Sony Mediacentre

I was brought onto the project as a local analyst and broadcast expert, to work directly onsite with Sony in London as the rest of the team is based almost everywhere but the UK! I was originally asked to work only 3 days per week for 3 months. This was increased to 5 days per week and extended to 6 months, 9 months and then a further year, being seen as an integral part of the project team and critical to the project’s success.

Without any prior knowledge of the project, I recognised the potential for improvement with the proposed workflows and technical designs on the very first day. I tactfully raised this immediately and led the required discussions, analysis and preliminary re-designs to ensure the project started in the right direction.

Analyst

Since then, I led the analysis with Sony’s Requirements Lead, validating requirements against my broadcast experience and capturing in requirements specifications.

Architect: Enterprise, Solution and Software Architect

Due to my experience and knowledge of broadcast and Sony’s requirements, I then took on more of a Architect role. This began with an Enterprise Architect Role redesigning the workflows for the whole organisation’s core business with media assets and metadata. This continued onto lower level details to a more Solution Architect Role, designing how this would be achieved and the interactions between users and the system. This then continued further towards the very detailed end of a Solution Architect’s role and into a Software Architect’s role; designing the lowest level details of the import process and system logic.

System Integrator

With the best understanding of media, requirements, design and broadcast software being interacted with, I then also adopted the role of a System Integrator. I configured the Transcoder presets, profiles and MAM automated ingest process and also wrote pseudocode to prescribe in detail the logic that needed to be written by the developers. I worked closely with the development and test teams in India, Sweden, Ukraine and the US to ensure that all aspects of the solution would work for the expected media formats, workflows and was fit for purpose.

System Integrator and Testing: Case Study

When trying to integrate and validate a successful integration, I identified and diagnosed several software bugs in each of the solutions. I wrote up the details and supported the development teams to resolve the bugs long in advance of delivery to ensure the solution’s success. This also included identifying, diagnosing and even designing suitable workarounds to bugs that some of the software vendors were unable to diagnose. This was significant as in a specific example (details witheld) the issue was blocking the project’s progress for weeks and with the vendor unable to solve the problem. I was asked to look into it, installed the software locally and worked both independently and with the vendor to identify the issue and implemented a suitable workaround within a week.