Meet the associates: Aurimas Mickevicius, Platform Tech

In our ‘Meet the associates’ series, we introduce you to the associates who work with us to deliver outstanding projects for our customers. This time, we talked to Aurimas Mickevicus, our Platform Tech Lead on a project delivering Critical National Infrastructure for a major government customer.

Read on to learn about his day-to-day and what he values most about the project and working with Tecknuovo.

Aurimas’ current project: Building a reusable developer platform for central government

Can you describe the project that you’re currently working on?

On a high level, my team and I are working with a major government customer to build and maintain an internal developer platform for containerised workloads. Essentially, we’re helping the customer build the infrastructure for building and deploying containerised applications, and any tools the application teams might need to develop and release their services.

What is your role on the project?

My role is Platform Tech Lead. At the moment there are around 10 DevOps engineers on my team, and I oversee the development, maintenance and scalability of the platform and its capabilities.

So, there’s some hands-on work, some architecture, and some team management, as well as managing the stakeholders and the relationship between Tecknuovo and the customer.

How has Tecknuovo added value to support the customer to deliver the project?

Tecknuovo is steering the project it’s running with the stakeholders at a higher level. From my perspective, one of the most valuable things about Tecknuovo is that we can raise any challenges or questions with the team, which they then manage with the customer.

Another area where Tecknuovo has been really efficient is providing great team members on short notice when we need additional headcount. If there’s a project that needs an additional engineer, the teams can quickly find a really skilful and experienced engineer on short notice, which has been a great help.

What skills or expertise have you found to be the most valuable on the project?

I found it valuable to be able to balance hands-on engineering work with team management work. I wanted to stay as technically relevant as possible because I’m an engineer and I wanted to keep doing what I was good at. At the same time, I wanted to use my experience to lead the team, the roadmap, and the architectural side of the project.

From the team perspective, what I value most in the team is that everyone has a fantastic work ethic. Because we all work mainly remotely, it is really important that the engineers are productive, and I can trust them to do the work. So having that self-drive and general interest in what they’re working on — I think that’s really valuable for the team as a whole.

What has been your biggest challenge on this project and how has your team approached it?

We found that there were many projects working independently, which can often be a challenge in public sector. So we had the job of breaking down communication silos between different projects and teams to help us work well as a whole.

In terms of the platform’s users, it was very important for us to get as much feedback as possible from them so we could support them and give them the best possible experience of using the platform.

We created a constant feedback loop and had regular catch-ups and feedback sessions with our users. We also created a Teams channels for our platform users so they could engage with us directly and get support.

Establishing this communication and feedback culture was challenging initially, but we’ve achieved great results from it. We’ve also had positive feedback from other teams around how responsive and easy to work with our team is.

What is the most important thing you have learnt through working on this project?

The biggest thing we leant was not to reinvent things for the sake of engineering. We wanted to reuse things that were already available for us to use and that were maintained by other teams. So in a nutshell, keeping things simple and avoiding over-engineering was a crucial learning for us.

Delivering meaningful solutions for the public sector and citizens

What challenge is this project working to solve in the public sector? What impact will this have on the lives of citizens?

In the simplest terms, the platform my team built reduces the time and cost it takes to build the infrastructure developers use to deploy their applications. Essentially, it reduces the budget that the teams need to deliver something, which saves costs and time. As a result, those funds can be better utilised in other sectors like education and healthcare.

That time and money saved benefits citizens directly at the same time, because the applications can be deployed and shipped faster to the end users, so the citizens get to experience better quality services, faster.

What excites you most about working on delivering change in the public sector?

As a citizen, there’s a bit of self-interest in working to deliver change in the public sector. My team and I can work on the tools and the processes to make the public sector efficient. We know that it affects a lot of people who are relying on these services, so if we save time and costs somewhere, that can be better allocated elsewhere to create more value for citizens.

I think seeing the direct impact of your work is such great motivation day-to-day.

About working with Tecknuovo

What does a typical day look like for you?

I work mainly remotely, which I really like because I can allocate the time I would spend commuting to spend with my family or on self development. Being remote gives me that quiet time to focus without interruptions, which makes me more productive. Occasionally my team will come into the Tecknuovo office to catch up and collaborate with each other. Otherwise, a typical day usually involves focused work, meetings, and daily catch-ups with the team to check in on how we are progressing.

What’s different about working at Tecknuovo vs. other consultancies?

I think the main thing is that Tecknuovo is much more involved in our day-to-day and the project, which happens through regular catch-ups and coming into the office to collaborate. Tecknuovo also organises regular events for associates to connect and come together. They’re also very customer-focused, and more focused on the outcomes than other consultancies I’ve worked with.

What do you enjoy most about your role?

We've built a great team and culture in this project. We enjoy working together, and can efficiently solve even the most challenging problems together.

Interested in joining the associate community or want to learn more about our projects?

Speak to one of our team on hello@tecknuovo.com