Fourteen weeks, seven engagements, personally in the configuration rather than over it — the densest hands-on period of the whole tenure, and worth recording as its own entry precisely because what follows it is a director role.
What ran
Casino surveillance network design and segmentation. A gaming floor is a regulated environment where the camera estate is a compliance system, not a convenience, and it does not belong on the same broadcast domain as anything else in the building. This one continued into the director tenure.
Data center relocation and modernization for a battery manufacturer. The engagement type where the design is easy and the sequencing is everything.
Network access control feasibility on a pipeline operator’s mixed-vendor estate. NAC is straightforward on one vendor’s kit and a negotiation on three — and on an operator’s estate the question is not only whether it can be done but what it does to the things that must never be locked out. Seven years of running enforcement in a federated city estate is what that assessment was built on.
BGP failover testing and firmware remediation for a rural telephone carrier. Path selection that has to hold when a circuit does not, proven by taking one away rather than by reading a configuration.
BGP design and wide-area migration for an industrial equipment manufacturer.
Pharmaceutical research building design — a facility where the network is part of the building rather than an occupant of it.
A municipal infrastructure assessment for a town government, written as the foundation of the client’s own procurement — the same discipline as nineteen years of writing requirements a public body had to be able to defend, arriving from the consultancy side of the table this time.
Firewall and intrusion-prevention upgrades against an active vendor security advisory ran alongside, on the healthcare estates that stayed with the practice afterwards — the kind of work where the schedule is set by somebody else’s disclosure timeline and the change window is whatever the client can survive.
Three more engagements opened in this window and ran on for two years under the director tenure: the four-property gaming group, the natural gas and electric utility, and the client portfolio itself — along with the practice, which began the day the team came over rather than the day the title did.
Why it is stated separately
An architect who stops touching the estate starts writing architecture that drifts from what the estate actually does. That was true across the nineteen years at the City and it is the reason this stretch matters on the record: the director role that followed was a player-and-coach arrangement, and the “player” half is only credible if there is a period like this behind it.
The team came over on the second day and I was interviewing architects into it within six weeks — before formally leading it. Which is how the practice that followed came to be built around a design review rather than around a reporting line: the reviews existed before the title did.
Outcome
A promotion into a newly created director role after five months, on work done rather than work directed.