A senior experienced IT Operations and Delivery manager who has been directly involved in IT for over 25 years; developing and honing my skills to add significant value and bring quality to any organisation. With a decisive and proactive approach and the analytical skills to assist organisations with defining their key strategic direction in all areas of IT strategy.

July 2009 to December 2009

January 2009 to April 2009

December 2007 to Present Date

May 2006 - November 2007

2004 to present

• Entomology, general wildlife interests, science and technology, numismatism and astronomy.
• Sports including Power Kiting and Swimming.
• Member of the Institute of Advanced Motorists.

Site Operations Manager

July 2009 to December 2009

Management of the Site Operations team (Unix, DBA and Linux specialists), ensuring the team's service delivery objectives were achieved within agreed budgetary constraints, according to agreed processes and procedures, abiding by all relevant REA-Group procedures and policies.

• Participation in the preparation of the IT Strategy roadmap and tactical planning processes that align with REA business direction
• Ensured the availability and smooth operation of Production, Staging and Development environments
• Provision of Production, Staging and Development environments that meet REA standards for Production control and development productivity and agility
• Ensuring that backup, recovery and DR procedures are in place and tested for all required environments
• Escalation and management of all Production Incidents
• Implementation of the ITIL based Problem Management process, ensuring integration with other ITIL based processes within REA
• Provided a positive work environment whilst ensuring team members efforts are focussed and aligned, through to the day to day management ensuring compliance with REA HR Management policies - which in turn enabled the successful closure of 2 production Data Centres and the opening of a new facility.
• Ensuring Operational Procedures describing the installation, deployment, commissioning, and decommissioning of equipment in Data Centres are documented, understood and actively used by the team in technology and service delivery
• Managed, identified and resolved a long standing significant performance issue with the production site

Solutions Architect

January 2009 to April 2009

Successful short term contract to define the Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) solution for the following areas:

• Strategic solution to provision access to all historic legacy data from all business applications
• Strategic solution in implement a HSM based infrastructure architecture to manage aging data reducing the business TOC for its aging data base
• Identify appropriate tools and define appropriate data management solution
• Define the ongoing harvesting strategy for aging data
• Define the solution to manage non structured data
• Identify where the solution would apply to external vendors

Senior Consultant

December 2007 - Present Date

Southern Region Delivery Manager:

• Involved in new opportunities from their inception, development of the statement of works through to customer signing, allocation and management of resource requirements for the engagement
• Managing and delivering professional services to companies such as Australia Post, BHP Billiton, Sensis, Goldman Sachs JBWere, Vic. Dept of Treasury & Finance

Development and delivery of a strategic IT Infrastructure Roadmap

Initially employed as an Infrastructure Manager to manage a team of technical staff at a client site. The team were responsible for the design and implementation of infrastructure solutions :-

Development and delivery of a strategic IT Infrastructure Roadmap

• Ensuring team work and process alignment between many staff groups and technical disciplines
• Development of quality processes and procedures for efficient service delivery
• Defining and building Infrastructure to specification and make recommendations for improvement
• Provide level 3 support for incident management
• Applying Project Management methodologies and standards used in EIS
• Planning and forecasting budgets

Development and delivery of a strategic IT Infrastructure Roadmap

Service Account Manager

May 2006 - November 2007

• Management of a non-standard outsourced solution for a key British Telecom Australasia global customer, SCA Hygiene. Management of the day to day service as well as ongoing strategic planning with the customer; aligning our service delivery with their predicted growth and ongoing infrastructure changes
• Management of all outsourced telecommunications suppliers for SCA Hygiene (Optus, Telstra, TelstraClear, Telecom, 1Step, VOIP, VNSG, IComm).Development and maintenance of the Customer Service Plan for each customer (SCA Hygiene, NAB, Cellarmasters).
• Management of a standard solution for a key British Telecom Australasia global customer National Australia Bank. Responsible for the day to day service as well as bringing value to the provision of said service.
• Facilitating the prompt, effective resolution of all service related issues. Root cause analysis and permanent resolution to the customer's satisfaction
• Administer Service Level Agreements, understand all regulatory conditions; understand the basic key points on commercial law applicable to service issues.

