Interim Projectmanager
Projectmanager (interim)
Works from home
Lives in Amersfoort
Works for VodafoneZiggo since 2020
It was the middle of the first lockdown when IT expert Dick Bertels advertised his availability on LinkedIn. Despite corona, the recruiters at VodafoneZiggo seized their opportunity to hire him and offered him the job of overseeing the migration of two large network systems. "The project was right up my street and a challenge I couldn't refuse: pandemic or not, this had to be a success down to the final detail."
When Dick was introduced to his new colleagues during a virtual meeting, the country was at a standstill. Unfortunate timing in terms of starting a new interim job, but his project in the Inventory domain is progressing very smoothly and Dick is impressed by the way the organisation communicates. From the initial recruitment stages to actually working together in practice, he is full of praise. "Although we can't see each other in real life, there's plenty of confidence in the virtual work floor. Contact with my direct colleagues is superb, too. I mean, ideally we'd all be together in an office somewhere exchanging ideas and sketching plans on a whiteboard, but each of us at our own screens is working out just fine."
What does the project that Dick has been tasked with involve? "VodafoneZiggo was born of several mergers," he explains. "The original companies each had their own legacy; systems and processes that need to be reinvented as one, well-oiled machine. I'm heading up one of those migration projects." VodafoneZiggo's infrastructure comprises myriad components for millions of connections. "Fibre-optic cables, distribution boxes, network nodes, modems - you name it - and there are records on each of those components so that technicians can quickly pinpoint them in the event of a malfunction. I've been asked to bring two of these huge records libraries together, to rewrite them, as it were, so they can be read by a single system that queries them."
"A system migration like this a huge, complex undertaking and not something anybody can do alone. I have a dedicated team of experts, engineers, coaches, testers and coordinators at my disposal who do all the hard work. We're also building a very convenient field app, with which technicians will be able to quickly locate specific network components. Neither migration nor app are projects you can expect to complete in a short frame of time. Two years is realistic, but even that is a cautious forecast, because with complex processes like these, you can never be quite sure beforehand what you're going to bump into."
Dick previously worked at global bank ING. "I gained a lot of experience there with agile working, and that's really coming in handy. VodafoneZiggo is currently transitioning to agile and this project is a case in point. Many of the teams involved have already adopted the approach and the entire design and development of the locator app is agile. Finally, when the new network registration system is launched, an agile team will manage and further develop it, so there's plenty of value that an interim like me can bring to the table, now and looking forward."
