise business process automation products at aZaaS, and the tools on this site are the same work at a smaller size. The payback is easiest to see here, because the hours are already being spent.
• Systems that have to be provably right. Rules engines and calculations where close is not good enough, and reporting where every number traces to the record it came from. The family-benefits calculator carries 129 tests for this reason. Parsnips will not let a model write a quotation, because a wrong one discredits the whole product. If you have an edge case that keeps biting, this is the work.
• Records and workloads at volume. A large pile of unstructured material that needs a system around it. A pipeline that keeps running without anyone driving it. I have run Government Commercial Cloud platforms at a million API requests a minute, grown a global Linux estate 30%, and turned an 800-page manual into 372 structured sections. Where a model is the right tool for part of it, that is part of the design. It stops where the evidence stops.
• When compliance and day-to-day usability pull against each other. Four years holding strict IT compliance together with what people needed to get their work done. One global estate, two groups who wanted opposite things from it. A lot of internal tooling fails on this and only this, which makes it worth naming early.