Service Consultant

January 2004 to present

Centrica plc is the parent company for (at the time) OneTel Communications, the AA (an RACV equivalent company), Centrica Energy and British Gas. Currently having a group revenue of £21.3bn, with over 32,000 employees. I was responsible and accountable for the end to end service provision of key Centrica Shared Services. This included key strategic planning with the businesses, enabling transformation and technical direction for the shared IT services that span the different Centrica companies, in alignment with the corporate roadmap.

Responsible and accountable for the end to end service provision of 10 key Centrica Shared Services. These are services that span the different Centrica companies.

Key Achievements

• SAP R3 - Stabilisation of service post upgrade; management of "silo" support staff, suppliers and Finance, Personnel and Payroll customers. Involved in and signed off all stages of upgrade to new infrastructure in Nov. 2005
• SAP Business Warehouse - Stabilisation of system; management of "silo" support staff, suppliers; recognition and justification for interim infrastructure upgrade and management of technical customer. Later merged into above SAP system
• HP Openview Servicedesk - Largest implementation of HP Openview Servicedesk outside of HP themselves. Stabilisation of service; management of "silo" support staff, suppliers and customers. Strategic requirement for and initiated / managed upgrade to more stable environments, initiated and managed transition to completion. Key strategic involvement in revision of Change Management process
• IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler - Strategic planning with the Infrastructure and Service Delivery sections of the organisation and initiation of the infrastructure upgrade; identified estimated cost per days outage around £20m; produced and justified business case with the board and transition of the new service. Management of all customers, support and all external suppliers
• BACS and Girobank financial systems - Strategic planning with the finance section of the organisation and transition to the new BACS service merging all 48 financial companies into one service. Management of suppliers, banks and internal customer at all levels; integration of new service into existing support infrastructure
• Management of and working with all key suppliers/vendors including British Telecom, BACS, IBM, Sun, HP, SAP, Citrix, BMC, Kana, Girobank, OneTel.

Management and governance for the end to end service provision of 10 key Centrica Shared Services. These are services that span the different Centrica companies (British Gas, The AA (RACV equivalent) and OneTel):

• BACS and Girobank financial systems - delivery of 48 separate Oins (business units); Finance Collections approx £2.9bn and payroll approx £740m; average monthly transactions of £250m
• Customer Hub - core marketing data warehouse system (bespoke Oracle data warehouse application, 3xSAN, synchronised across 2 Data Centres. Primary marketing tool for the whole organisation
• SAP R3 - Corporate Finance, Payroll, Purchasing and Personnel system, estimated daily service at £14m per day. Later upgraded to SAP ERP, BW, Xi and SRM modules
• SAP Business Warehouse - Core financial system
• HP Openview Servicedesk - Core Helpdesk, Change, Workflow management system - integral to all IS departments
• Kana - eWise knowledge management application
• IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler - managing and processing all batch schedules to 200 different services (all production services within Centrica)
• -Peregrine Asset Centre - core procurement system
• -Citrix services - entire Citrix infrastructure (160 servers, 2800 users)
• -BMC / EMS Patrol. Infrastructure management for all Centrica servers

Management of critical Service outages (in particular, managing critical P1 outages that impact the provision of the service).

Proactive management of the service (supporting, facilitating, and scrutinising Service Delivery and escalating issues appropriately - managing service improvements through the Service Improvement Plan).

Director of Data Centre Services

February 2003 to November 2003

• Responsible for all service provision of ENG Hosted Services. This covers all aspects of service delivery from managing the day to day infrastructure (provision of hosted websites, Citrix infrastructures , sql database services, email (internal and external) file and print (internal and external), Internet services etc), the physical environment, server maintenance, third line support service maintenance team as well as ongoing presales support and project implementations, to hosted service provision offsite both in the UK and the USA.
• Major customer base includes companies such as Whitbread, Le Meridien, Richmond Events, Graphite Capital. Managing all major customer's for the ENG Hosting service. Bringing the customer onboard from the initial concept of the deal through to senior account and escalation management. Developing an in-depth relationship with each customer, enabling a single point of contact for all service escalation issues.
• Responsible for managing supplier relationships for ENG Hosting. Ensuring the suppliers meet the demands of the business in order for ENG to provide its contractual service obligations. This includes initiating service contracts (both UK and USA ) as well as approving ad hoc invoicing.
• Drawing on ITIL training and experience, implementation of core process and procedures adhering to ITIL defined standards wherever possible. Includes such essentials as capacity planning, physical planning, security, change management, initial installations as well as the ongoing service provision and contingency planning.
• Strategic planning and management giving focus and direction for all aspects of ENG's Hosting services.
• Project Manager for all ENG Hosting projects. Managing the implementation of all solutions, systems and services to be hosted by ENG.

