ronutz

The Roles · Who deploys it

Network consulting engineer

Held this role - at integrators, and in 2008 and 2012 through my own company, 2008, 2010-2011, 2012, 2013-2014, 2020

The engineer who turns a design into a working thing inside somebody else's network. Consulting engineers arrive after the sale and before the operations team, and they carry the technical responsibility for the transition: planning it, doing it, proving it, and handing over an environment the customer's own staff can run.

What the day looks like

  • Auditing the environment as it stands, which is the work that makes every later step honest.
  • Reading an environment that is documented partially and understanding it fully enough to change it safely.
  • Migrating services off equipment that is leaving, with the business running throughout.
  • Improving what the audit surfaced, separately from what the project was sold to do, and saying which is which.
  • Documenting the result to a standard the customer's own staff can maintain.
  • Training the customer's operations team and the reseller's engineers on what was built.
  • Writing the method of procedure: the ordered steps, the verification after each, and the way back.
  • Executing a change inside a maintenance window that ends whether or not the work does.
  • Proving the outcome with evidence the customer accepts, rather than with an assurance.
  • Handing over: documentation, a walkthrough, and the knowledge transfer that decides whether the customer calls again next month.

What it answers for

  • The change working, and the environment being restorable when it does otherwise.
  • The evidence that the work met what was sold.
  • A handover that leaves the customer's team able to operate what was built.
  • The written record of the environment, before and after, being true.

What it is measured on

  • Utilisation: the proportion of time booked to a paying project.
  • Delivery against the statement of work, in scope and in hours.
  • Customer satisfaction, and the follow-on work that satisfaction produces.

Who it receives from

Pre-sales
The design, the statement of work, and whatever was promised in the room.
The customer's team
Access, change windows, and the environment's real history.
The vendor
Support cases, escalation and firmware when the product misbehaves.

Who it serves

The customer's operations team
A working environment and the ability to run it.
The project manager
Progress that is true, including the parts that are behind.
The account team
A delivery good enough to sell the next one.

Who else has a stake

  • The customer's business, which experiences the change as availability rather than as engineering.
  • The customer's security and compliance functions, whose approval the change frequently requires.
  • The vendor, whose product is judged by how this deployment behaves.

What it takes

  • Technical depth combined with the discipline to work inside someone else's rules.
  • Writing under time pressure, because the method of procedure is written before the window and read during it.
  • Composure at three in the morning, when the window is closing and the verification step has failed.
  • The social skill to be the outsider in a room of people who built the thing you are changing.

What the job turns on

The statement of work says deployment, and the job is an audit, a migration, an improvement, a document and a training course delivered around it. Utilisation measures hours booked, and the work that decides whether a project succeeds happens in the hours that are hard to book: reading the environment properly, writing the rollback, sitting with the customer's engineer until they can do it themselves. Consulting engineers who protect that time deliver projects that stay delivered, and the conversation with whoever owns the utilisation target is part of the job rather than an interruption to it.

Where it leads

Roles that lead here

The work itself

The Practice covers how this work is done — triage, escalation, evidence, handover — across the whole corpus.

Read The Practice