plan.com - Building an MVNO

With great motivation comes great anxiety;

For over a year myself and the rest of the tech team have been bringing our MVNO from an ambitious proposition to full blown reality. This has been a huge source of motivation for everyone, but alongside the motivation, the pride and the excitement it?has also brought its fair share of anxiety into the mix as well.

With more than a few false starts, problems to overcome - well, more than a few, to complete an ambitious design which gives us a platform to build more and more upon in the future years and now we are in the final throws.

plan.com has always been a small, dynamic, agile company - preferring incredibly talented staff and few of them, over a larger team; put in short the people who I work with are the very best at what they do.

I thought several times over the duration of this project - that when it went final, I should write something on here about the process - technically that is, but now I am actually here - what I find myself wanting to do is praise the people who actually made this reality. / actually delivered this (well almost as of writing .... getting there) some of whom are pictured above.

James and Tim - Batman and Robin, Bert and Ernie, The Chuckle Brothers?if there is a team that works best as a duo at plan.com it's James and Tim. Expertly skilled in networking, routing, designing, monitoring, and two of the nicest guys you'll ever meet, complementing each other and improving each others design daily and continually. These guys built our Data network and our links into BT\EE.

Ryan - If its got something to do with voice, or SMS, Ryan is your guy - if he doesn't know how to do it, give him a few hours, he will be an expert ahead of anyone else in it in no time. At the time of posting I have been working with him for 8 years and he continues to excel and impress me daily. Ryan built our voice and SMS links into BT\EE, as well as working to get premium SMS up and running.

Ben - well, Ben is to many who have worked with him simply a minor deity. There's very little you can't throw at Ben to do with a system an interface or a process and he will become an expert in it in no time at all. Ben built our API, porting and provisioning capability in this project.

There are of course others in my team and at plan.com, who keep the day-to-day running of the company going and sort out issues for our partners and customers every day so this is in no way exhaustive; Jon who manages our ITOps team, Ross who makes sure day-to-day connections and provisioning go right and often with Jon keeps me on a level footing, and D-A and Bridson who work across a variety of roles across the team - in other teams ; Kaitlin in marketing, or James our recently appointed Commercial manager who is doing amazingly. An entire development team that comes underneath Tom and Adrian who worked to make the new network and its features work in my.plan, then there are also friends of ours who have moved on since, Zac in particular, who negotiated such a great contract in the first place, I have felt his hand on my shoulder a few times, and as if that was not enough then there are those outside of plan.com, contractors who work with us like they are employees, embedding into our internal teams and of course last but absolutely not least, our ever-inspiring CEO Dan.

I am extraordinarily lucky to work in a job I adore, and with a team of people around me that I love - we have many plans for what we are going to built on top of this incredible platform, and I am sure we will build some amazing things on top of it - but while we do that, I hope more than anything that we continue to enjoy each others company every day while we do it.

Thanks guys. People with great passion can make the impossible happen.

Gregg

PS you could have a look here Careers at plan.com if you fancy coming to get as much cool shit done, and have as much fun while doing it as we do.