Black dated.

In the thrill of working as a Technical Project Manager in the wild wild west of online slot games, Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway will (hopefully always) take the cake… away.

Last minute, introduced defects found by an external certification company - the day before go-live coinciding with the show’s season premier - resulted in hustling across continents to get final fixes in for help file inconsistencies. A record (hopefully never to be beaten) 4:30am finish in only to get back in for 7am on a Saturday morning to manage a final round of smoke tests and preparation ahead of hundreds of deployments across the globe.

A project that no one had wanted, landed on my desk some 3 months earlier with the dreaded “black date” label and a global interest to put it lightly. The pressure was on coordinating back-end developers in Isle of Man, front-end developers in India and the rest of the SDLC cogs in game maths & service, game engine, testing, operations & CI/CD deployments in Durban, South Africa.

The challenge? Time. The tactic? Use it. Often the best projects to manage are those with a clear mandate and, even better, a fixed delivery date that is matched by business priorities and supported by senior stakeholders. While the defect and test cycle counts were high, I was able to get the issues on the right desks time and time again. All the while building those relationships as I went along knowing it wouldn’t be the last time I’d be approaching one of their desks - cap-in-hand - for the third time that week!

A never to be repeated celebratory dance to Cotton Eye Joe at 4am and a firm handshake from the CEO the following week cemented this as being right up there with the very best projects in my career.