Experience

Breadth

I don't have a wall of vendor certifications. I have a long career following problems from the routing table to the contract to the boardroom.

Insights and thoughts Andrew Wood

I don’t have a wall of vendor certifications, and neither do some of the most capable engineers I’ve worked with. What I have is a long career in managed services covering infrastructure, networking, cloud and the commercial conversations that sit behind all of it.

Anyone who has run a major incident bridge knows the danger of pure hyper-specialisation: the network engineer proves the firewall is green, the virtualisation engineer proves the hosts are fine, the database admin says the queries are normal, and the customer’s application is still completely down. Growing service providers often need someone who can follow a problem all the way from a routing table to the commercial contract to the client’s boardroom far more than they need another narrow badge.

Breadth goes stale, though, if you only ever manage technology through slide decks and status reports. So I still build and test things in my own lab environment at home. Partly I do it because I enjoy it, and partly because it keeps my instincts honest. A padded engineering estimate or a flawed migration plan is much easier to spot on a Monday morning when you’ve spent a Sunday afternoon troubleshooting the same underlying technology yourself.

Hands-on curiosity isn’t a step down for a senior leader. It’s how you stay useful.