Edwin Ashdown Email & Phone Number

Brisbane, Qld, Au

Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

Empowering Enterprises with Microsoft AI.Practical Microsoft AI Copilot Solutions for real business transformation.

Wellington, Wellington Region, New Zealand

Wellington Region, New Zealand

Led the establishment of a Strategic Cloud Enterprise practice, developing a roadmap and timeline to enhance capabilities including FinOps, DevOps, and technical delivery practices. This initiative facilitated a focused delivery pipeline and improved operational efficiency through a prioritized backlog. I orchestrated the formation of a collaborative team aimed at conceptualizing a robust Cloud Enablement Platform, drawing insights from Microsoft's Cloud Adoption Framework and… Show more Led the establishment of a Strategic Cloud Enterprise practice, developing a roadmap and timeline to enhance capabilities including FinOps, DevOps, and technical delivery practices. This initiative facilitated a focused delivery pipeline and improved operational efficiency through a prioritized backlog. I orchestrated the formation of a collaborative team aimed at conceptualizing a robust Cloud Enablement Platform, drawing insights from Microsoft's Cloud Adoption Framework and Well-Architected Framework. Our focus delved into enhancing Reliability, Security, Cost Optimization (FinOps), Operational Excellence (Cloud Operations Model), and Performance Efficiency levels. My role involved conducting comprehensive workshops with key stakeholders to identify the organization's needs and articulate requirements encompassing technology, personnel, and processes essential for successful Cloud implementation, ensuring alignment with MFAT's objectives over the next 3-5 years.After conducting guided workshops, the following outcomes were achieved:• A clearly defined and documented Cloud Operational Model.• Development of a capability model with resource planning.• Planned budget and forecast for delivery Opex and Capex.• Establishment of a technical roadmap for Landing Zone implementation.• Implementation of governance practices including Cloud Controls and Policies.• Implementation of FinOps and Cost Management strategies driven by the business value of cloud.I led the development and implementation of comprehensive service models documentation for Cloud-related change management, release management, new requests handling, and incident management within MFAT. My role emphasized strategic alignment with organizational objectives, ensuring efficient utilization of resources and effective stakeholder communication throughout the process. Show less

Wellington Region, New Zealand

Build a Strategy to drive and adopt Enterprise Cloud DevOps consolidation, enable uplift of Cloud DevOps Practices and digital and cultural transformation. Budget and forecast management. Led quarterly resource and technological delivery planning sessions, aligning toolset requirements with strategic goals of toolset rationalization and centralized ownership responsibility. Developed budgets for resource uplift and tool spend, considering whole-of-life cost and forecast spend… Show more Build a Strategy to drive and adopt Enterprise Cloud DevOps consolidation, enable uplift of Cloud DevOps Practices and digital and cultural transformation. Budget and forecast management. Led quarterly resource and technological delivery planning sessions, aligning toolset requirements with strategic goals of toolset rationalization and centralized ownership responsibility. Developed budgets for resource uplift and tool spend, considering whole-of-life cost and forecast spend. Prepared reports and delivered presentations to the Resource and Development Committee, emphasizing strategic alignment and effective communication.Consolidate technology stack, processes and staff practices. • Establish Key Epics to discover inefficient usages of Toolsets, create a roadmap and timeline for consolidation.• Write business cases and a ‘whole of life costs’ budgets.• Establish DevOps best practices, Backlog/Task management and pipelines for secure delivery. • Vendor and third-party management and negotiations.Create and manage the delivery cadence for the DevOps Enterprise Practice. • Run Quarterly planning Sessions, to establish large epics and breakdown long term goals and prioritise for quarterly delivery.• Establish a risk and decision register to escalate when needed and ensure dependency’s were documented and managed.• Create opportunities for team members to gain exposure to different technology and skills to build cross functional high performing teams.• Define clear objectives, communicate expectations. Show less

Wellington & Wairarapa, New Zealand

How to bring about trust in your Organisation, how to elevate your knowledge workers to self-determining, innovative, collaborative, active Modern DevOps Practitioners.

Wellington & Wairarapa, New Zealand

• Westpac is undergoing an agile transformation which includes the implementation of DevOps delivery pipelines. My role is to guide teams in the implementation of DevOps best practices through workshops and deep dive sessions with the teams to gain an understanding of where best to start initiatives so as to enable a better quality and a faster velocity for delivery.• I investigate Enterprise constraints that impede delivery (starting from Infrastructure as Code, through to auditability… Show more • Westpac is undergoing an agile transformation which includes the implementation of DevOps delivery pipelines. My role is to guide teams in the implementation of DevOps best practices through workshops and deep dive sessions with the teams to gain an understanding of where best to start initiatives so as to enable a better quality and a faster velocity for delivery.• I investigate Enterprise constraints that impede delivery (starting from Infrastructure as Code, through to auditability and compliance including best practices in development and packaging for delivery, as well the delivery mechanism and processes) and then to create and implement initiatives for the removal of these constraints. These involve discussions with multiple teams and areas within the organisation enabling better communication and understanding the different team’s motivations, with the view to ensure that dependent teams can express their constraints and together teams can implement initiatives to remove the constraints. Show less

