Careers with Version 1 in Dublin

How did you get into this career?
I graduated from Kevin St. College of Technology with a HND in Computer Science in the late 80's. After 5 years working as a programmer in London I returned to Ireland and after a few years started working in a bank as a programmer. I stayed in the bank for 17 years, and worked my way up to become an IT Manager of a small IT dept within the bank. This pretty much gave me the skillset required to be a Project Manager - "owning" problems, tracking finance and dealing with day to day issues.

Describe your average day at Version 1?
My working week is usually a mixture of coordinating and attending project meetings, bringing people together for problem resolution, and also managing and tracking peoples time and tasks. I work from 8 in the morning until 5 or so, I generally don't work weekends or overtime - unless a project really needs it. My role is working for a client in the public sector.

What does your working week look like at a glance?
I might have 1 or 2 set meetings daily but I end up speaking to the developers, PM and the Customer on an ad hoc basis pretty regularly throughout the day. At the moment I am working across a number of customers so my to-do list can change hourly. Because I am the only tester on the account, I tend to be working across different projects in different parts of the business at the same time, so every day brings something new.

What is your proudest accomplishment in your role?
We successfully upgraded the UI on the DEAP4 application used by BER assessors last year. This was a very important project for a public sector customer of ours as they were struggling to get their assessors to use the existing application. Since the upgrade has gone live, there has been excellent feedback from the customer which contributed to us winning a tender with them earlier this year to continue our work with them for the next 3 years.