Service Manager

March 2001 to October 2002

• Management and planning for all aspects of Pasporte's e-business Data Centre; this includes physical planning, security, transition management, initial installations as well as the ongoing service provision and contingency planning.
• Management of the procurement process; selecting and then working with suppliers to establish best cost and availability to fit the project definition workshop criteria as well as the overall service delivery requirement.
• Initiation and implementation of disaster recovery plan as contingency for total service failure.
• Software license management - implementation and management of all software licenses both internally and for customer hosted services.
• Problem, Change and Capacity Management. Escalation focal point for all major incidents and sole authorised signatory for all requests for change.

Third Line Support Manager

October 1999 to March 2001

• Management of both Unix and AS/400 third line support teams. Managing business workloads as well as the more technical projects as required from senior technical staff.
• Management and planning all aspects for all three Equitas Data Centre's; this includes transition management, service provision, security and physical logistics planning.  
• Problem Management and Support Manager responsibilities.

Technical Change Manager

1999 to September 2000

• Implementation, provision, management and operational support of the entire Technical Change Management Process for Equitas.

Remedy Project Management

1997 to 1999

• Software configuration and implementation for the Remedy Action Request System. Involved in all stages of the design process including schema development, backup and recovery planning and subsequent training and implementation to internal customers.
• Hardware planning for the Infrastructure Management Project, defining and purchasing the hardware platforms required for Tivoli , BMC Patrol and Remedy Action Request System.

• Recognition and management of information collaboration between Remedy and other applications (Remedy, bespoke applications) to enable sharing of information between applications and subsequent reduction in data duplication and data management overheads.

• Organising and managing a complete audit of all BOC Gases Europe locations across the UK . Managing a team of four full time members and additional part time members. Collation of said audit information providing input to senior management and associated SAP project and then managing the subsequent acquisition and equipment redeployment wherever possible.
• Equipment deployment and configuration for 20 training facilities at various locations around the country. Ensuring the smooth operation of the equipment during associated training sessions.

• Management and planning for all aspects of the Guildford Data Centre hardware and environment.
• Planning and successful installation of the IBM 9672 Enterprise Server for the planned SAP environment. Additional hardware includes IBM SP/2 Nodes; IBM3494 Tape Robotics Subsystem; SSA DASD Subsystem supporting a 20 node configuration; IBM Ramac Virtual Array 9393 Storage System; RS/6000 front end interconnected by Escon Fibre channels.

Technical Change Manager

1997 and 1999

• Provision, management and operational support of the entire Technical Change Management Process for Gases Europe, and BOC Group Network Services provided from multi-vendor platforms, serving a population more than 7,500 worldwide.
• Provision, management and operational support of Technical Change Management for Gases America.
• Management and operational support of the International Technical Change Management process for sister companies including Edward's High Vacuum, Distribution Services and Ohmeda.
• Global Change Manager; promotion of Global Change Management resulting in participation from companies such as Ohmeda USA, Gases Hong Kong, Gases Australia (including Hewlett Packard) and British Telecom.

Data Centre Service Management

1996 - 1997

• Maintenance and enhancement of all existing Service Level Agreements including the Gases Europe Mainframe Services (44 applications), Midrange Services (three platforms for five applications) and SAP SP/2 Services (in excess of 40 applications).
• Development maintenance and implementation of Service Level Agreements for all new services including the NT Server based services such as File/Print, Electronic Mail, Lotus Notes
• Various Services (multiple applications at multiple locations) and the Human Resources Senior Management Database.
• Provision, management and operational support of the Service Management recording and reporting process for Gases Europe Service Operations.

Infoman Development and Support

1990 to 1998

• Technical support for the Problem and Technical Change Management platform, Infoman. Including panel and database maintenance, development and problem determination.