Amanda Ling Email and Phone Number

Review and track IT elements of all 3rd party contracts throughout their lifecycle in the business. This included participation in RFPs, onboarding and delivery of required services, compliance to SLAs and milestones, review of associated costs and billing, and all vendor engagements going forward.• Drafting of IT requirements for new business systems and participation in RFP processes.• Onboarding of new suppliers or services into the business.• Ensuring that necessary IT services, processes and SLAs are clearly defined in contracts.• Liaising with both internal business units and external providers to ensure that contracted services are delivered on.• Maintaining a database of 3rd party IT vendors and suppliers and their contracted service details.• Maintaining strategic partnerships with all IT vendors.• Management of Microsoft licensing.• Assisting with miscellaneous subscriptions and renewals.• Auditing of billing to ensure accuracy and compliance to agreements, and investigation of anomalies.• Identifying cost savings and/or credits or penalties due.• Facilitating Service Review meetings with required vendors at pre-determined intervals and measuring compliance/delivery.• Monitoring trends and providing insights and recommendations where applicable.• Tracking of IT spend and reporting back to Finance.• Input of CAPEX and OPEX forecasts for budgets.• Cancellation and/or renewal of any agreements as and when required.

Provide excellent IT service to the business, by managing daily activities of the support teams and reviewing and improving processes. Deliver on technology projects and rollouts and ensure handover to BAU, as well as assistance with end-user training and adoption. Team was comprised of a mixture of direct reports and outsourced staff through a managed services partner.• Management of IT Service Desk and Desktop Support Engineers. These were initially in-house teams, but the functions were later outsourced to Datacentrix, then moved to Dimension Data.• Act as Escalations Manager for any IT related incidents or requests.• Problem Management• Major Incident Manager (on rotation both during and after hours)• Participation in CAB for all IT changes.• Preparing and maintaining required system documentation and diagrams.• Transitioning of new services to BAU and facilitation of training for Tier 1 and 2 staff. • Engaging with relevant vendors and providers in the hardware, networking, telephony, and procurement (eg. Dimension Data, BCX, Telkom, IS, Vodacom, Vox, Digicape, SAICOM etc).• Driving service improvement through regular trend analysis and process review.• Creating end-user training material when required.• Stakeholder communication regarding outages, changes, and rollouts.• Input of CAPEX and OPEX budget requirements for associated areas.• Identity Management in the Azure Active Directory environment.• Management of Microsoft licensing and renewals.• Project management (eg. all IT components of club openings, closures, and refurbishments).• Data analysis and compilation of reports.• Alignment of processes with business needs.• Participation in RFPs for technology rollouts.• Asset lifecycle management of all IT hardware (this included purchasing, repairs, warranties, spares, decommissioning, and safe disposal).

Manage the daily operational activities of Virgin Active’s IT Infrastructure team to ensure uptime and stability of all systems, services, and core infrastructure. This highly technical team of 4 Engineers was responsible for design, planning, implementation, and maintenance of all facets of core infrastructure, such as network, storage, backups, disaster recovery, and automation.• Co-ordination of the technical team’s activities.• Ensuring ongoing proactive maintenance of hardware and databases to guarantee IT system stability.• System/server monitoring and any necessary remediation.• Leading reactive incident management and resolution of core infrastructure issues.• Scheduling of air-conditioning, UPS and fire system checks in our on-premise datacentre.• Regular testing of backup and restore platforms.• Preparation and maintenance of technical documentation and infrastructure diagrams. • Server and switch asset lifecycle management relating to procurement, warranties, spares, decommissioning, and disposal.• Engagement with all relevant vendors and service providers in the datacentre hardware and networking space.• Act as Change Manager for all changes implemented by the greater IT team.• Problem Management for any recurring issues relating to IT systems.

Seconded to the project team that would be responsible for moving the business over to the Domino platform, with the intent of not only migrating our email, but also implementing our first company intranet. Accepted the permanent position of Domino Administrator thereafter, managing the servers, databases and user directory. Role was later renamed to Senior Support Analyst.• Daily administration of user profiles and mailboxes.• All support relating to email, intranet and associated applications.• LDAP integration for application access outside of Domino. • Deployment and maintenance of IT Ticket Logging system • Implementation of mail filters to enforce email governance and DLP.• Installation and maintenance of distributed email servers in clubs.• Replication of required databases to local servers to improve performance.• Various proactive database administration tasks.• Intranet content management, including basic development.• Administration of Mimecast, including setup of mail flow and filtering.

Responsible for attending to IT Support calls and maintaining the Head Office network and servers.• Troubleshooting and resolving of errors relating to all IT equipment and systems at our National and Cape Regional Offices. • Attending to IT calls for Virgin Active clubs when the Regional Technician was unavailable.• Creation of user profiles and directories in the Novell environment.• Installation of hardware and software. • Running of server backups and restores and managing off-site media storage rotation for disaster recovery purposes.• Assistance with IT setup for new club openings and refurbishments.

Handled all aspects of the membership system where information was extracted from the database and consumed elsewhere. This was prior to the business having a dedicated wide area network, email, or any automated or integrated systems. Data was manually moved between sites, consolidated, manipulated, and then redistributed for specific functionality. It was a series of highly repetitive tasks that required immense concentration and accuracy.Examples of tasks:• Creation of bi-monthly debit order files for membership fees, as well as submission to the bank.• Receipt of debit order status files, which were then manually uploaded onto all servers for collection of unpaid fees.• Extraction of various member and access trends and compilation of board packs for Executive meetings.