LumaLegends: Anthony O’Reilly and Troy Foster

People are the heart of Lumary, and every month we shine a light on our LumaLegends. We love sharing a bit more about the incredible people that exemplify what it means to be part of the Lumary family. In this edition, we reached out to two Luminaries that are an integral part of their respective teams and also the creators of an internal favourite—the LumaRun.

Troy Foster — Technical Writer and Help Centre Mastermind

While he wasn’t necessarily a techy guy growing up, Troy’s big connection to tech was music—a big passion. For him, the internet opened up access to a world of music that he didn’t have access to locally, like “the B sides that Radiohead had recorded but not released”.

Troy later began a career in multimedia before deciding to complete a professional writing degree as a mature age student and pivoting into instructional design. He would go on to spend almost 12 years as a Content Solution Architect for an online learning platform as the lead educationalist providing oversight to the quality and integrity of the organisation’s instructional design processes.

Looking for a new challenge, Troy joined Lumary in May 2019, at which time there were only 30 employees. With his mum and sister both having worked in the aged care and disability care sectors, he was already familiar with the healthcare industry and looked forward to being able to make a difference through his work.

At that time, Lumary was looking for someone to transition the existing Salesforce-focused help centre into content that focused on Lumary product processes to best support customers. Coming from a background of instructional design, Troy brought the perfect combination of being able to put himself in the user’s shoes and turn technical information into digestible and user-friendly content.

Troy’s role as Technical Writer

As Lumary’s lead technical writer, Troy is the heart and soul of Lumary’s Help Centre for which many of our customers rely on for their understanding of the Lumary platform. Troy maintains several live pages such as release pages, as well as developing articles for new software functionality and feature enhancements. 

Talking through how the team approaches their writing, Troy references a quote from the movie Tron: “I fight for the users”. “With all the noise and complexity that can come around tech, we try to cut through that and talk to the people using our care management software by thinking about what the users’ problems are and how to address them,” Troy says.

The key to writing content that is going to best support our customers is to “tune into the language that the customer is likely to understand and how they think about these problems, then reflect this in the language we use,” Troy adds. To do this, he keeps a close eye on the news in the disability and aged care industries and monitors newsletter streams from industry peak bodies and government departments to keep up to date with legislative and policy changes.

What is your favourite thing about working at Lumary?

“One of the things that anchors me to this business is the passion and sincerity of the founders. When I started working with Joseph and Matt, I was immediately struck by their passion to make the world a better place for the people being cared for. This technology has a real opportunity to give workers and providers more time and capacity to care for the people they’re providing services to.”

Anthony O’Reilly — Director of Quality and Master Tester

Much like Troy, Anthony’s foray into tech was driven by his passion for music. As a musician in an indie rock band roaming the UK, Anthony would also build websites for his bands to promote them. He eventually moved into a software testing role for global telecommunications giant British Telecomms (BT) before returning to Adelaide in the capacity of Test Manager for a mixture of public and private sector companies.

Joining Lumary not long after Troy, Anthony was excited for the “opportunity to use my powers for good,” he jokes. “I never thought I’d have the chance to do something that has the potential to make a real difference.”

Anthony’s role as Director of Quality

“My main focus is helping people and removing impediments,” Anthony says. He explains that his role boils down to testing—everything. Anthony and his team will get involved from the very start to understand the problem that the customer has and begin their testing from there.

His team tests ideas, assumptions, theories, prototypes, code, and packages. “Then we test again.” They will ask questions, challenge assumptions, explore interpretations, and so on—all to ensure that the customers’ needs and desires are being considered at every stage of the process.

“The main focus for us is to expose problems and highlight risk,” Anthony continues. He refers to his team as a bridge. Starting off with a problem, his team will act as the voice bringing the context back to the customer as the building goes on and then ensure that the broader team is building the solution that people want and that solves a real-world problem.

What is your favourite thing about working at Lumary?

“Our customers. It’s spending time with customers and hearing their real-world challenges. It takes a lot of creative thinking and organisation to stay ahead of it—like T&T and SIL—these are really complicated concepts and I thrive in the challenge of making sense of those concepts and making them easy and digestible for our customers. I’ve also really enjoyed the journey that Lumary is on. As Lumary has evolved, we’ve grown with our customers and have become closer now than we’ve ever been.”

LumaRun takes off

While MVPs in their respective departments, there’s another reason that Anthony and Troy are known across the office—and that’s for the creation of the LumaRun; an initiative begun through Anthony and Troy’s strong bond over running.

It all began back in 2019 during the summer after Anthony and Troy both joined, when they realised each other’s passion for running. What began as a casual run together once, soon became a regular thing. Not long into these runs, Anthony, a lover of wordplay, came up with the LumaRun—a Tuesday constant at Lumary ever since.

What began as a LumaRun would also transition into a LumaWalk at times due to the inclusive nature of the initiative. As the LumaRun grew beyond Anthony and Troy, they would come together as a group and choose whether to run or walk depending on the feeling on the day or if there were members that were more inclined to walk than run.

While there have been peaks and troughs throughout COVID, Anthony and Troy discuss the importance of the LumaRun in connecting with different people, especially in a relaxed activity-based setting. “Sometimes it’s just good to have a chat,” Anthony says.

Lumary is a big advocate for better health and wellbeing in our community, and a great way to do that is by keeping fit and healthy, both physically and mentally. For Lumary, whether it’s running, walking, hiking or any other way to get moving, it’s important to get out and about.

For Anthony and Troy, running is a great way to switch off and relax. Troy describes it as “meditative and good for problem-solving”.

Anthony & Troy’s Top 5 Running Tips

With that in mind, we asked Anthony and Troy to give us their 5 top tips for those that are looking to just get the motivation to become a bit more active. And for those that are particularly ambitious, you’ll also find some advice on how to build your way up to a marathon!

While these are some great tips to apply to your running regime, you might notice that all of these can be applied to the way you live your life or run your organisation. We hope you find them useful!