Darren Nicholas Email & Phone Number

London, England, Gb

Seattle, Washington, Us

I have extensive experience designing and managing Network Services within leading companies including a highly driven global investment management firm, Accenture - a leading outsource company and Utilities. Having led 30 strong teams in networking and architecture I excel at people development and building high-performance teams. My teams manage SDWAN, Cloud, Networking and Security focusing on the future state, project delivery and operational availability. I developed considerable multicultural skills and excellent Stakeholder management in my various roles. I have an appetite for implementing cutting edge technologies, I thrive in fast-paced environments and Major Incidents.

Newark, New Jersey, Us

(Contractor) Prudential - Head of Network Operations – October 2016 to March 2018 Responsible for 16 Network engineers and 2 team leaders and reporting into the Global Head of Network Services During my time so far at Prudential (PGDS) I have undertaken improvement to service and automation. Previously code was deployed direct onto production systems with no prior testing which lead to a number of incidents caused by change. I researched solutions of onsite testing and offsite test. The decision was to deliver the offsite test being the most cost effective and flexible model. So I introduced a new test environment so that code and configurations can be upgraded on non production environment, due to the size of the team we have a third party vendor who hosts this environment off site and provides us engineer resource to conduct the full testing. I have successfully introduced automation using Solarwinds NCM to deploy scripted configurations/Operation System upgrades across 700 devices.I have created a number of Terms of References, from automation, Network monitoring improvements, Network Security reviews and Documentation. All of which are currently in flight and many improvements have already been put in place. The priority of focus is on operations and service availability. Due to a lack of focus on incidents I introduced an agile approach utilizing huddles to give focus to incidents in the very busy incident, change, task & project environment. Since joining, service to the business has vastly improved by providing more stringent change process within the network area, utilizing the test environment to test code prior to implementation and testing major configuration changes.

Atlanta, Ga, Us

Responsible for six network architecture engineers, which involved traveling to Houston twice a year to work with the engineers located there. I led the engineers to define our future state, looking at new technologies and delivering these technologies based on business requirements. Some Key Achievements - more on my CV•Development of a number of engineers from Senior to Principal focusing on their development plan, defining stretched goals and coaching which lead to promotion. •Integrated in the Lean process and worked within the Lean methodologies during rapid improvement events and bringing those methodologies to the work place. •Led the movement of our London primary datacenter to a co-located facility. Ensured that the design and strategy ensured future proofed this environment, provide full resilience and a flexible environment for infrastructure teams and application teams. •Leveraged vendors to ensure we stayed abreast of technologies. Attended meetings with vendors to understand their products and future roadmaps to ensure the current technologies we use are the best fit for our future initiatives. •Continues and improving knowledge on the latest technologies like SDN, Segementation, Next Generation Firewalls and Cloud. I utilize Pod Casts, third party Vendors, Seminars and Conferences.

Atlanta, Ga, Us

Manage a team of 17 engineers in India,UK and Hong KongDuring my time as Network Manager I created a very strong UK and Asia PAC team with longevity; the team members were all highly motivated and skilled. This consisted of two principal engineers, one specialist in Cisco the other in security and senior and advanced engineers.Some of my Achievements•Led and created the ‘follow the sun’ operational support model in India. This involved recruiting staff, training and developing them and creating a 24x5 shift rota with a partial weekend cover. •Created and designed new office in India for 600 staff, this involved the installation, resource planning and meeting project deadlines from beginning to end. •Led and moved the India Invesco DR center in India •Led the implementation of two internet build outs in Hyderabad and Tokyo•KPI's for key areas of the circuit infrastructure•Response to support issues timelines and process defined•Regular software upgrades to deal with critical vulnerabilities and keeping software to a standard version•Reduce complexity in operations to standardise on hardware as much as possible.•Ran lean events to reduce process time, improve quality and reduce resources on common operational processes•Implementation, Decommission and Operational processes •Created and defined development plans for the team I managed which led to some key achievement within people management and people development for example: i.Developed an engineer into a very effective operations manager in India. ii.Developed a number of staff in India from level 1 engineer to level 2 and 3. iii.Worked with and developed an under achieving staff member into a very effective engineer using SMART objectives and reviewing these on a regular basis whilst providing the appropriate support. iv.One principal engineer was interested in following a more managerial direction so I developed this individual who now runs the operational team.