Providing IT Consultancy Services to Small to Medium sized businesses

Helping DCAT to improve security, systems and IT services to deliver "frictionless" IT across the Trust.

contract end

The Harris Federation comprises 50 Academies. We currently educate over 36,000 pupils in and around London and have around 5,000 staff. Nine out of ten inspected Harris Academies open for more than a year have been judged to be Outstanding by Ofsted (82% compared to 20% nationally). Improvement in terms of 5A*-C with English and Maths was 13% last Summer compared to 2.8% nationally and 5.7% for all Academies.

Part of the AXA Group, Bluefin Group provides employee benefits consultancy and other financial services including pensions administration, Actuarial and IFA services to individuals and employers. As Head of IT at Bluefin Advisory Services I have overall responsibility for all IT. Bluefin Advisory Services have around 750 staff, over 13 offices, supported with an in-house IT team of 14 and a number of key external suppliers.At Bluefin I developed an IT strategy that supported the newly developed business strategy by allowing the business the accessibility and flexibility required. This consisted of virtualising the whole estate including desktops and moving everything to the centre. It also required the building up of a new combined team to build, maintain and support the new infrastructure. We now have over 40 VMware hosts supporting 150 servers, 250 VDIs and 18 Citrix servers. We also have an excellent DR solution utilising VMware SRM. The project to completely upgrade the infrastructure including moving to Windows 7, Office 2010, Exchange 2010 and Lync was recently completely within budget and time constraints. Not only this, but the tight budget for the works meant that most of the infrastructure was recycled which has delivered a real value-for-money solution. The strategy identified that once all regional servers had been centralised and virtualised the applications and data also needed to be consolidated. This work is now well underway saving over £200k per year in license costs alone. To address the consolidation of the data I developed a combined strategy of using a single share for the whole business, a new document management and workflow system and an archive store utilising cheaper NAS storage.

Capita is a FTSE 100 company dealing with many outsourced contracts including many public and private clients such as the National Strategies for the Department of Education and Skills.At Capita I developed the strategy to support the business strategy. This consisted of developing the virtual infrastructure to allow the expansion of the estate to include complete copies of the production environment in development and UAT environments. This allowed us to develop and test many in-house solutions. I developed a three year plan to support the business which identified the many applications that were required, that were either purchased or developed, then we integrated them to ensure they were all linked and finally introduced data warehouse technology to extract the information and provide better management information.

Capita is a FTSE 100 company dealing with many outsourced contracts including many public and private clients such as the National Strategies for the Department of Education and Skills.Achievements:Working as an IT Service Manager and a single point of contact for all IT matters on many high profile contracts including Capita Head office, Veredus Recruitment, Strategic Children's Services, Consultancy and Advisory Services, Mission Testing and The National Primary and Secondary Strategies.Achieved the highest ever IT Service Scorecard for the National Strategies contract ever achieved within Capita.Successfully created and presented proposals for senior management for many Service Improvement projects, including introduction of 3G data cards to 200 laptop users, Upgrade of MS CRM v1.2 to v3, Proposed, planned and managed the successful project to migration 150 home based users to Capita Broadband. This resulted in a in a yearly saving of over £38k and improved service. Reviewed staffing levels, costs and service levels for the new National Strategies contract. Negotiated and managed Service Level Agreements with the Client and OLAs/Contracts with internal and external suppliers. Contract value of £8m over five years on this contract alone.Implemented ITIL processes within the transferring IT department of the National Strategies contract, in line with the overall Capita Strategy. Also rolled out an ITIL compliant support service in two central London Sites and developing a new Service Level Agreement with the various clients.Set up and managed a temporary helpdesk service, whilst the home-based National Strategies staff transferred to Capita dealing with the support of the transferring staff and new systems. Successfully managed the transfer to the central Capita Service Desk

CfBT, a leading UK & International company provided educational services, products and outsourcing contracts to a wide range of beneficiaries including National and Local Government, young people, schools, parents and learners. The company had 1500 UK and 300 Internationally based staff and a turnover of nearly £150m. The IT team consisted of 30 staff covering support, development and training located in three centres around the UK. The overall IT budget for 2004/5 was just under £2 million.Achievements & Responsibilities:Set, agreed and implemented the company wide IT strategy in line with the corporate objectives and business needs. Successful completion of two IT Strategies and three year plans, including two complete desktop upgrades. The last desktop upgrade introduced locked down and fully managed desktops was carried out within the existing service charge and allowed 20% more users to be supported with the same amount of IT staff. Directed, managed and set priorities for the entire IT team consisting around 30 staff. The department had 17 support staff (helpdesk, desktop and network support and management), eight developers (web, Lotus Notes and eLearning), Project Team (Project Manager, Assistant PM and Business Analyst) and two trainers. Set and managed the IT budget of just under £2m and advised departments on setting their IT budgets. Centralised the devolved IT budgets to provide a single Service Charge for IT support.Managed to deliver improved quality of service and around 10% more services year-on-year whilst maintaining the same per-person service charge for the last four years. Designed and implemented new asset charging scheme to allow easier budgeting, better utilisation, improved flexibility for ever changing departments needs, which reduced the cost of providing hardware and software by 20%