Hot experiences
Flash Interview with Daniel Dias
C — What is the memory from your past that most positively influenced your professional life?
DD- For some people picking one moment can be difficult, for me that moment is very clear!
The decision I remember as a pivotal one happened just before I started my professional life. I was hired in April 1998 to join in September of that year. At the time, there was still no Celfocus.
In July of that same year, I was found myself in a big dilemma with a difficult decision to take. I was invited to be the captain of the Portuguese Futsal Team to play in the University World Cup in September. That would imply asking Novabase to delay my start to October.
At the same time, the Project Manager asked me to start in August to be part of a new project that was starting. After struggling on what I should do, I decided to say No to both invites and keep my original commitment to start working in September.
How did this influence my professional life?
When I started in September, I joined a start up in Novabase called CFocus that later in 2000 would become Celfocus. Twenty-four years after that moment, I am still part of this great team.
C — What is the "hot experience" that you believe everyone should have when working in technology?
DD — In a narrow view, working in technology is about creating solutions based on technology to support the needs of Clients and Users. However, when building solutions there is a life cycle from sales, design, implement, test, deploy and support. I believe that experiencing all these different stages is extremely valuable for someone working in technology.
The hot experience that I would recommend is working on a live solution support team. This will help you to develop a number of key hard and soft skills. You need to have the hard skills to understand how the solution is built, the functionality, the knowledge of the core technology it is based on, and the infrastructure ecosystems it is running on.
You will also need to have the soft skills to interact with the client users that use the solution, to understand their asks and complaints, and be able to coordinate investigation and resolution activities with other teams and peers.
And on top of this, sometimes you will need to do all of this with the pressure of a P1, which requires you to provide answers in minutes!
I remember these moments until this day, but I see all of them as great experiences that helped me to develop and build muscle on my nervous system :-)
C — Which old song would best serve as a soundtrack for life at Celfocus today? Why?
DD — That is subjective question because all of us can interpret the current moment in different ways, depending on their professional stage and ambition.
My interpretation and reading is that Celfocus is at a pivot moment. We are preparing a new future for us, a new Dream.
We have the dream to be a company that excels in the cognitive and analytics space, that is recognised world wide to build mission critical solutions that leverage on data and create value for our clients by resolving meaningful problems.
We are now starting a new journey, changing our organisation to become more focused on that dream.
This will not be an easy journey. We will face a lot of challenges. For the journey to be successful making the dream a reality, we will need to have great people that will create stronger and united teams to overcome the challenges ahead.
In terms of music, I would pick the 80’s. It was a wonderful period for music.
A song that still inspires me today, and can be an energy booster for what is to come is “Together in electric dreams”
PS: My experience at Celfocus has been a “walk of life” together with “brothers in arms”.
C — Tell us about an unlikely event that was really important for your personal development? Why?
DD — It happened in 2002. I was completely focused on the Vodafone Portugal Postpaid transformation project. Until one day, our CEO at the time asked me, with very short-notice (1hour), to replace him at a meeting with the CIO of J-Phone (Vodafone Japan). Skipping the part where I stressed about what I should say, the meeting went very well and 4 weeks later, we were asked to join J-Phone in Tokyo - Celfocus’ 1st international project.
Going to Japan for a project was a key milestone for Celfocus, however it was not in the plans of young professional and, recently married person. It was my first international experience, in a country with many language barriers and culturally very different. During this period, I developed relationship building skills, where empathy was my biggest tool to fulfil my mission
More challenging was the personal part, it required me to learn how to manage my marriage remotely - fly backs were every 2 months and we did not have Teams or WhatsApp!.
I look back and see this unlikely event as one of the greatest learning experiences of my life. I am still married so somehow we made it work!
When we think of today’s post covid world, I believe that managing relationships remotely is a critical skill that all of us need to master, both at a personal and professional level.
C — How do you explain to your family what "going live" means? Describe it with emotion.
DD — I normally use my favourite hobby - cooking.
I describe it as a scenario where the goal is to cook dinner for several persons in a high-end restaurant: nothing can fail and everyone needs to be satisfied. This process in a kitchen involves different people and roles, from the ones that wash the dishes to the ones that cook the meal. A lot of work needs to be prepared in advance – mise en place – to finalise, in the real time, all ingredients and components of the dish carefully, combine them in a certain order, and delivered on the plate with no mess. The final test is up to the customer, when they taste the food and see if all tastes as expected.
Going live is very similar – it has all these steps together with all the pressure to get it done on time!
C — If your name came up on Wikipedia, what would you like the reason to be?
DD — That’s challenging because I do not see my self as relevant enough to be part of wikipedia. It also sounds strange because it feels like the exercise when they ask you to write your obituary!
If by some chance it would appear in wikipedia, I would like to be referred to as someone that was part of a team, a group of persons, a company that helped build solutions that actively improved the local ecosystems where they worked on, contributing to a better world - I believe that we all have the mission to leave the world a better place.
Also, that during that mission, I had a major role in helping others to be successful in their lives, professionally and personally.
At the end, I would like to be seen as a nice guy! Who wouldn’t?