Steve Lomas, Systems Engineer

"I graduated from Imperial College with a BSc in Chemistry and immediately switched track into the IT world by joining a software house as a programmer. I’ve had a fairly traditional IT career progression. Over the years, I’ve climbed the skills ladder, steadily gaining experience of programming and software design, until jumping over the fence into systems analysis and requirements management. I’ve worked in a number of areas - avionics, cryptographic systems, satellite communications, and various defence programmes in land, maritime, air and space environments.

"My day job... as a Systems Engineer, is to analyse the system requirements to determine what the system needs to do functionally to meet those needs. I work as part of a team, and together we define an architecture for the system by identifying the blocks making up the system. We analyse the requirements to work out the necessary system functionality, partition that functionality between the blocks and derive additional requirements as we refine our understanding of the system.

"I mostly work with a UML-based system modelling tool that allows the creation of use cases to describe behaviour, and object-oriented blocks that define the architecture. Working at the architecture level means that I’m often in a customer-facing role - talking about the requirements in workshops or discussing the evolving system architecture to be sure it meets the customer’s needs.

"What I enjoy the most... is the technical challenge of defining an elegant functional architecture that meets existing customer requirements and is flexible enough to accommodate growth without radical restructuring. A robust and functional architecture can be a thing of beauty!

"Purple, as a growing systems house, provides me with a supportive structure that allows me to do the job I enjoy. It’s a company full of helpful and friendly people, working on several programmes in a number of disparate domains, providing an environment in which people can thrive.

"The company is keen to develop career skills through regular training, and actively nurtures its staff through frequent appraisals to keep careers on-track, addressing any problems promptly. With the full support of Purple, I’m hoping to develop my management skills to augment my technical skills, and have recently started training towards a PRINCE2 qualification."