Profile

I live in Gloucestershire and live with my girlfriend, two cats and a few chickens. We are lucky enough to live in the countryside and we really enjoy outdoor activities such as walking, cycling and watching nature. I am also a glider pilot and teach people how to fly them. In the summer I also like flying around the south of England and Wales, an on a good day might fly a few hundred kilometers, maybe to the south coast, mid-Wales or Lincolnshire.

I enjoy watching films and my favourite genres are action, sci-fi and I quite like a good comedy or spoof film in these genres too, but it has to be good.

In my career after university I started out by being an engineer designing silicon chips, after a short while doing that I realised that whilst it is great getting into all the details of technical work, it was just as much fun working with a wide variety of people with different skills and backgrounds, and helping a diverse team work together to create a new product.  All the products I’ve worked on have used cutting edge technology in some way, and many of the people I work with went to university and did a technical degree of some kind, Physics, electronics, computer science and similar. I’ve always loved working with teams with a mix of abilities too, both old-timers and recently qualified people just starting out.

I’m a project manager working on high-tech products. This means that I found out what our company or customers want, make sure they think about what they want, and then build the right group of people to design and build that product. Most of the time no-one, or no-one I know, has ever built a similar product, there are a lot of unknowns. As a result there are a lot of questions to be answered, for easy ones like “what colour does it need to be” to others which are more like “that’s impossible, how are we going to do that”.  Whilst I have manager in my job title, that doesn’t mean I make all the decisions, the really great project teams all work together to find the right answer to any problem although it has to be said we don’t always get it right. This means that making mistakes and learning from them is just part of the job. The more you do it and the better the people you work with, the more times you get it right first time. So helping the team make the right decision is a big part of the job, and a part I enjoy. So is fixing things when something breaks or isn’t working.

For the majority of the time, the team I work with are using computers or analyse, design, model , and my current team is about 70% desk/computer/office based with the rest working hand-on with prototype products, often trying to break them or improve them, or maybe showing them to potential customers.  So this is modern day engineering fully open to men and women, and for my part I wish we had more women engineers, our teams would likely work better.

So to start the day I catch up with any overnight emails (yes, in our industry people work all around the world in different timezones). Then I’ll plan the day’s activities. the great news is that every day is different, and the work I do will depend on which stage in a product development we’re in:

At the begining, we’re trying to find out what the product needs to do, and how we might design it. This is not a precise activity and as with a lot of engineering, it’s about making the right trade-off between all the things you need to do, which often come down to juggling features, cost and quality.

Once you’ve decided all this then you can start work doing design thing product, all the teams start to work and all the assumptions you made in the first phase come to bit you. Here there are a lot of decisions to make and also a lot of architecture, design, make and test activities going on.

At some point you’ll get a prototype product – then you can really see if’s doing all the things you hope it can. Once again, lots of problems to solve, especially if it doesn;t work quite how you expected (this is very common)

Once you’re happy with that, then you have to make sure the customer is happy with it, and make lots of them.

All these phase of work require good people understanding the technology, the engineering and the customer to make a good product.  You will notice from these stages that the focus is quite different as you progress. My job is to help all the teams involved make their bit work, and to help make the whole product together – as a result half my day is spent meeting teams doing all these things, and the other half is about planning what we’re going to do next, and how we can do it better in the future.