My job title has changed about a dozen times. Sales. Procurement. Production planning. Operations. Supply chain. ERP consulting. Business analysis. On paper that looks like someone who couldn't pick a lane and stick to it.
In most of those jobs I found something broken that wasn't mine to fix, and I fixed it anyway. Nobody asked. It wasn't in my scope. I did it because leaving it broken bothered me more than doing the extra work did.
It wasn't initiative. It was closer to an itch.
I don't think that's initiative, not really. Initiative sounds like a decision. This was closer to an itch. Something's wrong near me and I can't walk past it, even when walking past it is technically the correct, professional thing to do. At least one manager over the years would have called that "doesn't stay in his lane," and they'd have had a point.
The clearest example: at Pernod Ricard my actual job was business analysis in supply chain. Nobody asked me to build anything. I built a PowerApp anyway, to fix a cost-reporting problem that was annoying me, because that was easier than sitting next to a bad process and doing nothing about it. People kept using it afterwards. That's a nice outcome. It wasn't the reason I built it.
I'm not writing this to make the habit sound noble. It's a compulsion that happened to be useful often enough that nobody fired me over it. Plenty of people have a version of this that isn't useful, that just makes them hard to manage, and I don't think there's a clean line between the two versions of it.
Why CodeFish fits
CodeFish is an operational efficiency partner. The work is finding what's actually slowing a business down and fixing it, not just shipping software and hoping the process around it sorts itself out. None of that is singular. It's a different client's problem every few months. For me that's the actual fit. Not the variety for its own sake, but that every engagement starts with something problematic and ends with it fixed, by design. The itch has somewhere to go now, instead of turning into me overstepping in a job that was never about that.
That's not a grand realisation about purpose. It's closer to finally landing somewhere the compulsion is valued and doesn't need an excuse.
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Ryan Higginson is a Senior Business Analyst at CodeFish Studio, working across operational problem discovery, digital transformation, and technology delivery.
