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28/11/2024 – Ross has been part of PASMA as head of digitalisation for a whole year. To celebrate this milestone, we had a catch-up with him about how things have been at PASMA, the work he’s contributed to in championing tower safety, what the future holds for the association’s digitalisation efforts, and his life offscreen.

From day one to year one

Ross stepped into his new role with the clear mission to advance PASMA’s journey into the digital sphere. When he first started, the focus was on TowerSure. "A product that had been developed, launched and released by the time I started,” he recalls. “This was thanks to a lot of work done by Maarten de Vries and Jason Carlton, who were by then ready to increase support for the product.” “In the early stages, I was trying to understand why we did things a certain way, how we got there and what problems we should be trying to solve,” Ross explains. “So, I worked backwards, retracing the steps I would normally take, to try and visualise a logical way to evolve things.” He also remembers feeling slightly overwhelmed at first, trying to wrap his head around all the new information. “When you start somewhere new there's always a degree of frustration: ‘You’re a new resource, so let's go at full speed!’ But you're trying to extract information locked in people's heads and document it into organisational knowledge,” Ross says. “By now, I don’t feel like I’m holding up the process anymore; I’m in the rhythm and making progress.” Since then, the digitalisation team has expanded, with software engineer Toni Lluch implementing upgrades planned in 2023. “Members wouldn’t have seen much happening up to now, but a lot of work has been done in the background,” Ross notes. “We’re hoping to see a significant acceleration in integrating TowerSure into PASMA training and a more collaborative approach to working with larger organisations to help us come up with new features based on their requirements and use cases.”

Looking ahead

Ross and the team are preparing to launch projects they’ve worked on over the last several months, starting with a transition to virtual PASMA cards. These digital cards will eliminate the need to print physical cards and their associated environmental impacts. “This will free up our member services team to focus on supporting members rather than printing, packing and shipping cards all week,” he explains. Next up is an integrated single sign-on service and hub for digital member services, aptly named MyAccessIndustry after AIMS, the organisation that manages PASMA and other access industry associations like the Ladder Association. Ross clarifies that MyAccessIndustry is a building block for further developments, as it “will enable users to access the online registration system, the website members area and a new mentoring system we’re aiming to release alongside it—all in one place.” “Beyond that, our big long-term projects include the digitalisation of PASMA training to eliminate physical paperwork as much as possible, and building and developing our online course delivery system,” he concludes. "I'll be working alongside Chris Smith and Karen O'Neill to better understand what our training members and their delegates want training to look like in the future."

Growth and insights

Fresh off university and holding a degree in business and marketing, Ross had a few different professional experiences early on in marketing and as a business consultant. Later, as a product manager at PASMA member Wernerco, he began to learn what kind of work he was drawn to. Involved in developing physical products at Wernerco, Ross managed the life cycle of lighting towers and scissor lifts from design to marketing.“My role evolved into becoming more software-orientated, including implementing a culture change towards the digitalisation of services and building direct relationships with stakeholders using websites, webinars, conferences and a content strategy,” he recounts. Here, Ross consolidated his feelings towards the digital realm and started exploring them. “It’s all about understanding what problem you’re trying to fix, who the different users are, what their use case scenarios are and finding unique ways to solve for these—or uncovering issues that no one else has discovered yet. That’s where the value is,” he states. Taking what he’d learnt from his time at Wernerco, Ross moved on to the role of strategic product manager at a fan manufacturing company. “We’d gotten into horrible cycles of doing these mammoth, five-year-long projects with huge investment but no validation loops built into the process to keep things on track,” he recalls. The solution came from the digital sector: “We introduced the idea of a minimum viable product, roadmaps and other agile frameworks.” The sum of these experiences led Ross to apply for his current role as PASMA’s head of digitalisation, where he is particularly enthusiastic about the potential of data analysis. “Data is bizarrely something that makes me excited. I love uncovering little gems of knowledge that give us insight and help us do better,” he shares. Another background-running process, he describes data analysis as a tool that can lead to improved user experience and efficiency.

Offscreen

All Ross wants after working all day in front of a computer is to be outdoors making the most of his time off. We asked what he likes to do in his free time: “It's more ‘what do I get the time to do,’ between two young kids and a lot of DIYing. With the kids especially, we like getting on our mountain bikes and are lucky to live near an area of outstanding natural beauty, with lots of rivers and cycling trails—and this year we got some paddle boards too!” Ross also visited his wife's family in China earlier this year, including a trip to Zhangjiajie National Forest Park. “That’s where they based Pandora in the movie Avatar, with all these huge stone columns. We went there and got to go on one of these very scary glass bridges that you see on social media but don’t have a lot of faith in,” he laughs.