The Fun of Work in the Tech Fast Lane

For Duston Mounts, a degree in electrical engineering led to… software development. “What I learned in school was how to solve problems. In engineering as a whole, you get complex problems that are not well defined—and a plethora of tools to solve them. This is not unlike the situation developers face all the time.”

Duston joined Accenture because he saw it as a company that offered plenty of scope for growth and an environment that would offer him constant challenges. Assigned to what is now Systems Integration & Technology, he was catapulted into the world of Java. He had to learn the technology from the beginning, receiving training from a third-party vendor via MyLearning, Accenture’s online training facility—“and just by reading the books.”

Systems Integration & Technology has made it possible for Duston to work on challenging and satisfying custom development projects. A recent example is a project Accenture completed for a major sporting association. This innovative project involved building the association’s new website from the ground up. The site’s design uses Rich Internet Applications (RIA), and is heavily reliant on front-end technologies, such as Adobe Flash and Javascript, which are now coming to prominence as Web 2.0 takes off.

Ready for the next season

To add spice to the mix, the association had terminated its agreement with its outsourcing partner, and the system rebuild had to be complete by the time the contract ended, and ready for the next sporting season.

Accenture split the application development team into two—with Duston heading up one. The project leveraged agile methodologies, specifically scrum and extreme programming, which gave the project a fast-paced iterative/incremental approach to developing the application. Scrum is a framework for creating cross-functional teams to tackle the various phases of development together, whereas extreme programming focuses on the development architecture for agile development. “It ensured that we stayed focused on the client’s high-priority items, it’s fast-paced and it’s just plain fun,” Duston says. The onsite team of approximately 50 professionals spent a little more than four months on the development phase, camped out in a big room sitting at folding tables—and making progress.

“The great thing about this type of approach is that you see real progress in terms of actual working software. Every two weeks we deployed new functionality. Progress is real,” laughs Duston. “Scrum really helped us manage scope, timelines and overtime effectively.”

Time to “play ball”

The project went live successfully and Duston is now working at a client in the insurance industry to help it use a similar method to speed up applications development—a vital capability in an industry where high performance is increasingly dependent on a company’s ability to create and get new products to market very quickly.

His final words of advice for new hires? “Build your network within Accenture as best you can. That’s what helps you to get invited to join the interesting projects.”