Judgement

The circuit a management system automates — buying, producing, costing, restocking, charging and knowing whether any margin was left — was run by hand first, for more than a decade, with his own till inside it.

A pasta factory and a pizzeria of his own: production, input costing, purchasing and suppliers, sale price and margin. Head of kitchen at a restaurant franchise and at a speciality coffee house: process standardisation, quality control and team coordination under variable demand. Head of kitchen at a mountain hotel: 250 covers a day, perishable stock, tight purchasing and no supplier round the corner. Assistant manager at a supermarket: restocking, stockouts, staff and customer service on the floor.

Each of those posts left behind a constraint that resurfaces in software: that bad costing is discovered late and always at month end; that an unstandardised process can be neither delegated nor measured; that perishable stock does not forgive a purchasing error; and that an empty shelf is a lost sale no report recovers.

That is where knowing what it feels like to discover at month end that a product has been selling at a loss comes from, and why it happens. It is the difference between surveying an operation and recognising it: discovery starts from the questions that matter, and the first meeting is not spent explaining the business.

A system in production fails at some point, and what defines that hour is not the code: it is how the conversation is handled while it gets fixed. That is not learned by programming; here it was trained on the front line.

Contact centres and a roadside assistance network: assistance for vehicles involved in accidents, coordinating resources with the customer on the worst day of their week. Promoted on performance to supervisor for high-end vehicle warranties and for complex cases requiring a mobile workshop.

One case sums up the craft: talking a mechanic through the complete strip-down of a lorry’s transmission by phone, step by step, at the side of a road — with the gearbox seized the wheels would not turn and there was no way to get it onto the recovery truck. It worked.

Three capabilities come from there and get used in every implementation: explaining a technical procedure to someone who does not know it and is under pressure; deciding from data once something has already broken; and holding a conversation with a company or an institution in their own register. It is what separates a resolved incident from a lost client.

Much of what sets a delivered system apart is not that it works, but that someone looked closely enough to catch what does not add up before the client did. That reflex was trained outside software.

More than twenty years of visual and sound craft. Music production with Ableton Live and Max for Live — signal-oriented visual programming: building the tool that does not exist because no commercial one does exactly what is needed. More than fifteen released records, fourteen years teaching the craft, and a record label of his own with two partners where every cover, every video and the website are designed in house.

Two things that do get hired come from there. First: a system’s image and interface are not outsourced, they ship with it. Second: when the tool that is needed does not exist, it gets built — and that reflex applies as much to an audio instrument as to a management module.

And the one that joins them, the one used daily: looking closely until you find what does not add up. A colour out of tune on a cover, a cut half a second late in a video, a kitchen where waste leaks through a procedure nobody reviewed, a figure on a dashboard that is correctly calculated and wrongly conceived.

An auditable method is one someone else can review, not one the person running it vouches for. This one was formed by sustaining a method under a standard, not by reading it.

That way of looking became a system in the Quality and Innovation department of a company building embedded software on its own hardware: requirements discovery with every department, documentation of what had never been written, QA testing of software running on internally designed hardware, and maintenance of the quality management system under ISO 9001:2015, audits included.

An audit forces you to walk the whole process — not the task that fails, the entire process, with every interaction between departments — and that is where you learn the problem is almost never the one reported. It is the workaround someone put in years ago to get through the day, and that nobody remembers.

That is why, in a first meeting, the first half hour is not about technology. It is about how the work happens today. And the answer lands quickly, because at some point it was the job.