The infrastructure team design and manage the IT services for the group. Our remit spans from network devices such as Cisco Nexus switches, through to line of business applications like Microsoft Exchange Server 2019. Sometimes these services are owned by the infrastructure team, although more often than not we work with other teams across the business to deliver a wide range of services hosted on-premise, with managed service providers or on public cloud platforms such as AWS or Azure.
My role in the main is a problem solver and subject matter expert within my professional field of expertise. I can be called upon to help innovate on a number of topics and support other departments within the business.
Day to day I’ll work with my team to deliver services to the business, while also working closely with colleagues across the business to help them solve their own problems and to make a success of their own projects.
Why do you like working at tmgroup?
I’ve been at tm a very long time and can’t recall a time when I haven’t been learning something new or improving my understanding of a subject. As a technology business things rarely stay the same for long at tm and I really enjoy the rapid pace of change and the fact that I’m empowered to make those changes happen.
A good example of this has been our move towards adopting some DevOps practices and in particular Infrastructure-as-Code. 4 years ago much of our business as usual (BAU) work involved clicking around a screen. Today any repetitive BAU work has been replaced by PowerShell based automation leveraging modules that we’ve written ourselves. This has then freed us up to focus on higher value projects and allowed us to start look at a broader range of technologies for the future including Linux and Ansible to name a few. All of this change has been driven by ourselves, not just because it’s interesting, but because it delivers clear business benefits.
What advice would you give a new starter with tmgroup?
Ask lots of questions! Everyone at tm is really friendly and eager to help and conversely, they’re also open to new opinions. It could well be that a better way of doing something that seems obvious to you, might not have even been considered by your colleagues.
What do I do outside of work?
Most weekends you’ll find me out riding bikes or racing a Mini. While I love the racing almost as much as food, it would be nothing without the great community of friends and family that I spend my weekends with.