Our Sr. Project Manager, Brad Comrie, celebrates eight years with our team this month. We sat down to reflect on where he got his start, his time at Build With Assembly, and the importance of putting the right processes in place.

Tell us a little bit about your career before you joined Build With Assembly ...

I've always been very interested in technology and love learning how electronics work, which led me to my first job at Future Shop. From there I made the jump from hardware to software, working at a wholesale website company that hosts website and email systems for some of the largest Telcos, Cablecos, and ISPs in the world. I started at the bottom, answering support calls and then worked my way up to a partner relations specialist, account manager and then to a project manager. As a project manager, I got to lead detailed discoveries and challenging migrations - the lessons I learned there definitely played a big part in the attention to detail I have today.

What made you want to join our team?

I was excited to learn something new, I had never managed website development at an enterprise scale. Moving to a smaller company got rid of the internal red tape larger organizations can have, and the culture was a good fit for me. I was joining a young team that seemed to have fun while executing innovative work. There were certainly opportunities to learn, grow and get outside of my comfort zone.

How has your role evolved since you joined the team in 2014?

When I started, I was focused on managing application support services for a few different clients. Over the last 8 years, I’ve jumped from managing application support services, to managing web application software development projects. Sometimes juggling both at the same time! I’ve been able to learn a lot about Azure cloud hosting, IT service management (ITSM) and our ITSM portal workflows and processes. Today I’m focused on leading our Application Support Services team and Managed Services practice. I love constantly realizing incremental improvements across my clients’ business.

What does your job entail?

Internally I oversee two teams, our Application Support Services team, and Managed Services team. In my role, I work with our clients to ensure their asks and objectives are clear and orchestrate the work with the team. I also work with the Managed Services team to ensure any issues detected are reported and addressed, adhering to our client SLAs. In addition to the day-to-day, we take time to ensure we are conducting retrospectives to see that we're always improving as a team.

For me, managed services and application support go hand in hand, to be successful at both you must be calm under pressure and be able to quickly react to constantly changing requests, requirements, and priorities. I pride myself on mitigating what could be chaotic by putting the correct processes in place, and ensuring they are followed by my team. Attention to detail is huge.

What’s your favourite thing about your role?

Again, the big thing that I really enjoy doing is implementing scalable processes that turn chaos into something manageable and predictable. That, and over time I feel like I’ve gained the experience here that I’m now able to be that go to guy for others on our team.