Christopher Hopkinson Email and Phone Number

Responsible for business critical solutions deployed over cloud and on premise, including leading support of the Satsuma online loans application.Participation in Agile squad ceremonies, ensuring operational considerations are taken into account in delivery process and design ensures supportability of new solutions, identifying and defining operational requirements, taking responsibility for delivery of monitoring and smooth transition into support.Deployment: Collaborating with project managers and stakeholders on planning and performing deployments into production, ranging from small changes to major software deployments; assessing risk and contributing to strategies to minimise disruption to live service.Monitoring: Developed and implemented from ground up an effective monitoring capability for Satsuma, using Splunk, New Relic and cloud monitoring tools such as Application Insights, Log Analytics; continual improvement consistent with an environment of constant change. Incident: Escalation point for incidents from offshore L2 support team. Liaising with incident, service managers, technical teams and third parties to diagnose and resolve high priority incidents and perform root cause analysis as part of major incident reviews.Problem: Instrumental in resolution of high impact problems, resulting in significant measured commercial benefit, through activities including: raising profile of Satsuma problems through publicising a "top 10" problem list; participation in hackathons including senior business stakeholders; collaborating with digital, marketing and credit teams on analysing customer dropout patterns and correlating to logs.KT: Acting as SME to perform knowledge transfer, mentoring and leadership to offshore staff as part of transition of level 2 support and to junior onshore staff. Planned and lead knowledge transfer to facilitate establishment of an offshore level 2 Satsuma support team; produced quality documentation to support this process.

• Played a leading role in WTX interface support for financial services client UK Asset Resolution (UKAR), as part of an IT Service capability delivered from both the UK and India. • Made key contribution to the successful transition of services to the new supplier whilst remaining committed to maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction. • Conducted knowledge transfer / mentoring sessions with offshore staff and proactively contributed to integration of established best practices into processes of new provider.

• Technical lead to specialist integration team of six, principally using IBM WTX 8.3; reporting to overall application maintenance team leader on the UKAR account. Became recognized account focal point for WTX.• Maintained high levels of customer service during a time of resource pressure; rapidly trained new staff, gaining promotion and “outstanding” IBM appraisal rating. • Coordinating and reviewing all interface proposals created by the team as result of customer requests for change; ensuring appropriate solution; documentation of scope, risk analysis, design and cost. Approx. revenue value £300,000 pa.• Worked closely with IBM and customer project managers and new IT supplier to plan and execute successful transfer of over 100 middleware interfaces and associated configuration and data from IBM platform to that of new IT supplier, critical to success of strategic IT transition cutover event at UKAR. • Proactively initiated and managed a plan of interface service stability improvements which reduced recorded problem incidents by 60%, improved service to the customer and was recognised with IBM award for “excellent initiative and leadership”. Catalogued and analysed issues, researched solutions, agreed funding and coordinated and implemented action plans with team.• Planning of team resources including allocation of project work to team members and organisation of support rotas, including out of hours cover. Maintained detailed resource plan, held review meetings with management to proactively identify and resolve resource gaps in advance.

• Responsible for maintenance of business-critical interfaces for UKAR; incident and problem resolution; liaison with key stakeholders including third parties to achieve resolution within SLAs; out-of-hours standby support, continuous service improvement including identification of efficiency improvements and providing root cause analysis.• Developing both incremental changes and new interfaces using WTX, involving extract, transformation and load of data between key customer systems and also with third party partners. End to end management and implementation into production following account change and configuration management processes.• Acted as specialist development resource and SME to several major IT programs:• WTX developer on a project to merge the IT systems of Northern Rock Asset Management (NRAM) and Bradford & Bingley (B&B); responsibility for the development and testing of interfaces feeding NRAM data into B&B’s key applications using WTX 8.3 with Connect Direct Secure+ SSL\STS external interface links. Successfully delivered interfaces with low level of defects, within budget and timescales, was a major contributor to the overall success of the project.• As part of a wider program of infrastructure and software upgrade, responsible for upgrading key interfaces from Mercator 6.5 to WTX 8.3, supporting SIT and UAT, raising issues with suppliers, planning phased implementation into production whilst maintaining integrity of BAU service.

• Part of a team responsible for maintaining and developing Bradford & Bingley’s web based applications, including external customer facing web site with mortgage wizard, and internal lead management and mortgage broking applications used by national sales-force. • Incremental development and support of portfolio of web based applications using Classic ASP and ASP.net, VB6 components, SQL Server and MS Access; analysis and resolution of incidents and problems line with CMMI compliant processes and agreed SLAs. • Technical analysis & costing of business requirements, coordinating regular software releases for customer web site; face to face liaison with customer over requirements, budget, testing and scheduling of releases.• Responsible for delivering several applications using web technology for use by distributed network of branch and agents, developed using ASP, VB6 components and SQL server backend.

• Responsible for providing strategic management information, based on Hyperion Essbase multidimensional database cubes. Specification, development, testing and support of MI solutions delivered via intranet using Hyperion Analyser and Excel add-in, including a key system for group financial reporting covering 300 retail branches.• Meeting ad-hoc MI report requests through liaison with business. Understanding how business reporting requirements can be fulfilled by analysis of database structure. • Also specialised in developing tactical MI solutions using VB6, Access & HTML where Essbase did not meet business requirements. Developed MI Incentive Reporting, the most popular business application on group intranet with over 10,000 hits per month.