Rich D.

Developer to Business Analyst to Manger

As a software developer in Linedata, there are opportunities to either focus technically or to branch out into project management and business analysis. I explored both of these, becoming a 50:50 developer and business analysis with a sideline in managing projects! This led to me becoming a full time business analyst and project manager as our needs for these increased. It is possible to shape your career around the areas for which you have a talent and an interest, which is very rewarding. Now, I am the manager of the Icon team and more focused on the growth and careers of my team members.

I manage the Icon product development team

My team of developers and testers work on the Icon product, which is used for back office accounting of various types of fund, such as pension funds, insurance funds or general investments. It is a very flexible, powerful and scalable product with a feature set built on over a million lines of C code, though with some Oracle facing code in PL/SQL and newer GUI code in C#. At the time of writing, I manage of team of 13, with an emphasis on the growth in their expertise to be able to support and take forward such a complicated piece of software.

Developing my team members to be the best they can be.

Historically, I have been mainly motivated by learning and have continually learned new things, especially in finance and the accounting areas important to our customers. Now, I have a vision of a highly expert team that can handle all aspects of the software lifecycle with high quality and all the financial areas covered by our software. Enabling their growth is my motivation.

Devote yourself to life-long learning

Potentially more in our industry than any other, you should have a love of learning and a desire to keep growing in new ways. Whether picking up new technology, or becoming an expert in different business areas addressed by the software, a growth mindset is absolutely essential.

I ran a 1000 day project within budget and anticipated the market

We made a major enhancement to our income module to handle new types of asset, where I was the business analyst and product manager. As part of this, we brought in support for new assets with daily compound interest before customers needed it and in plenty of time for the large exposure that result as they replaced simpler floating interest rates. This was a complicate project and was delivered within estimates.