Auckland, New Zealand

To engage with teams in both SOR (Systems of Record) and SOE (Systems of Engagement) to lead and facilitate workshops that guided teams to out think how they currently work and to constantly take into account Continuous (Integration, Delivery, Deployment, Monitoring, Security, Improvement, Testing, Compliance) in the implementation of practical approaches.Strategically, I identified several key constraints within the organisation’s current enterprise delivery practices and recommended… Show more To engage with teams in both SOR (Systems of Record) and SOE (Systems of Engagement) to lead and facilitate workshops that guided teams to out think how they currently work and to constantly take into account Continuous (Integration, Delivery, Deployment, Monitoring, Security, Improvement, Testing, Compliance) in the implementation of practical approaches.Strategically, I identified several key constraints within the organisation’s current enterprise delivery practices and recommended strategies and approaches to resolve the constraints. Show less

Wellington & Wairarapa, New Zealand

• At Unisys New Zealand my role as the Asia Pacific DevOps Principal Consultant, was to define a strategy for engagement of clients with the view to sell consultative services in the form of DevOps Maturity Modelling assessment and or managed services. These engagements were conducted as workshops to extract clients work processes and find areas where value can be offered by the implementation of First class automation and monitoring Tooling.• I defined strategies and initiatives to… Show more • At Unisys New Zealand my role as the Asia Pacific DevOps Principal Consultant, was to define a strategy for engagement of clients with the view to sell consultative services in the form of DevOps Maturity Modelling assessment and or managed services. These engagements were conducted as workshops to extract clients work processes and find areas where value can be offered by the implementation of First class automation and monitoring Tooling.• I defined strategies and initiatives to implement cultural changes within the organisation with a view to increase agility and value through the integration of DevOps practices. • In my time at Unisys New Zealand I was engaged with several clients including New Zealand Transport Authority, IRD and Ministry of Education for several initiatives.• This always involved discovery workshops with senior technical people, PMO groups for process information and education/benefit discussions at stakeholder level. Show less

Cayman Islands

● Develop Strategic RoadMap to uplift Infrastructure as Code, Build processes, Continuous Delivery/Deployment and Monitoring,● Templated vApp provisioning utilising VMWare vRealize Automation, vRealize Orchestrator.● Environment Configuration Management via PowerShell Desired State Configuration.● Deployments using Octopus Deploy maintaining 30+ environments with over 100 custom deployment packages and 20+ deployment projects. Implementing Environment promotion smoke Testing post… Show more ● Develop Strategic RoadMap to uplift Infrastructure as Code, Build processes, Continuous Delivery/Deployment and Monitoring,● Templated vApp provisioning utilising VMWare vRealize Automation, vRealize Orchestrator.● Environment Configuration Management via PowerShell Desired State Configuration.● Deployments using Octopus Deploy maintaining 30+ environments with over 100 custom deployment packages and 20+ deployment projects. Implementing Environment promotion smoke Testing post code promotion.● Re-Aligning TFS/VSO CI/CD Builds to conform to industry best practices, to include unit tests, code quality management (SonarQube), Static code analysis and security (Parasoft), Daily Automated Integration test suite reporting.● Assessment of Application Performance Monitoring Tools including AppDynamics, New Relic, SolarWinds, Dynatrace for suitability to meet requirements. Show less

Wellington & Wairarapa, New Zealand

IGMS Project :I have conducted a Continuous Delivery Assessment of the projects maturity in the delivery pipeline, from this I built a road map to delivery initiatives that uplift the targeted areas to better deliver automation, governance and visibility.The initiatives included better approaches to Build Management and Continuous Integration through automated global versioning of delivered components.The creation of deployment artifacts to ensure consistent deployment methodology… Show more IGMS Project :I have conducted a Continuous Delivery Assessment of the projects maturity in the delivery pipeline, from this I built a road map to delivery initiatives that uplift the targeted areas to better deliver automation, governance and visibility.The initiatives included better approaches to Build Management and Continuous Integration through automated global versioning of delivered components.The creation of deployment artifacts to ensure consistent deployment methodology is tested in an iterative process.The building of dashboard/reporting sites to gain greater visibility of Configuration Management and Environment Drift to ensure compliance and post deployment validation.The delivered technologies included SharePoint, BizTalk, K2 and various services hosted via IIS, the various packages were comprised of 25+ deliverable components that must integrate in a custom configuration for the multiple environments (DEV, TEST,UST,SIT, PreProd and PROD) that it is delivered to. This was accomplished through environment agnostic MSI packages built using WIX (Windows Installer Xml) as part of the Team Foundation Server Build workflow. The MSI’s accept environment specific parameters in the form of MST’s that are managed in xml and maintained in the TFS Version Control System. This pipeline utilises the same MSI in every environment with the unique environmental MST, thereby separating the configuration management in deployment to a highly visible and manageable process. To further uplift configuration management visibility we built a dashboard (very portable and with a very small foot print) that monitored the unique environmental configurations to ensure pre and post deployment values thereby reducing the pre and post release validation steps. Show less

