Working on the prestigious restoration of Manchester's Neo-Gothic Town Hall.

IT management and IT Project Management. Working for clients in Finance, Education, Property Management and the legal profession.

Working with the newly appointed IT Operations Manager to document the group's IT estate, and liaising with the operational managers to understand their issues and requirements.

Contracted primarily to harden their Infrastructure, working towards getting all 17 companies cyber essentials accredited. Implementing compliance and IT policies to all staff, remote IT teams and IT suppliers. I was also involved in reviewing and developing the IT roadmaps, ensuring they were cost effective and in line with the group vision.

I was contracted to advise on the complete overhaul of their infrastructure and hardware, and support contract. Including a complete audit of their current status, requirements gathering, producing a RFQ, advising on 3rd party selection, assessing the quotes with recommendations, negotiating with 3rd parties, and project managing the implementation.

Reporting into the CFO I am responsible for the IT infrastructure and systems with a clear aim to control IT spend.Role and Responsibilities• Providing strategic direction in accordance to company vision.• Develop and support multiple IT teams, agreeing improvement plans and introducing new technical areas, ensuring the correct allocation of IT resources.• Identifying Risks and issues, and their effective management.• Define and implement proactive tasks to avoid future issues, including monitoring, software patching, performance tuning and housekeeping.• Negotiation and ownership of vendor accounts, including assets, software and consultancy services. • Management of untangling and handover of companies divested.Key Achievements• Reduced annual IT spend from 2.0m to £1.5m whilst improving the service provided in a tough business environment.• Managed the planned reduction from 97 serviced sites across the group to 65.• Moved to an internal Disaster recovery model saving £60k pa.• Migrated a datacentre of 14 servers to a Virtual environment with a cost payback of under 6 months, and an on-going saving of £85k pa• Implemented and managed ITIL based service desk focussed on continual improvement.

Attending the monthly board meetings, I was accountable for the delivery and management of all IT systems ensuring they were stable and secure.Role and Responsibilities• Develop and deliver the IT Strategy and roadmap within agreed budgets and timeframes in accordance with growth plans.• To develop relevant management systems, policies, procedures and documentation relating to risk management, health and safety, information security, compliance and business continuity.• Manage operational staffing of 7 IT teams including mentoring, supervision, scheduling, development, and disciplinary actions.• Managing non-core companies IT in line with individual strategies.• Manging and resolving all major issues, leading issues through resolution whilst minimising service and brand impact, ensuring relevant communication given throughout.• Develop realistic business cases with costs and benefits for projects and initiatives.• Regular due diligence projects, then management of integration of companies acquired by the group. Key Achievements • Reducing annual IT spend from 2.8m to £2m whilst improving the service provided in a growing and changing group.• Migration from 12 AD Domains to 2 whilst also migrating to licenced and supported version of Microsoft servers• Migrated main datacentre of 51 servers to a Virtual environment with a return of investment within 2 years, and an on-going saving of £80k pa whilst introducing a DR model.

Reporting to the IT Director I lead an experienced team of 15 developers and contractors, I managed the Geneva Billing System and it's interface into Oracle CRM with 15,000 B2B customers, processing 2 million transactions a day with an annual turnover of £16mRole and Responsibilities• Developing and maintaining the Billing systems ensuring the business needs, financial and commercial objectives were fully met.• Accountable for the delivery of continual improvements to ensure all systems were efficient, stable and secure.• Supporting critical technical infrastructure ensuring 24/7 availability.• Using Agile methodologies to ensure constant improvements to the internal systems.Key Achievements • developed the system to handle the Selling and Billing of bespoke SaaS offerings• I used shell scripting to convert the output file from the billing system, combining it with database feeds to produce an XML file for each invoice, and then converting them into pdfs. This immediately saved the company £28,000 a month in rendering costs. With the checks and reports that were included the accuracy of the bills increased from less than 90% to 99.999% saving the company over 1000 helpdesk hours a month in queries. Within 3 months we moved to online billing saved a further £42,000 a month in printing and postage costs. Total ongoing annual savings: £940,000.

Reporting to the IT Director I lead an experienced team of 15 developers and contractors, I managed the Geneva Billing System and it's interface into Oracle CRM with 15,000 B2B customers, processing 2 million transactions a day with an annual turnover of £16mRole and Responsibilities• Developing and maintaining the Billing systems ensuring the business needs, financial and commercial objectives were fully met.• The specification, evaluation, selection, implementation, testing and maintenance of internal systems.• Supporting critical technical infrastructure ensuring 24/7 availability.• Using Agile methodologies to ensure constant improvements to the internal systems.• Prioritising IT resources to ensuring a balance of maintaining legacy systems, and implementing large migration project.Key Achievements • Key stakeholder, project manager and developer in a 18 month £6m Prince2 project to migrate to billing systems, with responsibility for the billing system. The project followed Prince2 methodologies. • I joined as an IT support Technician, becoming the IT manager, before specialising and becoming the Billing Manager, and eventually the Billing and Software Manager.