Declan Maher Email & Phone Number

St. Albans

Responsibility for projects delivering IP telephony solutions to government clients as part of a modernisation programme. Engaging with programme stakeholders throughout projects, influencing business change and maximising potential benefits. Working collaboratively with 3rd party suppliers to ensure timely delivery of bespoke solutions that meet customer requirements and facilitate realisation of benefits. Demonstrating subcontractor management skills to ensure governance framework and project plans are agreed and adhered to by all consortium members. Leadership of cross-business design, test, service and deployment teams to produce optimum performance and quality throughout development and project life cycle. Managing risks and issues, escalating potential programme impact or opportunities. Introducing project deliverables into service, ensuring training needs are met, user acceptance is achieved and fully tested service support processes are in place. Guarding against loss of critical services and functions in joint disaster recovery and business continuity planning forums. Ownership of project budgets of circa £10m including P+L accounting, payment of consortium partners and evidencing payment milestones to clients.Example project and achievement: Provision of a bespoke IL4 IP telephony solution to a nationwide secure government agency of circa 4000 users across 30 sites. Managing Vodafone, Mitel and CGI teams delivering a blend of first to market developments and COTS products, hosted on a purpose built IL4 network infrastructure and integrated with Active Directory, MS Lync and video conference system. Budget of £10m. Received outstanding performance and commitment awards for 2 consecutive years.

Effectively delivered a diverse range of projects and programmes as part of a managed services contract providing BT Retail with Internet Service Provider (ISP) capability. Delivered a yearly average of ten business critical full life cycle infrastructure, software and application projects, varying from innovative proof of concept to entire network builds. Led on and off shore design, operations and deployment teams within a matrix management model, ensuring the development life cycle best practice was followed. Managed risks, issues and requisite mitigations and contingency budget. Controlled £10-15m CAPEX and £2m OPEX budgets. Personally responsible for ensuring project deliverables were fully tested and support teams were prepared for service introduction. Engagement of key BT Retail stakeholders to maintain financial support of project sponsors. Chaired Steering Board, confirming client satisfaction and influencing prioritisation of work to meet strategic and operational objectives.Example project and achievement: Nationwide capacity management project delivering a 10-fold increase in customer bandwidth on a live network. Managed Cisco and Arbor development roadmaps, internal design, test and deployment teams and external data centre build teams. Ensured delivery before capacity issues arose and without service loss. Budget of £12m.Received plaudits for identifying and exploiting opportunity to achieve £650k savings by persuading key stakeholders within client’s internet operation to co-locate hardware in data centres. The initiative obviated the need for duplicate resilience installations and annual maintenance, whilst also reducing power consumption and carbon emissions.

Working within BT Retail’s internet network services operation. Successfully led a number of service assurance projects and activities providing change management and incident management during major outages. Coordinated helpdesks and analysed collated information for fault diagnostics, Route Cause Analysis (RCA) and incident reporting. Engagement of key stakeholders and board members to ensure appropriate customer service delivery and maintaining BT’s position at the top of customer satisfaction surveys. Owned all operational support processes and managed approval of change controls, risk assessments and acceptance into service of new products. Ensured continual service availability through detailed business continuity planning.Significantly contributed to BT Retail’s reputation as ‘customer voted No.1 ISP’ during entire tenure through service delivery excellence. Achieved high degree of trust from key stakeholders, which in turn, facilitated promotion to next role.

Effectively managed series of maintenance and repair activities working on communications and management systems across London Underground’s (LU) Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines. Project managed teams of engineers providing 24/7 corrective maintenance ensuring targets were achieved within very challenging time constraints.

Joined the army as a Junior Leader undertaking a 9 month programme of military training designed to enhance leadership qualities. Received over 1 year of full time training on all aspect of telecommunications installation and maintenance from installing exchanges to desktop equipment. Dilgently led series of engineering and telecommunications related projects and initiatives most latterly as Corporal on project management assignment to an RAF base in Germany. Prepared base for occupation by the army once the RAF returned to England. Directly performance managed 82 multi-discipline colleagues, including qualified communications engineers, working on projects typically lasting up to six months as well as controlling CAPEX budgets up to £200k per project.