Meet the Team – Project Management

Nicol Kay, Project Management Team Manager
14 October 2020

How long have you worked at Spitfire?

I’ve been at Spitfire since 2013. I originally started on the Ethernet team within Provisioning, placing and managing ongoing Ethernet orders, before moving over to Project Management, working on PBX and MPLS installation projects. I have been manager of the Project Management team since May 2019.

What do you enjoy most about working with Spitfire?

The challenge and the people. The telecoms industry moves quickly, and with so many different products and services being managed by the team, every day at work has the potential to bring something new. Just when you think you’ve seen everything, something new will come along and surprise you. We’ve also got a fantastic team at Spitfire and a great working atmosphere which always makes clocking in each day that bit easier.

What does a busy day look like in provisioning?

Our team will spend the day placing orders with our various suppliers, to supply our customers with anything from an analogue line to a 10Gb Ethernet leased line. When not placing orders we’ll be following up with our suppliers about ongoing orders and getting updates out to our customer base. On the project management side our team will spend the day speaking with customers to plan their PBX and network configurations. They’ll also be arranging on-site and remote installations of our cloud-based PBX and MPLS solutions with our team of in-house engineers.

What’s the most rewarding thing about working with Spitfire?

Being able to design, plan and deliver services that make a real difference to customers’ businesses. You’d be surprised how excited some customers are when they get to use their new phone system for the first time! Spitfire also work with a lot of partners so it’s very rewarding to develop a relationship and a rapport with a customer that you may get to work with for years to come.

What do you do with your time outside of work?

In my spare time I’m an avid football fan and usually spend my time lamenting another poor performance from one of my teams; Rangers, Scotland, or my (constantly disappointing) fantasy football team. I also play a bit of 5 aside in my spare time and am a keen cyclist, getting out most weekends when the weather is nice. More recently, re-watching TV and movie favourites has been getting me through lockdown. I’m on my fifth viewing of the Sopranos and already contemplating the sixth.

Finally if you were asked to set up a new office for Spitfire’s Service anywhere in the world, where would it be and why?

Tricky one – I think it would be a toss-up between Australia and Italy. I have a brother who lives in Western Australia and I lived in Melbourne for a couple of years myself so I have a lot of friends over there. I don’t get a chance to see them very often so any reason to visit would be nice! It would be hard to pass up the opportunity to live in Italy though – I think it has the best food, wine, culture, history and scenery in the world. My Italian isn’t great though, so it might have to be Australia!