JP74

It’s almost two months since I joined the JayPees as Technical Director. It’s been fast, furious and fun. Outside of work I’ve been adjusting to becoming a dad for the first time and embarked on renovating a house. However, juggling these two ‘major projects’ is nothing compared to the variety of tasks thrown at me since joining JP74.

In the few weeks I’ve been on board, I’ve been involved in the release of a large multi-lingual site, an accompanying mobile site, an iPhone application, the introduction of a new development process and implementation of an office wiki. We’ve also kick-started a project to develop info-boards for an office reception, plus internal projects to migrate email to a new provider and improve our backup strategy. To top it all off, I’ve had to learn the studio rules relating to the stereo.

It’s actually quite amazing to experience such a throughput of work. Whilst I’ve been developing web applications for well over a decade, I’ve not worked on so many projects in parallel. In the past, I’ve worked on large projects such as online banking which involve teams of people, reams of paperwork and months of development. But, I’ve also worked in smaller, agile teams on projects such as National Rail Enquiries, where we added substantial functionality in just a few months. And it’s this experience that is partly why I’m here. The development team have immediately embraced the principles of SCRUM; an agile methodology that I’m a big fan of, and the studio is now awash of yellow post-it notes, and the team is more focused.

Aside from looking to improve development processes, I’m also tasked with reviewing JP74′s current in-house CMS and Email marketing solutions. The pace of digital change seems to know no bounds, and JP74 must therefore respond pro-actively by offering our clients a richer feature set and user experience offering dynamic, real-time content, mobile access and social networking.

One thing I can be certain of – this new role certainly won’t be boring!