Allan Todd Email and Phone Number

Product Design consultancy.

Managing projects in all disciplines, and also taking a leading role in building up the company's experience in Electronics and Software. I have managed projects for clients including SujiBFR, Ergon Equine, PlayerData and BOC.

I was responsible for setting up and running a Project Management Office to support the Condition Monitoring (Machine Health from 2014) development sites (based in Livingston UK, San Diego & Fort Collins USA, Luleå and GothenburgSweden, and St Cyr France). The PMO encouraged and supported good project management, gave management visibility into project status through a standardised approach to reporting, and ensured appropriate use of SKF processes. I enjoyed working with the Project Managers, having frequent discussions with each of them about their projects and looking for areas of risk we could mitigate and how to give an accurate impression of project status to management. I could act as a Coach and a sounding board for any project manager, and I was also able to act as a bridge between projects and senior management -- both to shield the projects from unrealistic management expectations and to engage management when the project needed their assistance to clear obstacles.One of the things I was most proud of was helping to introduce Agile development practices. I helped gain management support for the investment in Agile training & coaching, arranged for an external coach to present training sessions, presented "introduction to Agile" sessions, and created ISO:9000 / ISO:90003-compliant procedures to capture how Agile worked in our teams -- without over-prescribing and removing the important room for flexibility which good Agile teams need. I also worked with the Engineering Management team on how best to structure engineering teams to allow maximum realisation of the benefits of Agile. Agile was very well entrenched with most of the software / firmware teams when I left, and progress was being made on setting up Agile development teams to include electronics design as well.

I managed a team developing and supporting SKF's portable electronic devices, including Data Collectors (sold as the SKF Microlog family and via OEMs as the Enpac 2500, DC460, DCA-31B and Snapshot IS products) and Laser Shaft Alignment instruments (sold as the SKF TKSA 60 / 80 family). Initially I ran the firmware development team, but from March 2012 my responsibilities included all aspects - firmware, electronics, mechanics. I was very well supported by good developers but remained involved in the coding and design of the Data Collector and Shaft Alignment tools throughout my time as Engineering Manager, doing some coding in C++ / MFC and VB / C# / .NET as well as creating support tools in Perl.

Manager of a firmware development team at Diagnostic Instruments, working first of all on our DI-2200 FFT Analyzer and LineCheck Production Test instrument, and then on Data Collectors (Enpac 1200, DI-225-D).DI was bought by SKF in July 2000.

Multimedia consultancy company, started by myself and 2 colleagues from Philips Interactive Media Systems. Specialised initially in CD-I and CD-ROM, moving later into Internet sites.The business has grown since I moved on and is still going strong, especially in the field of Internet Search Engine Optimisation. I am proud to have played a part in getting SilverDisc under way in those early days.

Multimedia software company specialising in CD-I for consumer and corporate customers.

Working in the Communications Division on HF military radios and secure speech systems. Some hardware design (digital) before concentrating on software, particularly digital signal processing.