“Is Adam Wintle dead”? A question I never thought I'd hear, and one I'll hopefully never hear again. But it has been asked and needs an answer: “I'm alive”!

Few people know this, but I was once in the IT industry, mainly working for various government departments and corporations; Mallmus Design and MallmusMedia! my previous business ventures we're born from a hobby which grew into a small company, but I'd always maintained my contacts from when I worked in IT, at the end of July I got a call from a great friend who asked if I could step into a project as they needed someone with my skills.

Here I'm going to reflect over my past five weeks work and life; it may become a bit of a rant, but I hope you find it all interesting...

At first I wanted to turn the offer down, considering I've only recently launched Adam Wintle Design I wanted to focus on marketing the new business and secure some new clients; but my IT friend really needed my help so I agreed to go up to London and take the project.

I also thought I'd be able to get away with doing the web design on the side, but unfortunately I didn't have the time or the energy; this was a disappointment but not really a surprise.

The nature of the IT industry can certainly be strange and mysterious; all details are hush-hush until you agree to actually do the work, but you don't want to accept until you know what you're setting yourself up for, a bit of a catch 22. But after a little experience you can usually figure out what each project is going to be about.

Taking tips from another trade

I was told this particular project was for the government and the Education Department, so it probably involved schools... but anything beyond that was a mystery due to the secretive nature of the industry.

I didn't end up staying in London for long, instead I was needed further North in Leeds; I've never worked away from home for a long period of time before, and especially not staying in hotels four nights a week. Monday mornings involved a hellish journey up the country arriving at the client's office by 8am and then Friday was much the same, hitting awful traffic around London and the M25 on my way back down South.

The project came to my friend, and eventually to me, through a chain of different companies (this is always the way); one of the companies was RM Computers, a company solely focused on manufacturing, maintaining and deploying computers in schools here in the UK; they're the government's largest computer supplier for schools and on this particular project they were who I interacted with on a daily basis, essentially my client.

The interesting thing I realised is that many aspects of the web industry and the IT industry crossover, they're both very fast moving; leaving the IT industry for a few years and you quickly get left behind with emerging technologies; another area which can be compared is how projects are managed, there are striking similarities.

Being away from my design desk has giving me the opportunity to take a step back and reflect on some of the mistakes I may have made in the past in my web design career, and I personally feel the underlying cause of most of my mistakes have been to bad project management; which now with hindsight I know never to make those mistakes again.

This particular IT project was only supposed to be two weeks but ended up being around five weeks, but it could have taken much longer if it wasn't due to having a good team; it really showed me how important it is to build up a trusted and highly skilled team around you, and that having an averagely skilled team compared to a very well trained team can make all the difference; and can save a company a lot of money.

So now the project is over and I've cashed in all my crazy IT money, I can go and hire all the best designers and programmers for whoever my next client may be, so use this as a chance to get in touch and enquire about my services and be confident that in this mad world of relationships, computers, coding I'll offer you that extra edge when we work together.

I can happily say I'm glad to be back at my web design desk. I'll update the blog again soon with something more web design related soon!