Please join us in welcoming our new Engineering Manager, John Field.
While the last 18 months have been tough for everyone, it has also been a particularly busy time for LibLynx. By disrupting traditional work patterns, the pandemic exposed many of the challenges with traditional resource access, and accelerated the need for better usage analytics.
John is helping us to scale our capacity, and brings a wealth of experience from within the learning and publishing communities (more on his background here). Needless to say, we’re super excited to have him on board.
To help introduce him to our LibLynx community, here are John’s thoughts on why he joined our team and what he’s hoping to achieve.
What attracted you to LibLynx?
I’ve been aware of LibLynx from my educational and publishing experiences, and long interested in social impact; I want my work and career to have as much meaning as I can. LibLynx’s mission of simplifying access to resources across publishers, educators, researchers, and other areas of human activity – and their need to measure their impact in an increasingly open and decentralised world – struck a chord. And on top of working alongside people I know and trust, there’s the interesting challenge of helping to grow and scale a young business with real value to offer the world.
During the UK covid-19 winter lockdown, I decided to take a mini-sabbatical and work out how I can help next. The stars aligned, and here I am!
How are helping the team to scale their operations?
In several ways, and hopefully I’m just getting started. In my years (getting more than I like to count) in software engineering, I’ve also had insightful experience in leadership and organisational change; I am already having an impact as a technically-experienced manager in embiggening the Operations Team and improving how they approach their work.
So far, I’ve helped integrate Modern Agile and the Theory of Constraints into LibLynx’s day-to-day operations and also longer-term projects, including with work-in-progress visualisations using Asana (not JIRA; “agile” has spread way beyond its original domain of building software). Ultimately this helps us to scale ourselves, and help our clients meet their needs.
What do you hope to achieve personally over the next 12 months?
Continue to improve and season my softer skills, including leadership and mentoring. Learn more at the intersection between business, strategy and technology; and how they interact with organisational patterns. Help grow and mature LibLynx as a business; partly by building out the Operations Team. Learn more about modern decentralised, federated authorization technologies (now there’s a phrase…)