My last six months: the digested read

I haven't had a chance to blog about work since I started at eircom. But now I've been in the role six months, it's a good opportunity to step back and reflect on what's happened to date. First off, it's been stupendously hectic; not because I've been bogged down in steering groups, bureaucracy and red tape a la Orange, but because I've actually been making decisions and achieving goals (sometimes finding myself in situations where decisons need to be made without all the facts - which can prove to be a real test of nerves.)
I think it's fair to say that I've achieved more in six months at eircom than I did in three years at Orange. There are reasons for this: eircom is a smaller telco with more compact reporting lines, making it easier to get sign-off; there's a huge appetite for change within the business, which means there are far fewer obstructions to achieving our business objectives; and my role is materially different within eircom compared to Orange; previously I was an advocate / advisor / evangelist; now I'm the decision-maker (which translates as: there's no-one else to blame if it all goes tits-up.)
The last half-year has been something of a baptism of fire: setting KPIs, forecasting, planning, financial modelling, establishing targets, managing multi-million Euro budgets - these are all things I generally get nervous about. But I've had to do them, along with writing a few hefty business cases, specifications, exec memos and god-knows-what-else. Strangely enough, I've really enjoyed it; it's like doing a paid MBA. And I've acquired a huge amount of knowledge as a result. Alongside that I've been really psyched by the freedom to apply a lot of the theoretical knowledge I amassed at Orange - in the shape of new business models, emerging consumer behaviour, innovation practice, development methodologies, and generally a lot of the 'deep thought' and intellectual rigour that we prided ourselves in at Orange TR.
Having said that, I'm not working with dummies; the team at eircom are surprisingly young, dynamic, confident, insightful, clued-up and commercially astute.
So in no particular order, some of the achievements and transformations I'm particularly happy about include:

• eircom's sponsorship of last night's Dublin leg of the FOWA Road Trip. Ryan reckoned it was bigger and better than the London event, which is pretty amazing. Well done to Sean and the rest for organising a storming event (and for drinking all our money);
  
• Getting to know (and collaborate with) some of the movers and shakers in the Dublin scene, such as Sean from Rococosoft / Mysay, Joe from PutPlace, Fergus Burns from Nooked, John Breslin from Boards.ie, along with the guys I met last night (who I hope will email me as I don't have their cards);
  
• Contracting some of Dublin's design talent - such as Fountainhead and Spoiltchild - to work on eircom projects;
  
• Building a business case for webmail and getting Zimbra selected as our preferred vendor (I introduced them to eircom and they were always my partner of choice - woot!)
  
• Putting our entire online advertising business out to tender and getting Sales Online onboard as our new partner; I'm pretty excited about where this relationship could go;
  
• Hiring DX3 as our digital media platform vendor; these guys almost went to the wire a year or so ago, but following a change of management they secured a round a funding from New Media SPARK and have transformed themselves into one of the most progressive content platform businesses in Europe;
  
• Doing business with old friends such as Tony Jeje and Ken Parnham;
  
• Putting together a E50k innovation bursary to help incubate new Irish business ideas, as part of the Golden Spider awards; I proposed pretty much exactly the same thing two years ago to Orange and it fell at the final hurdle due to a lack of will / support from the stakeholders, so I'm stoked that it looks like history is repeating itself, this time with a positive outcome;
  
• eircom sponsorship of the Irish World Cyber Games team; again, I wanted to cultivate links with the games industry at Orange via sponsorship etc, but apart from working with GameRepublic on an innovation-in-gaming pilot scheme, it didn't came to much;
  
• Helping to support and nurture new business ventures from the likes of Dylan Collins and Johnny Beirne;
  
• Meeting Dr Stephen Brennan from the Digital Hub during my recent speaking gig, and discussing plans to formulate a broad framework for collaboration with eircom;
  
• Building relationships with third-parties I've had my eye on but never been in a position to capitalise on, such as: Pixsy, Brightcove, NetVibes, Protopage, Blinkx and others;
  

Combine all that with the fact that I've got a 10 minute commute in the morning, a sea view from the apartment, a beach two minutes away and a very cool city down the road, and things could be a lot worse. Naturally, not everything is rosy (living away from home four days a week is far from ideal, the electricity in my apartment keeps getting disconnected for no good reason, and I've still got some major gripes about the way eircom functions), but on the whole coming out to Ireland has been a good decision. Don't know how long I'll stick it out for - if I carry on the way things are going I'll burn out in a couple of years (and my other projects such as Sleevenotez are getting neglected in the meantime.) Never thought I'd wish for more hours in the day...

Still, the pressure's off for a while. I'm heading to Brittany on vacation for two weeks this weekend. The timing couldn't be better.