Actively and thoughtfully retired!

Symology is an Employee-Owned company specialising in developing and supplying integrated asset management solutions to the Local Authority, Utility and Construction sectors.Symology is the most successful supplier in the field, with a highly specialised industry vision, a user-focused approach, and a 40+ year history of supplying proven solutions.My role was focussed on the successful migration of Symology's customers from the current service (Insight) over to the new award-winning product, Aurora.

I was responsible for managing the Consultancy Team, which includes the product consultants, trainers, account managers and project managers undertaking the implementation and configuration of software, product consultancy and training, and customer relationship management.

Selima is a software and services company who specialise in providing large organisations with Human Resource Management software, including payroll and expense management systemsAs Development manager I was responsible for all software development, delivery and support in Sheffield and Prague

Civica are an international software, consulting and managed services provider who specialise in the public sector, and who supply software to over 95% of UK Local AuthoritiesAs Strategic Projects Manager I ran a specialist team implementing new software products and modules across a range of Civica products, including systems integrations, data warehousing, web services and a major development in conjunction with the Department of Work and Pensions developing automated Housing Benefits letters.

Vantage is an IT services and solutions company specialising in the delivery of innovative software solutions in a variety of market sectors including corporate, public sector, healthcare, and police. I joined Calmax (the web design company that was part of the Vantage group) as Operations Director, responsible at board level for all software production and support, including Project Management, strategic planning, recruitment and resource planning.My team of graphic designers, web authors and technical programmers provided internet solutions to a number of major companies, including Argos, Nectar, BP, O2 and Pfizer.Unfortunately, shortly after I joined the company, the owners restructured, merging the two companies they owned into a single new company, bringing web design and database management under one roof. I became the Projects Director for a short while, but post-merge the company was not well structured (too many managers!), so a number of us needed to leave to get the balance right.

Sanderson is a publicly owned, UK provider of software solutions and IT services.I started at Sanderson as an Analyst Programmer working on their Community Charge, Business Rates and Council Tax systems for the newly created Public Sector division (consisting of just 6 employees). When I left in 2001, the team had grown substantially, and was successful enough to be hived off to form the basis of a brand new company - Civica. At that time I was a the manager of four product teams (Housing Benefits, Debt Recovery, Document Management and Housing Rents), responsible for the full system life cycle, from design and development through to pre-sales support, implementation, software releases, documentation, training, customer support and account management.In earlier years I had managed two financial product teams (Council Tax and Business Rates), and during my period working in pre-sales support the company grew its market share from 2% to 12%

Natural England (formerly the Nature Conservancy Council) is an independant government funded agency responsible for the study, administration and protection of Sites of Special Scientific Interest, and the provision of relevant educational resources. These are areas of England that are of special interest because of their unique fauna, flora or geology.I worked as an analyst/programmer, using the Prime Information system (a version of PICK - a language that is not well known, but was revolutionary at the time for incorporating a database, database query language, and integrated programming language). I wrote office inventory systems for use at the SSSIs and also contributed to the COREDATA nature database

The Fisheries Reseach laborotory in Lowestoft is the headquarters of the UK's largest and most diverse applied marine science centre, shaping and implementing policy through internationally renowned science and collaborative relationships that span the EU, UK government, non-governmental organisations, research centres and industry.I worked as a research scientist, producing and analysing data from various research programmes. This work involved analysing the data on a HP9000 using my own programs written in Fortran.My original plan was to migrate out of computers into the world of Biology Research, but I discovered that I had some talent for writing software.

After struggling to land a job that made use of my degree in Marine Zoology, I ended up working at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF). This was the UK government department responsible for both food production and food safety.I knew nothing about computers when I took the job, assuming from movies that a programmer was someone who wore a white lab coat and carried large tape reels from one machine to another. At MAFF I trained to write COBOL and Filetab programs in an ICL1900 environment running under George III. All programs were written using the SDM methodology - the Civil Service interpretation of JSP. I wrote and tested programs for a variety of agricultural systems, 3 months of which were developing reports for the national potato census.