Employee Corner- Ken Danner Celebrates 10 Years with CCI
Senior Engineer Ken Danner recently celebrated his 10th Anniversary as a member of the Control Concepts Team. In the decade since Ken, one of our early hires, joined Control Concepts, he has seen and been part of changes across the A/V industry. He has also provided consistent value, technical expertise and creativity to our projects, our business and our offices. We are grateful to Ken for his ten years of service and we look forward to many more.
The Control Concepts team celebrated Ken with a party and an award honoring his continued dedication. We sat down with Ken to talk about the changes he has seen, some of his favorite projects and what being part of our CCI Team means to him.
What was the first project you worked on at CCI?
One of my first projects with the CCI Team was working with the Pennsylvania company, Wyeth, on a head end touchpanel. It was a lot of fun working with John Fish, who was with Advanced AV at the time, to help me learn what was needed to get the system up and running. For a first project it was a great learning experience and a successful outcome for me and for the client.
How does that project from 10 years ago compare with the type of work you do today?
The equipment has changed, a lot. It is more powerful in terms of what you can do with it, but it is similar when you look at something like the basis for controlling a large head end switcher. We still work on projects like this today. But now, the programs that we create are even more reliable, robust and intuitive. What we can do has grown a lot in ten years.
When you look at the kinds of feature rich systems we are working on today, they are more complicated to produce and the end result is more intense and more robust, delivered in the same amount of time.
What is the biggest change you’ve seen in the industry in the past 10 years?
In the ten years since I joined Control Concepts, the role of the programmer has become more integral to the entire A/V project because control systems have become more integral to the A/V project. We are taking on more responsibility, bigger roles, and doing more for our customers.
Instead of just coming in at the end of a project to put in a program and run testing, we are now more involved in system design and deployment. We are relied upon to test and troubleshoot more and we understand the system as much if not more than anyone involved. Because systems are more complicated we are one of few professionals who can trace that through the entire process. When we get involved in the design phase we are able to adjust the system to make the program easier and make it work better for the customer.
What does it mean to be a part of the CCI team?
The environment at CCI is a very supportive, confidence building environment. If I run into issues or challenges I know that I always have the support of the team behind me. When I am working on a project and run into technical issues and questions about how best to resolve them, I know that all of the engineers at CCI are all here for each other and interested in helping each other. You learn from the collective knowledge and grow from everyone else. It’s a good team.
From the technical side to the personal side, the team of coworkers really makes it worth it to work here. It’s a great crew of people.
