Award Consulting is a remote team. Very remote. Since I started the company in 2016 the only team member I had seen in person was Stephen Denny. That’s one person (5 years ago) out of a team of eight people. That’s… not great. But that all changed on May 18 when (almost) the entire team… Continue Reading
Network Ops
16 days without 911, and a $227k fine
If I’ve learned one thing in my 18 years of working in telecoms, it’s that people don’t like outages. And they especially don’t like outages that impact 911 service. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened for subscribers in four counties in West Virginia, for a 16 day period in April 2022. Apparently the local ILEC, Shenandoah… Continue Reading
Crashing and burning: what can we learn from the SpaceX explosion?
I imagine most of you have already heard that SpaceX attempted to launch a huge rocket on Thursday last week (April 20, 2023). According to Elon Musk, this was a great success – he tweeted, “Congrats @SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship!”. Check out the video below and see for yourself –… Continue Reading
Handlebars and Headaches: A Tale of Mountain Biking and Project Management
When I was a teenager my family took a vacation in Pitlochry, Scotland – which was beautiful and amazing… except for the day we went mountain biking. The uphill part was okay. I mean, it was exhausting as you might expect, but otherwise passed uneventfully. No, it turns out the downhill is the tough part… Continue Reading
The Delicates of Delegation: Managing Like You’re Doing Laundry
I have a hard time doing laundry. In our family the laundry isn’t really assigned to any particular person – it’s just handled by whoever happens to get around to it. Or who gets the most desperate. I usually wait until the last possible minute, and then I am faced with a decision – do… Continue Reading
My unexpected trip to the ER – why expertise matters
Thursday February 9 started out as a pretty normal day. Our team gathered for our daily video call to compare notes on current work and then I began catching up on my overnight email. So far so good, but then I suddenly found that I couldn’t see properly. I wasn’t sure exactly what was wrong,… Continue Reading