“I had the freedom to express myself”- an interview with Cenitex’s Kevin Liu
In March we launched our newest program — Sandpit — an iteration on the Academy program we’ve run with over 100 folks over the past few years.
Kevin Liu, a Service Desk Analyst at Cenitex, was one of the brave change-makers who joined us for our first round of the new program. Paired with talented designers, developers and product managers from the private sector, we took Kevin on a journey of idea validation over six weeks. Here’s how that came to be and what he came away with.
Can you start by telling me a little bit about you and your work.
At Cenitex I’m a service desk analyst and I work in an area that does automation. I’ve also been involved in a roles-based access control project.
Cool. So what does your day to day look like?
It depends on the day of the week! On Mondays and Tuesdays I try to determine what is my highest priority and focus on that. Whereas on Wednesdays and Thursdays I spend time with the automation team I mentioned, and on Fridays I support and improve our role-based access control (RBAC). It’s really varied.
And just so I understand properly, the automation team, that means getting services within Cenitex to talk to each other?
Part of it, yes, getting systems to talk to one another. But also trying to get access to things so we remove the need for manual work to be performed. The more manual work we can reduce, the more time we give back to the teams for other things.
Right, and then later on you’re doing… what was it again?
So Wednesdays, Thursdays we work on automation and try to prioritise our work based on the needs of the service desk.
On Fridays is when I’d work on roles-based access. That means I would be making sure that when someone starts in the organisation they automatically get the network access they need and are good to go. It’s sort of in that automation space as well as security; making sure that if people change teams they gain the permissions they need for their new team but lose the access they no longer need from their old team.
Wow. That’s quite varied! How did you find out about the Sandpit?
There was an email sent out by HR asking for expressions of interest, and that’s when Wade and I signed up.
* Wade is Kevin’s colleague at Cenitex — you can see his interview below.
So Wade was like, there’s this thing, I’m gonna totally bring you with me, and coerce you into doing things differently?
I think another member of the team first saw it and thought it’d be something that Wade would be interested in. He then tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I would be as well. We sort of recommended each other for the program.
What appealed to you about it? What was it that interested you?
I think the main draw was to get experience outside of what I’ve previously worked with, which was wholly just within the public sector. I wanted to better understand freelancers, or other people working in IT. I was interested in learning more about their perspectives, their way about going about doing things, and developing projects.
It was quite a long journey, but were there any bits that stuck out to you as being most memorable or most enjoyable over the six weeks?
I suppose I enjoyed working with the people. The attitudes people had were really different and I suppose this is because it is a workshop rather than an actual work environment.
There weren’t any pre-existing conceptions coming into it — there was freedom to think about the way Cenitex works with a broad perspective. People came up with things I wouldn’t have considered. There’s also none of the politics you would see at work.
Did you come in with an idea that you already wanted to explore? Or did you come in with no idea of what the program was going to be?
Wade and I weren’t quite sure what we should have been expecting when entering into the program. I think our initial impression was that we should have been presenting ideas that we could run with off the bat. But we actually started off by exploring the facets of our organisation, presenting that and seeing where the pain points were and working on a solution from there.
So it gave us training on the ideas establishment process rather than working on ideas we’d already thought of and would likely be able to work on ourselves.
When you did land on a problem to solve, did you expect that you would get as far as you did by the end? In terms of being able to prototype and take it back to the organisation, that kind of thing?
Given that the workshops were split up into two types of sessions — half where there are presentations by speakers, and half where we actually do work — I was surprised with the amount of work we completed, in such a short period of time. And I was pleased with the end result.
Human-centered design plays a huge part in the Sandpit model and philosophy. Was that something you’d done much of before at Cenitex?
We do think about the users of what we’re developing but what Sandpit showed was that the audience and ways of interacting with users can be broader than what I previously expected. It isn’t only the direct users of what you’re developing for but also the people they impact. In my example, we need to consider the benefits to both the people the service desk support as well as the people who manage and are interested in the service desk performing well.
So getting insights from all the different users rather than getting them to validate an idea?
That’s right, yes. Asking open ended questions rather than framing them in a particular way was also an important lesson when seeking user feedback.
Have you put any of the learnings into practise, or has the Sandpit changed the way that you approach projects?
I suppose the prototyping and the way we really quickly draft up the design of what we’re trying to create was a new way of thinking and a new way of developing for me. What we’ve developed in the past was less something you can easily show graphically, but I think that these ideas will definitely helpful in the future.
It was also a refresher in presenting ideas, particularly with the golden circle model. It got us thinking about presenting our idea in a way where we think about why we’re doing it first, rather than explain the details of what we’re doing.
This might be tricky to say, but do you feel more comfortable talking to people or asking for help from the private sector?
During the Code for Australia workshops definitely, because I had the freedom to express myself away from the constraints of what I would have at work.
One last question — would you recommend Sandpit to other people?
I think it was definitely beneficial for myself. If other people have the opportunity to join Code for Australia’s Sandpit sessions, yes, I’d recommend it. I enjoyed the experience, and was able to take important lessons away.
If you’re interested in joining us for our next Sandpit in Melbourne or Sydney, you can find more details here.
