Employee Spotlight – Troy Johnson

What is your name and position within Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence?
Troy Johnson, Senior Manager and Agile Coach in the metrology Software product line. 

What does your day to day look like at Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence? Describe a day in the life.
That’s a great question! As many people today, I wear several different hats so it really depends on what role I’m playing at the moment. As one of theSenior Managers I am guaranteed to spend a portion of my time interacting with teams to help steer the development work in PC-DMIS or other products in the Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence portfolio. At other times, I’m working with other members of the senior management team to help define and carry out the vision and direction of the Software Product line. As the Agile Coach, I work to help teams learn how to communicate and work more effectively together. This includes training our Wilcox development teams and also teams all throughout Hexagon, like Tesa, HDC and new acquisitions like Vero Software, Forming Technologies Inc. (FTI) and Apodius GmbH, to name a few. With oversite over IT, I help ensurethat the teams have all of the right tools they need to be effective day to day and to break down the barriers to collaboration.

How did you get into this line of work?
Oddly enough it came through a group of paleontologists. My graduate studies in Mechanical Engineering were focused on reverse engineering and were sponsored by a group of paleontologists looking for a quick way to turn their dinosaur bones into digital replicas that could be used in edutainment CD’s. Laser scanning was still in its infancy back then but was seen as a quick way to replicate existing parts, or, in this case, bones. After graduation, I joined them on the ground floor of a business venture with high hopes of a successful startup. The ground floor was all there ever was. After that failed, I joined Wilcox Associates to help build the reverse engineering capabilities of PC-DMIS. That was right about the time of the first release of PC-DMIS for Windows!

What are your future goals?
I have three main goals. The first is to facilitate interaction between our customers and our development staff to make sure that we are always providing value with every new release of product. Second, is to break down barriers to communication and development between teams and organizations within Hexagon. We have great software developers and products across the greater organization and helping them collaborate effectively will allow us to provide better solutions for our customers. Third, is drive the agile transformation within the organization so we can respond quicker to the ever changing needs of customer and innovations in technology.

What feature do you find to be most useful to our users in the latest version of PC-DMIS?
That is a really difficult question as there have been so many great improvements recently from the release of Inspect, the addition of the size command in GD&T and the quick feature and quick scan enhancements. However, since my background is data acquisition via laser scanners, I am especially excited about the work that our point cloud team has done over the past few releases of PC-DMIS. With the integration of the 3D Reshaper library into PC-DMIS,we now have meshing capabilities. We have seen huge performance improvements with laser scanning and my recent favorite is the introduction of the Caliper command to quickly get distances measurements from the point cloud. The team has done a great job taking the laser scanning to the next level and there is still more coming!

What is Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence doing to improve the quality of their software products?
I’m really excited about the efforts that Hexagon is making to focus on quality in all aspects, especially as it pertains to our product offering. Like many other technology companies today, Hexagon is making a shift towards Agile Software Development. At the heart of agile development is the concept of building quality into the product through every phase of the development cycle. While testing is traditionally something that happens after the product development is complete, we now make testing part of every phase of the process from planning, to development, to integration and product delivery. By making testing part of the entire product development cycle, we raise the level of quality in our products and our customers experience, improved performance and satisfaction. This has required a large investment in training personnel in the latest software development practices. It also requires efforts in breaking down communication barriers where they exist andencouraging and empowering teams to collaborate so they can respond quickly to customer needs and changes in technology and industry. In a global organization, this is not an easy thing to do, but it is exciting to be part of that effort and see the rewards that come from increased communication across all of the divisions.

What do you do for fun outside of working at Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence? Hobbies?
There is no question that my biggest passion is alpine skiing. I live in Utah, USA which has some of the best snow on earth and I love to spend my time skiing the slopes of the Rocky Mountains with my family. When there is no snow, I still take advantage of the mountains and enjoy backpacking, fishing and hunting. Almost as important is the cooking and eating of good food. I’ve been blessed to experience lots of cultures during my tenure at Hexagon and I love to bring that culture home to the family byway of the food that I have enjoyed.

What is something that most people don’t know about you?
I love speed! It doesn’t matter if it is going 65 mph down the mountain on a pair of skis, 250 kph in aPorsche on the autobahn, or 85 mph in my Honda Shadow. It is all a rush!