About
I’m Peter Harrad. For about thirty years I’ve worked in the space between technical systems and the people who depend on them — as a solutions architect, a presales consultant, and most recently as a senior business analyst at G-Research, where I designed root cause analysis and policy frameworks and led the operational risk work for the firm’s move into options trading. Before that I built out the North American arm of an enterprise architecture software vendor, and spent several years consulting on process and architecture for clients across financial services and government.
The common thread is finding out what’s actually going on. Usually that means asking a question nobody has quite asked in that form before, then going and getting the evidence rather than assuming the answer.
This blog is where that instinct gets pointed at things outside work. Council spending data. Leasehold service charge accounts. Tribunal decisions. Correspondence archives. Some of it is civic — I’m a director of the Right to Manage company for my building, so I have a stake in a few of these questions and I say so where it’s relevant. Some of it is professional, working through cybersecurity and detection tooling as I go. Occasionally it’s just something I got curious about.
The name is borrowed from incident analysis, where the honest finding is usually not a single root cause but a set of contributing factors that had to line up. That’s how most of the things I write about here turn out too.
Code for these posts is on GitHub. I’m on LinkedIn.