I can’t remember how many times I have faced the same dilemma every time I have started working on a new program -

• How do I quickly understand what has been built so far?
• How do I know which systems are talking to each other?

Knowing what exists today so that we can design a better future is always one of the biggest hurdles of any project.

The mystery of perpetual discovery#

It has alluded me all throughout my career: how can any organisation have the right amount of information about Technology Systems? It’s not that tools don’t exist to capture this information, but then, keeping those tools updated is a challenge. Understanding which teams use which tools for delivering which processes is easy to capture when it all starts, but much harder to keep up to date as time progresses and multiple projects get delivered.

My two daughters have distilled down my entire career down to a single sentence:

“Dad gets paid to talk and draw boxes.”

They aren’t wrong.

I have been very fortunate to live in the space between a problem and a solution. Usually that space is filled with thousands of whiteboard sessions and meetings, lot of coffees, mostly frantic deadlines and yes, many connected boxes.

I have realised that my daughter’s summation is actually the most grounded way to describe what I do. Its all about solving problems -