Sydney

Part of a team that carried out Continuous Delivery Maturity Assessments for clients

North Sydney

Analysis of existing development processes and procedures.Recommendation and Documentation of implementation strategy for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment.Design and development of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment utilizing best practice and best fit tools for minimal disruption to existing processes.Utilisation of build automation tools (Teamcity) to design and build multiple Continuous Integration processes and multiple Continuous Deployment… Show more Analysis of existing development processes and procedures.Recommendation and Documentation of implementation strategy for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment.Design and development of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment utilizing best practice and best fit tools for minimal disruption to existing processes.Utilisation of build automation tools (Teamcity) to design and build multiple Continuous Integration processes and multiple Continuous Deployment processes.The Continuous Integration process implemented a externally hosted SVN as a Source Control, built over 15 Web Applications and used NUnit for the Test suite and dot Cover for the code coverage analysis tool. FXcop was used for static code analysis.The Continuous Deployment process implemented MSWebdeploy for deploying to the Test, UAT and Staging Environments. Show less

Sydney, Australia

I was tasked with Investigation and Analysis of the current Build Environment and to immediately address the large build times, the build stability and the inconsistencies of Build Environment.My Initial investigation was into the current build ecosystem and a detailed inspection into the processes for the build with a view to document and recommend the best approach to alleviate bottlenecks in the build pipeline and to apply consistency and stability to all Builds. The current Build… Show more I was tasked with Investigation and Analysis of the current Build Environment and to immediately address the large build times, the build stability and the inconsistencies of Build Environment.My Initial investigation was into the current build ecosystem and a detailed inspection into the processes for the build with a view to document and recommend the best approach to alleviate bottlenecks in the build pipeline and to apply consistency and stability to all Builds. The current Build maturity position was at a middle level, in that while automation was in-place not all teams were involved or adhered to the practices. I implemented several initiatives to achieve better maturity in the Build practices onsite these included; : the creation of a Gold virtual machine image Build Agent to use as a template for a provisioning new Build agents (I also requisitioned new hardware to double the capacity of the existing overworked hardware). This increased stability and consistency of the builds across all agents and gave greater confidence in the builds for developers and testers. : the rationalisation of build processes to enact clean, isolated, consistent builds as well as adding greater reporting for all builds. This increased visibility of build processes and produced metrics on Builds (queues, timings, agent usage). The Technologies used were TeamCity, MSBuild, PowerShell, NUnit, JUnit, Selenium and Hyper-V for the virtual Build Environment. Show less

Brisbane Cbd

My role was to investigate the manual build/delivery processes and enable automation across the mainstream applications so as to facilitate reliable and consistent quality of deliveries within the Enterprise. This was implemented in several different approaches, one of automation in packaging for complex Environments, automation of delivery through on-demand provisioning of virtual Environments and Build/Deployment Validation Testing of built/deployed artifacts and their… Show more My role was to investigate the manual build/delivery processes and enable automation across the mainstream applications so as to facilitate reliable and consistent quality of deliveries within the Enterprise. This was implemented in several different approaches, one of automation in packaging for complex Environments, automation of delivery through on-demand provisioning of virtual Environments and Build/Deployment Validation Testing of built/deployed artifacts and their configuration.The first initiative was through creating a proof of concept that utilised Team Foundation Server as the SCM and the Team Foundation Server workflow component for storage and automation in packaging MSI's for delivery into multi configuration Environments (Test, UAT, Pre-Prod and Production). When this process was complete it was then rolled out across all mainstream enterprise applications within the organisation.The second approach was to work with the current virtual infrastructure (VMWare vCloud Director, vCenter and VMWare Orchestrator) to enable the automation of on-demand provisioning of virtual Environments, this was accomplished via declarative configuration of environments which permitted the automation workflow to provision the environments as required, deploy to the said Environments with individual deployment configurations.The final initiative was the capability to validate the Environment and also capture the deployed applications configuration to confirm/validate the deployment. Show less

Brisbane, Australia

Brisbane, Australia

TFS installation and management, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment.MSBuild scripting for Build Configuration

Brisbane, Australia