Private company offering bespoke hardship schemes and B2B eCommerce services to energy suppliers, CAB’s, housing associations and local government.Responsible for managing the Charis IT infrastructure based on the Microsoft stack. Front end solutions are built in C# .NET Core and back office processing in Microsoft Dynamics (D365 CRM) and Microsoft SQL. All services are hosted in Azure, with all C# development fully integrated with DevOps CI and release pipelines.Managerial:• Definition of IT strategy including IT risk assessment and documentation of the technology roadmap.• Consultation with board to advise on technical investment, including replacement of legacy systems.• Leadership of architecture, software development, IT infrastructure and desktop support teams.• Set, track and forecast IT budget.Technical:• Innovator and chief architect of an industry game changing and award nominated (in Sept. 2021) B2B eCommerce platform. Technical authority including hands-on development of the scalable C# .NET Core Entity Framework platform, using microservices, Azure security and RESTful API; all hosted in Azure. The solution includes a bespoke voucher management system to deliver vouchers from organisations including the Post Office, PayPoint, Tesco, Morrisons and Asda direct to customers via email or SMS; and 3rd party API integration to vendors such as Amazon Business.• Rapid infrastructure redesign and execution to enable all staff including the call centre to work from home having previously had no capability. No impact on service SLAs post execution.• Successful migration of on premise infrastructure and telephone system into Azure.• Introduction of robust security practices across infrastructure and software.• Architecture and design support for application developers and infrastructure team.

Managerial:• Reported into the Head of IT; line management of 5 managers, with overall team size of up to 50 people.• Responsible for delivering and supporting products and bespoke solutions across the Group of 7 companies.• Inherited and then transformed a 10 year, £12M legacy rewrite project to completion 3 months early.• Responsible for £4.5M IT divisional budget. Reworked the budget from bottom up, to create a transparent charging model, allowing IT to move from a profit centre to a cost (neutral) centre.• Daily interaction with the CFO and Directors of each Group within the company.• Objective setting, performance management, recruitment, training and day to day line management.• Drove improvements in technology and projects; giving team members autonomy to do the same.Technical:• Java development framework conception, gaining funding, design, delivery and product ownership. The greenfield scalable microservices based framework was built using Agile methodologies. The technology stack was Java EE, Spring boot, Bootstrap 4, WebLogic, Private cloud, API and Oracle DB.• Simplified legacy systems and infrastructure to reduce cost of ownership.• Architecture and design support for application developers, infrastructure team and 3rd party suppliers.• Mentored developers in best practice development methods; particularly required when coding for open APIs and websites. “Protect your interface, to prevent Garbage in Garbage out” has maintained data integrity and prevented data degradation or leakage through malicious methods.• Hands-on support to developers and infrastructure engineers during complex fault analysis.

Managerial:• Reported into senior management in Northern Europe and the EMEA Region.• Remote line management of a team consisting of Technical Project Managers, Solution Architects, Software Developers and Engineers spread across the UK, Ireland, Norway and customer premises.• Management of the transition of development and professional services to an offshore 3rd party supplier.• Daily external customer contact at all levels, from project members to Executive stakeholders.• Escalation path for Project Managers and customers for projects across Northern Europe.Technical:• Infrastructure design and on-site implementation (Linux & networking), specialising in non-functional design to meet 99.999% (telecoms) availability requirements.• Technical design and successful proposal to customer executive team for a 3rd European site to provide increased resilience and expanded capacity due to significant customer growth.• Conceived, designed and implemented a streamlined project automation test methodology to improve time, cost and quality. Reduced regression test time from 6-8 weeks manual effort to 3 hours.• Designed and implemented automation tools to speed up fault finding, e.g. the core file analysis tool reduced the time to analyse certain production faults from 5 days to 10 minutes.Technology platform:Delivering solutions using Open Services Platform which is the Alcatel Intelligent Network product produced prior to the merger with Lucent. It provides a fully scalable, resilient platform (multi site and multi machined) to allow any type of real time service to be hosted on it; such as Pre-Paid/ Post-Paid Voice & Data, SMS-C, Number Portability, Scratch Card top-up, Free Phone, etc. It runs on various types of enterprise hardware (e.g. Sun T5x20 and HP DL 380) using Unix (e.g. Solaris and Linux RedHat). In 2012 the OSP platform was deployed in over 100 operators worldwide with 400+ million subscribers and was processing over €4 billion/ month of revenue.

Created a professional services team from scratch to deliver OSP solutions to UK and Ireland Telecommunication operators. The team grew, as did the role. In 2013 my role increased to cover North Europe and absorbed a number of other development and professional service teams.

• Team Leader for the Broadband OSS Element Manager Test group.• Defined, implemented and communicated the test strategy, end to end test process and release process.• Test and Release Manager for customer Quality Gate reviews.• Test Specification, Case and Script writing for both Black and White Box testing.• Created in house automated test tools which improved cost, quality and reliability.• Responsible for 3rd Line Support and upgrades of the application.• Developed an extensive knowledge of Solaris Unix for trouble shooting and system design.The Broadband OSS (Operational Support System) was a central system which provided the interface between the British Telecom network management systems and the Alcatel DSL exchange equipment which provided broadband services to British Telecom customers. It managed the commissioning of equipment, provisioning of end user services and alarm reporting.

Test Co-ordinator, Test Engineer and Trouble Shooter for Business Group Communication (BGC) CENTREX product on AXE10.Awarded innovation prizes for initiating and developing 3 testing improvement ideas, which were accepted as Ericsson Global Best Practices.