I believe I have a strong work ethic. I certainly am not a 9-5 type of person and do like to get in to the office early before phones start ringing. It allows time to catch up on emails, any overnight questions from around the globe and get prepared for the day.

I have worked in teams from around the globe and realise that this poses challenges of time zones, culture and general communication. Face to face is always the best communication and when you are having to discuss issues, development, ideas and production releases non face to face communication can be tricky.

Having been involved in both Development and Production Services teams I am aware of how difficult it can be for both teams. I have been at the forefront of knowledge transfer from the development team to the PS team from web conferences demonstrating new functionality, how the PS team can deal with user queries and also where any particular points of note should be taken. I also drove documentation for the PS team on the Wiki so that any reference during hours the development team were not around to provide instant responses could be made.

One area I feel that others respected me was at how I approach operational risk for the teams. I made several changes to reduce risk and also drove forward when needed when an item of risk came about.

Finally, any area that is given to me that I may not know anything or much about, I spend time to research and get up to speed with as quickly as possible. This is achieved through research on the train, evenings and weekends. I dont sit on my laurels. Some examples include learning how to build a multi-threaded Java application to deal with Websphere MQ messages, Telerik controls for ASP.NET, Java itself, C# multi-threading and building a C# Windows service. Some of these areas I will build new examples to demonstrate these skills.