What's your job about?
I work for Telstra Purple which is the IT consulting and implementation arm of Telstra. My team focuses heavily on what’s called Mobile Device Management (MDM). Imagine you’re deploying 10,000 mobile devices and you want to make it easy for the end user to get their email, work apps, wi-fi network and often more complex configuration setup onto those devices so people aren’t constantly logging into a million different apps but are aligning with a company’s security posture, that’s where my team comes in. I design and deliver these kinds of solutions to customers all across Australia in areas like policing, health, logistics, retail, and pretty much everywhere.
On a standard day, I’ll usually be assigned to several projects so during a kick-off I might be capturing the customer requirements and translating what they want to do into what the different technology stacks are actually capable of. I’ll often be working to understand a customer’s environment and capturing those into matrixes to map out their configuration or logical solution diagrams to capture the network topology of how all the components fit together. This can get pretty complex when you deal with customers that either has a really complicated network or customers that don’t understand their own environments very well. When I move into the building phase I’m translating the design into reality and working with the customer to run through test cases to ensure what I’m delivering is meeting their expectations.
What's your background?
I grew up in a rural town in northern NSW distracted by the beach but still managed to find enough time to study. In high school, I loved and excelled in maths, took a single IT course and rounded out my courses with Physics and Chemistry (the latter of which I flunked completely). I moved up to the big smoke in Brisbane and had a general idea of “I want to study IT, but I don’t know what in particular”. I was fortunate enough to be able to focus on university without having to get a casual job, which meant I was able to get great grades while finding plenty of time to ‘party’ AKA: play video games like a true introvert.
As I was doing my bachelor I did a few programming courses, thinking that was the path I wanted to go down but fairly quickly learnt that while I love dabbling in the creation of things, I wasn’t enjoying the translation of that into a more formal capacity. I did my major in basically Artificial Intelligence and started applying for a bunch of grad programs. I was fortunate enough to be chosen for the Queensland Government IT grad program and fell into a team that supported MDM within Queensland Health. It was fairly basic stuff to begin with like answering calls and staging devices, but I began to see ways that I could change up legacy processes and bring new life to an older organisation that supports health care practitioners. I honed my skills within that team, worked on some projects related to MDM and then finally switched over to the private sector to work in a larger MDM-oriented team. I had steady promotions within Telstra working as a level 3 Engineer before switching over to the design space where I’ve been since 2020.
Could someone with a different background do your job?
Yes, there is nothing stopping anyone from learning the technology that I know. My job grows from having a solid sysadmin understanding across IT and then honing in on mobile devices. Having dabbled in programming helps from time to time with understanding core concepts but isn’t a necessity. The thing that sets great solution architects apart from good ones is a desire to help customers maximise the value of a product. I’m not a sales guy, I’m the guy that actually implements the thing they’ve bought so I want it to work as well as possible.
What's the coolest thing about your job?
The coolest thing about my job is the diversity of clients I work with and the impact I can have on making other people’s lives better. I’ve worked on solutions that deploy out apps so that police officers can receive information about the jobs they’re working on from an iPad where previously they’d have to use a radio to request information. I’ve worked on systems to give delivery drivers a single Android device for scanning parcels rather than having to carry about multiple out-of-support Windows devices. Best of all I get to help shape what the experience is for those end users.
What are the limitations of your job?
My job has a very clear windowpane that highlights how the outcome has a direct correlation to the amount of effort and work I put in. If I struggle with motivation/focus for a project or technically am out of my depth, then that will show in the design. In projects where customers have paid large figures of money, they will lose confidence in not just my team but all of Telstra’s ability to deliver. This is a double-edged sword that can motivate but can also add a lot of stress to ensure I’m delivering the best output I possibly can.
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