My decision to go it alone in January 2010 was borne from a mixture of circumstance, ideology and curiosity; the recession had finally caught up with my job at Isolearn and was taking large bites out of the Irish recruitment market, while I, inspired by TED and similar initiatives, found myself jumping at the chance to “make a difference” and try my hand at working independently.

As it turned out, recessions are a perfect time to try these things. Though experience has tempered my ideology somewhat, being a successful freelancer has enabled me to see more of the world, expand my network and further hone my existing skills and talents. Below is a non-exhaustive list of projects and clients.

Sony Techsoft R&D  •  Leaders Café 2020  •  Spirit Bank Exchange  • C&C Associates • Snap Printing • Institute of Asphalt Technology •  Sportswarrior  • Scholars Pub •  Systemlink R&D  •  Buddha Bag Dublin  •  Nauta Verzuimadviseur & Coach

When I first met its CEO over a coffee in October of 2008, Isolearn Technologies was a company without a saleable product. Its patented technology, a bar code reader that could scan a page in a book and then display the associated file (e.g. a flash video) on a computer screen, had incredible potential but was proving to be a hard sell without content.

In the conversation that followed, I was asked to pull together a team to start work on a series of animated revision courses for the Irish Leaving Cert that would help launch Isolearn’s “Iso-book” technology at home and abroad.

THE CHALLENGE:

Producing content for the Iso-book in the form of flash animations was going to be a time-intensive and costly operation. In order to get a better return on investment, we were hoping to sell the content at home as well as abroad. With this goal in mind, we recognised that we would need some form of multilingual support inside the default flash animations right from the word "GO". And, in-line with our hopes for future product expansion, we were eager to stretch the hardware’s functionality from just being an “animation-player” into something truly interactive - which meant that we had to get flash and the custom hardware to “have a conversation” using XML as a go-between.

THE SOLUTION:

Faced with the challenge of improving communications between the Iso-book and its content-to-be, I decided to hire a programmer. Together, the two of us created an XML-driven flash menu with multilingual support and several play-back features - thus changing the interaction between the flash content and hardware from strictly “read-only” to “read-write”. We would later go on to expand this functionality into an e-learning demo game for the K12 market.

In 2007 the Irish property boom had helped to make the Republic the 2nd wealthiest country per capita in the world. Fast forward three years and house prices have collapsed by over 50%, unemployment is up at 14%, emigration is rising and the government bank guarantee has left the average Irish taxpayer “drowning in debt”. For those involved with the Irish Building Industry, the last five years have been “interesting times”.

My story begins at the height of the boom in 2007, when I was hired by Systemlink, a company specialising in alternative forms of heating such as solar and underfloor, to clean up their catalogue. At the time, the company had a wide range of products, the majority of which had been brought in from third party manufacturers. The line was subject to frequent change, with some brands literally being dropped overnight.

I addressed these requirements by creating a table-based, fixed-width layout, reorganising the products into sets of colour-coded categories and by keeping the design free of bleeding edges. The resulting layout became the “philosophical” basis of all company marketing material and eventually coalesced into a unified Systemlink brand that is very recognisable.

2008. THE EXHIBITION STAND

In 2008 Systemlink decided to attend the Irish Building Exposition in the RDS in partnership with three UK firms, Rinnai, Calorex and Halstead. They needed an up-to-date exhibition stand that would cover their current product categories, whilst also providing exposure to the three exhibition partners. In terms of design, the challenge was to make the exhibition stand look coherent without damaging the brands of any of the four firms involved - organisationally, the challenge involved picking the right stand at the right price and getting the finished product out on time.

The battle for shelf space is a well-known phenomenon in the publishing world. Whether it’s for books or DVDs, games or graphic novels, getting your product out into shops and onto market at the right time can make or break it commercially. Which is why, in today’s games industry, missing a shipping deadline is almost akin to committing a cardinal sin.

It’s the summer break of 2005 and I have just gotten a job as a localisation tester at Vivendi Universal Games - an exercise that I’ll be repeating in the following year. While working at VUG I soon discover that life as a quality assurance tester is defined by deadlines. Testers are hired, fired and re-hired based on remote project schedules set by the marketing department. Late shifts, pizza dinners and working weekends are all part of the game. The good news? Most companies - after a particularly intense bout of late hours - will let their testers sleep in.

THE CHALLENGE:

Due to the seasonal nature of the work, many testing teams end up being drafted in unevenly, with some testers getting to spend more time on the game than others. Part of the challenge then, is to get these late arrivals caught up on the ins and outs of the new build as quickly as possible so that the project doesn’t ‘slip’.

But that’s not the whole story, adding to the pressure is a “no string left behind” localisation testing policy, which tends to involve hunting down and visually verifying every text-and-sound-byte in the game - no matter how obscure.

THE SOLUTION:

In order to ease the pressure on new recruits, I was asked to write several tester specific walkthroughs by my team lead. The idea was simple: create short how-to-guides that would help testers get 100% on their first play-through of the game, thus making the whole process just that little bit more efficient from the get-go.

It’s 2003 and the IT industry is at the height of the outsourcing boom. With Fortune 500 companies such as Intel, IBM, HP and Microsoft leading the way, the cost-benefits of streamlining core activities and outsourcing the rest are writ large on the wall. The DELL jobs recall of 2004, in which the company was famously forced to move all of its customer support roles back to the US due to a record number of customer complaints, is but a distant speck on the horizon.

Eager to capitalise on the new trend, senior management at Lexmark International decide to decommission their European Customer Service Department and outsource the work to a number of 3rd parties in Ireland and abroad. As part of the change, two of the largest teams in the technical support building are handed their notice immediately. The remaining teams are transferred into the care of a subcontractor, whose offices are located some 40 minutes further afield. The news comes as a complete surprise to floor staff, resulting in a record number of resignations and a significant drop in morale.

In the changes that follow, the Dutch team suffers severe losses and quickly becomes understaffed. Worst hit is the email queue, with two key members of staff leaving in short succession of one another. While there are no native speakers available to replace them, a staggering backlog in unanswered emails rapidly builds up. Eventually, I am taken off the phones to deal with the problem.

THE CHALLENGE:

Fixing the email problem involved two key steps, the first was to trim the existing queue so that we would be caught up again, the second involved resuscitating the unfinished Dutch template library, and finishing it. In order for it to work as a long-term preventative measure, the template library had to “pre-empt” customer queries, i.e. answer the question before it’s been asked, be formulaic enough to be re-usable, and finally, be well-organised enough so that any agent (even non-native speakers) could find the relevant information quickly.

Together with another Dutch technical support agent, a non-native speaker, we clobbered a backlog of over 200 emails in just under 2 weeks. Furthermore, the versatility of the updated template library meant that the “Dutch email problem” is no longer exclusively Dutch, and can potentially be handled fairly well by any agent in the building - native speaker or not.