Day in the Life – Muzammil Malick

• Name: Muzammil Malick
• Job Title:  Head of Core and IT Transport
• Function: Technology
• Tenure: 9 years

Tell us a little bit about yourself

Most people at Three know me as Muz so if you do happen to bump into me then please call me Muz. I moved to Reading after accepting a job at Ericsson (managing Three’s network) and after a year working for Ericsson, I moved to Three and have never looked back.

I live with my wife Aalia and two boys, Yaseen and Adam. Both Aalia and I are born and bred Mancunians and our family is full of die-hard Manchester United fans.

I love playing, reading about and watching football. I’m an avid film/drama watcher.

I loved Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul and really enjoyed the new Top Gun movie (I had very low expectations before going in with the first movie being a childhood favourite).

In a nutshell, describe your role and how you support our business objectives

I head up a team of highly skilled engineers who design and evolve Three’s data networks. What does this mean? It can be anything from providing a network to connect a customer from their phone to a YouTube video or ensuring that employees in the office can connect to Wifi in the office to retrieve their emails.

My team are relentlessly focused on customer experience to ensure we can squeeze every little last bit out of the available technology to give our customers the best experience and propel us to number 1 in public benchmarks.

More recently my team managed the deployment of the Wifi network in our Green Park office when it was just an empty shell, ensuring that when the building opened, everyone had the connectivity they required to do their jobs.

What does a typical day look like in your role?

With my role being to ensure everyone in the company gets the connectivity they need, you can probably imagine that we are involved in a massive amount of projects and deliveries.

Day to day I interface with Suppliers, Procurement, Programme Managers, Finance, CIO, RAN teams and the list goes on.

I try to split my time day between personal development, developing/coaching my team and focussing on business goals (in no particular order).

No day is the same for me. I will always get at least one email asking for my team’s support for something new, so it keeps us on our toes.

As the year goes on my focus will shift from working with suppliers to ensure they are delivering to commitments to focussing on planning for next year.

What is on the cards for the rest of the year in your world?

Right now my focus is on ensuring we make good financial decisions and plan what next year will look like. As you can imagine with the cost of living increasing, inflation, energy bills etc. we need to keep our costs under control. Just focussing on how we can reduce our power bill by switching off unnecessary hardware will have a massive impact to Three’s operating costs.

How are you finding hybrid working now we’re back in the office?

Personally, I’ve really benefited from the hybrid working setup. It’s given me the right balance of WFH and being in in the office. I really did miss the office and the human interactions, they are so important. I’ve also found that when working from the office I have a better mechanism to switch off after work. The drive home gives me time to switch off, whereas WFH means its sometimes difficult to close the laptop and then go straight into spending time with my family.

How have you looked after your mental health during the past couple of years?

Very honestly, I don’t think I did a great job in the beginning. I was fully immersing myself in work and working from home didn’t help.

Sometime after the outset of COVID I started to make an effort. We went out for family bike rides and I started attending some wellness calls that Three had setup online. These were really great for me and helped me realise how tense I was.

These made me realise how much I wasn’t concentrating on Mental Health. I now make a conscious effort to do daily meditation to calm myself.

More recently, I took part in the Samarathon at Three and racked up a massive 275 miles in the month. I’d never walked more than a couple of miles at a time in my life. But with this being for such a great cause I just started and got addicted. It has really benefited my mental health and I have carried on the walking post the event. I’d definitely recommend walking to take care of yourself!

Give us a fun fact…

Not a fun fact but I have always been terrified of rollercoasters since I was a child. My eldest son Yaseen is a proper dare devil though and was always making fun of me for standing on the sidelines. So to save face I had to start going on these crazy rollercoasters with him and now I love them!