How I Got Started In Computing

My first job was as a trainee computer operator for EMI  in Hayes, MIddlesex to the west of London and North of Heathrow Airport. It was on shift work and this was in 1980 so the computer was huge and ran in an air conditioned set of halls with a shift of seven to care for it 24 hours a day.

It was a great time, hard work, long hours and you had to really plan your social activities for the week that yu could go out in the evening. We were on a three week shift pattern, days, nights, evenings. So as the night shift started at 11pm it meant you could only go out on day shifts and at the weekends if you weren’t scheduled for weekend shifts.

It was really an apprenticeship into work and general responsibility. It didn’t teach me anything much about computing, that would come later.

It did teach me how to get along with a small group of people some of whom I liked and some who were pretty obnoxious. I saw how to run a team and how to annoy the team that you need to do the work. I listened and tried to learn about that. I got promoted to junior and then computer operator very quickly…and then stuck there as there were no openings for senior ops. I was there for three and a half years and then moved on to work for Bejams (a frozen food and white goods retailer with 200 shops in the southern half of England).

I went as an operator but with the aim that one of the three operators hired at that time would become the next shift leader as changes were planned.

I didn’t know then but the changes were going from two shifts to three shifts, one shift leader leaving and one being demoted. I got the job of the demoted guy and so six months into the job found I was in charge of a senior op who had been passed over and the shift leader that had been demoted. Wow.

I was there for three years and learnt so much. I would have stayed but only a few months after we were taken over by a facilities management firm I got a job with US computer maker Wang. Those last few months were interesting as I had a new boss who was different in style to the previous one. More subjects for future posts!

I hadn’t originally intended to go into computing. My personal aim was in sound recording but many letters to all of the London studios proved fruitless. I did get some interest in radio production with a possible post with a London talk radio channel (LBC) but then I saw the huge salary in computing and went for the money. I started at EMI on £3,400 per year. Yes and that was quite a lot in 1980.

So I will take up this story in a future post as we are currently about to join Wang and I was 25 and about to move into my first flat so it was around September 1987.

Why I Became a BA/PM

 

Why I became a BA/PM is very much linked to two other questions: how I got started in computing and What I didn’t like about developing systems.

Which sound like good subjects for other blog posts. Sticking to WHY I became a BA/PM… I think the business analysis part it is because I simply found an affinity with doing the research and explaining it to others. The Project Management was probably from hating the way ideas and analysis was being turned into mediocre projects that ended up not dealing with the original aim or worse still being hijacked by vested interests and bearing no relevance to the business and the users.

So I became a project manager to take care of a project I had created as a business analyst. This then became a habit, enter an organisation as b.a. and as the analysis phase finishes morph into a p.m. in order to execute the plan and get it done.
Before I was a B.A. I was developing small scale systems using combinations of VB, SQL Server, Access, Foxpro and Excel. So although I wouldn’t ever describe myself as a programmer, I did develop business systems that worked and achieved something useful for someone.

I think my success was that I was never in love with the idea of programming and was much more interested in making a good user experience that provided real value. This wasn’t always appreciated. I remember one system I came up with, a real hybrid of many technologies that scrapped data from six different sources, consolidated it around the customer id and a set of prioritisation rules and then spat out a weekly report. So I spent ages on this system adding and changing as the business worked out what it really wanted and then when it was running well it was handed over to the user department and they complained. Yes, they complained. It did exactly what they asked for but they didn’t like that the weekly report took slightly over an hour to run, tieing up the p.c. for that time.

What is wrong with that I asked. Well they thought that because it was on a computer now it would be really quick. They asked whether it would help if they replaced the 386 p.c. with a 486 (did I say that this was a long time ago?) but I told them that wasn’t the real problem here. The program in turn went and collected data from other systems. It then extracted data according to a set of rules and built new tables, it then had to compile a report in 15 sections from those tables.

I asked them how long it would take to do that without the system. One said 15 man hours but then the other one pointed out that was a conservative estimate as writing the final report in the format required would probably take another 3-5 hours. At this pointed I compared their 18-20 hour estimate of real people time with one hour of a p.c. chugging away. We came to an agreement that they would kick off the process at midday on Friday and go to lunch. One hour later as they return the process would be just about completing. They were happy. I was happy and I got my first experience of setting user expectations and then matching them to the real world.