What We Do

Vivo Technical is a multidisciplinary team of highly qualified, technical professionals who work with scientists, engineers, and governments to deliver results. We combine software development with programme-level expertise to orchestrate highly educated specialists with appropriate management tools and techniques.

One of the major projects we are involved in is the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), an international effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope, with eventually over a square kilometre (one million square metres) of collecting area.

The scale of the SKA represents a huge leap forward in both engineering and research & development towards building and delivering a unique instrument.
As one of the largest scientific endeavours in history, the SKA is bringing together a wealth of the world’s finest scientists, engineers and policy makers to bring the project to fruition.

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Who We Are

We are a small team of engineers, technologists and academics with proven system engineering, software development, project management and agile coaching experience spanning decades. Since 2021, Ferdl, Kechil, Rob and our team of engineers and developers have leant our considerable experience to the design and construction of one of the largest science projects in the world: the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).

Ferdl is an experienced lean systems engineer, lean-agile coach and practitioner with many years of industry experience working in technical roles such as development engineer, lead systems engineer, software architect and senior manager. He has worked in small and large enterprises, both commercial and government, in the consumer electronics, office automation, aerospace and software industries. His current responsibilities include working as a Release Train Engineer (lean-agile coach) on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project. Ferdl has a Masters degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering and he is a Certified SAFe® 6 Practice Consultant.

Kechil has many years international experience as technical project manager in highly innovation-driven commercial and research organisations. This included being project manager of the team that became Advanced Risc Machines (ARM), 14 years as consultant to the European Commission in IT, and stints as lecturer in Information Systems at Makerere University Business School in Uganda and at the University of Cape Town. Her current responsibilities include working in a project management capacity for the Inter-University Institute for Data-Intensive Astronomy, and on the Square Kilometre Array and MeerKAT projects for the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory and the SKA. She was a member of the Astronomy Advisory Committee to the South African government and was elected as Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2016. She has Masters degrees in Social Anthropology, Information Technology, and Space Engineering.

For the SKA she has worked in the DELIV team in the Design Phase, and in systems engineering and requirements management. Latterly she has been the Scrum Master of a software development team for the Science Data Processor.

In her spare time, Kechil hosts Looking Up, a weekly radio show about astronomy on Fine Music Radio.

Rob has many years of experience working on and managing computational science projects. He led the design of the data delivery component of the SKA telescope and has been involved in the oversight of many more projects as the director of the Grid Research Centre at the University of Calgary and as CTO of WestGrid, which is part of the Compute Canada organisation. He has held a Professorship in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Cape Town for over 10 years and is associate director of the Inter-University Institute for Data-Intensive Astronomy. He is also CTO for ilifu which is an Infrastructure as a Service cloud used mainly by Astronomy and Bioinformatics researchers and is based on OpenStack and Ceph technologies.

Our Track Record

Assisted the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory with project management of MeerKAT SDP development

Perform senior roles on the SKA
Scrum Master of various agile teams
Member of the Core Architecture Team in the SDP design consortium
Lead of DELIV package in the SDP design consortium
Lead Systems Engineer of the SDP design consortium.
Release Train Engineer of the Science Data Processing Agile Release Train at SKAO.

Perform senior roles at the South African National Space Agency (SANSA)
Technical lead for the SANSA Data Cube project
Manager of Data Management at SANSA Earth Observation

Software Integration Engineering and Testing
Software development in science pipelines, system controls and services, delivery systems and front-end dashboards

Our Track Record

South African Radio Astronomy Observatory
Assisted the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory with project management of MeerKAT SDP development
Square Kilometre Array
Perform senior roles on the SKA
Scrum Master of various agile teams
Member of the Core Architecture Team in the SDP design consortium
Lead of DELIV package in the SDP design consortium
Lead Systems Engineer of the SDP design consortium
Release Train Engineer of the Science Data Processing Agile Release Train at SKAO
South African National Space Agency
Perform senior roles at the South African National Space Agency (SANSA)
Technical lead for the SANSA Data Cube project
Manager of Data Management at SANSA Earth Observation
Software Development
Software Integration Engineering and Testing
Software development in science pipelines, system controls and services, delivery systems and front-end dashboards

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