Darren Walker Email & Phone Number

Newcastle, Nsw, Au

Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia

Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia

Crafted product vision and strategy aligning with business growth and customer needs.• Owned the entire product lifecycle and managed cross-functional collaborations.• Defined product requirements, maintained roadmaps, and ensured robust pre-release testing.• Led and mentored a team, promoting a customer-centric culture.• Established KPIs for product success and continuous improvement.• Streamlined communication of product strategies and adjustments based on feedback.• Upheld company procedures, ensuring client data security per the Privacy Act.

Geelong, Victoria

As the ever reliable and highly experienced Project Manager for Civica APAC, I am responsible for initiation, execution and finalisation of project plans to ensure the successful delivery of products and services to external clients and overall project governance (PMO), to ensure delivery on time, budget and within quality, taking ownership, and overseeing through to completion and within the governance frameworks. I work collaboratively to align all key stakeholders into one team that has a shared vision and path to success whilst ensuring transparency in reporting and all communications, strong stakeholder management and implementing rigorous project management and control disciplines to meet stakeholder expectations and deliver a first quality service. Finally, I oversee the planning and management of work streams and ensure that software development projects are initiated, delivered, measured, closed and handed over to support.Project | Roster as a ServiceAn Azure cloud service to provide a pathway of moving Carelink+ from client/server to the cloud. The development of this project was of immense importance for the organisation and offered an additional oversight and governance. Key Achievements:• Successfully managed a very complex project that was technically challenging, on a new platform (the cloud) whilst effectively utilising tools that the team had not used before. • Overcame quite a few change requests that came from the business during the project by successfully managing change request forms, approvals and re-estimating the project plans and resourcing.• Utilised extensive technical skills and industry expertise to successfully keep to the project plan, ensure the receipt of approvals from activities and present them to various people in the UK, Australia and India on Teams and therefore successfully ensuring certain activities and deliverables were completed with the approval to proceed from the Cloud Director.

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Transitioning to Civica Asia Pacific and working as their adept Sustainability Manager, I served as custodian of the R&D portfolio of software development for new products. I established an internal (quarterly) product council of key stakeholders to set the strategic product direction and secure budgets and resources. Whilst creating a customer advisory panel of 10 customer representatives to receive independent advice, ensure continuous improvement and validate product strategy, I formed an architectural board of business and technical personnel to ensure the business architecture and target technology of products aligned with the product strategy.Project | CarelinkGo (Smartphone App for Apple and Android) | 2017Responsible for all project management activities of the product from idea to completion and provided leadership to drive outcomes with the vendor and motivation for internal teams. The app won the ABA100 for Mobile Innovation in The Australian Business Awards in 2019.Project | CarelinkAir (Web Application) | 2015Enabled the mobile workforce to electronically record care details while on the move. Managed the whole life cycle of CarelinkAir from product inception to all the way though to managing the project to completion.

Geelong, Victoria

• Ownership of development of core products including the full SDLC, manager of technical and quality teams (13 people) and setting the product strategy and roadmap.• Created buy-in for the product vision internally and with key customers and translated product strategy into requirements and prototypes.• Responsible for managing the Carelink+ product on a day-to-day basis, product development and delivery to the market.

Geelong, Victoria

• Ownership of development of core products including the full SDLC and manager of technical and quality teams.• Established company-wide technical leadership and training for team members and management of strategy for continuous product improvement.• Provided leadership and motivation of team members through mentoring and personal development.• Worked closed with key stakeholders and participated in product strategy, sales, implementation, and consultancy.

Geelong, Victoria

• Senior developer in new self-checkout RFID library book kiosk for councils and schools responsible for the implementation and integration of software solution to an existing library system. • Defined, developed, tested, analysed, and maintained new software applications in support of the achievement of business requirements which included writing, coding, testing and analysing software programs and applications. • Researched, designed, documented, and modified software specifications throughout the production life cycle whilst providing mentoring, support and guidance. • Oversaw and managed the assessment and testing of RFID readers and tags in both capability and software interface and utilised proficiency in various tools including VB6, MySQL, HTML and CSS.• Collaborated with developers, programmers and designers in conceptualising and development of new software programs and applications, administered critical analysis of test results and delivered solutions to problem areas.

Geelong, Victoria

Technical lead and developer in new customer management solution (Carelink+) for Aged Care, Disability and Mental Health providers. When I joined the company, the product had been under development for 18 months and was overdue by 6 months and the business had begun laying off staff due to revenue pressures. The product was very poorly designed and crash often and a very long way from completion. I implemented entire SDLC as well as implemented best software development practices, designs, application architecture, patterns, tools, quality control, release management, builds, source repository, versioning, database controls and standards. The entire product was rewritten as a client/server solution and within 12 months it was ready and was sold to its first customer.Carelink+ has been a very successful product in attracting 150+ customers and 21% of the Australian market and is still very much used as of 2022. (C#, dot Net, SQL Server).

Geelong, Victoria

• Technical lead in development of a Windows application where small businesses can upload their MYOB statements and invoices to EP for processing, printing, and posting through Australia Post (VB 6, ASP).• Developed sales web application for photo processing retailers to allow users to upload photos for printing and purchasing photo related products (VB 6, ASP, HTML, SQL).• Technical lead in client/server solution to load variety of council notices for printing and mailing to customers. Multi-threaded, multi-user solution provided complex rule processing, PDF generation of reporting and proof notices. 3-tiered architecture, VB6, C++, XML/XSL, SQL, Windows Server 2003, MVC.

Geelong, Victoria

• Backend developer for new layby touch screen solution for Big W (WinNT, VB 6) including integration into existing 4690 POS environment (C++, COM, RCO).• Frontend developer for web application for fuel management for Shell Service Stations (ASP/XML/HTML).• Three-month assignment to Atlanta USA to gain technical knowledge of Radiant’s POS and back office products so Australian team can customise for local markets (Win-CE, Visual C++, Delphi).• Designed and coded GST and Ezy-Banking modules for Big W.• Repaired Year 2000 (Y2K) software issues for Big W and Target Australia.

Geelong, Victoria

Managed software development team of 8 for Point of Sale and back-office systems for all 120 Australian stores. Participated in strategy and working groups to develop and implement new in-store solutions in line with company priorities.

Geelong

Developed OS/2 back-office server (C++) and portal Telxon devices with in-store ‘C’ applications including stock-take, price markdowns and shelf price labelling across all stores.

Geelong

Developed program specifications, designed, coded (Basic), tested and supported software for Target 4690 Point of Sale environment across all stores.