Eddy Fernandez
Eddy Fernandez is a Business Systems and Quality Analyst here at Kopis. He can be described as very personable, kind, and slightly animated. He can at times tend to ramble when he gets excited or interested. He’s a talker! He describes himself as being sharp, inquisitive, and congenial which I think all of us here at Kopis would agree with. When family life doesn’t keep him too busy, Eddy tries to get out hiking on Sunday mornings, usually with Tyler and Candus (hardcore Kopis hikers) to Paris Mountain or somewhere nearby. When he isn’t outdoors, you can almost always find him reading. Eddy loves to learn and thinks you can never learn “too much”, so his dream job would be a professional student.
Eddy’s first ever real job was a 10-key operator where “we worked on huge desk like machines that were quite noisy, but that meant our boss allowed us to use headphones with a Walkman or CD player while we worked. (I said Walkman, I’m old, don’t laugh. Well, not too much.)”. This job helped him with attention to detail as errors would cause the machine to shut down until the error was found. He also learned how to work in a fast, loud paced environment, and both skills are still relevant in his work today.
After concentrating in engineering at both MDC (Miami Dade College) and FIU (Florida International University), Eddy began working as a CEI (Construction Engineering Inspector) which he maintained for about a decade.
Eddy says his BA (Business Analyst) career started as “a solicitation of sorts”. He was tapped as “an SME (Subject Matter Expert) for a large IT project while then working as a Corporate Merchandise Planner”. He had previously spent a good deal of time as the IT liaison for the Purchasing dept. in charge of all IT requests and he was the main point of contact.
“Through my involvement as an SME, the PMO (Project Management Office) Manager was impressed enough with my work to offer me a position as a BA in the IT dept. What I did not know at the time was that I was fulfilling most of the responsibilities of a BA in my former role as I had chosen to approach it. I have been working as a BA ever since and have thoroughly enjoyed it”.
Eddy says it is all thanks to Preston Lowe that he made the move to Greenville, SC.
“Preston (who currently sits behind me in the BI room) was working for Kopis, then ProActive, some time ago and at that time decided to go back to his previous employer. As it turns out, timing, circumstance, fate, and luck made his newly vacated position available and Tyler Foulds was the one to fill it. I worked with Tyler back at TigerDirect in Miami, but we had known each other well before, going on about 23 years now. After Tyler and his family moved to Greenville, they championed all the wonderful things about the Upstate and prodded us to visit. We did and loved it, which lead to more urging for us to move up here with them. The limiting factor? A job, of course.
Tyler put me in touch with Kevin about a junior DBA (Database Administrator) position at Kopis, and although I was able and willing I did not overstate my expertise. Kevin seemed to have found this somewhat novel of an interviewee and that lead us to talk more about what I had been doing as a BA. After a few more conversations, the rest, as they say, is history.”
Eddy enjoys different challenges in his day-to-day work life that encouraged him to adapt and problem solve. Eddy says that there is no such thing as a normal day and that the role of a BA changes over the course of any project; adding and applying different skills and abilities to fit the current state of the project’s needs. He described his last two weeks working on his current project at Kopis:
“I’ve travelled for meetings with users, SMEs and management on new needs and functionality of new and existing modules, gathering info on new requirements. I’ve demoed mockups of new screens including new functional changes for areas of the application that I put together. I’ve written scripts for new reports. I’ve had design sessions with the team on upcoming new mockups that I will create. I’ve assisted in estimates to the client on approved workload. I’ve reviewed and QA’d work ongoing work for the next release of the application. I’ve followed up on outstanding issues and questions from ongoing development. And I’ve also begun work on a new technology proposal for future integration into the application.”
He has a very broad skill set that he has been using and putting into practice. He enjoys working with others to get these projects done and doing aspects of this by himself as well. He says too much of working alone or working with others would get tiring, so it’s important to find balance.
Eddy’s long term goal in the company would be to “help Kopis grow to the point that we will require a bonafide BA department and I will be there to lead it”.
About Kopis
Kopis is a Greenville, S.C.-based technology firm focused on providing high impact software and cloud solutions to businesses and state agencies in the Southeast. With a growing team of over 40 employees, Kopis is one of the fastest growing software companies in South Carolina. To learn more visit, www.kopisusa.com.