Gary Lester Email & Phone Number

London, United Kingdom

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC, now BEIS) granted Smart DCC Ltd a licence in September 2013 to establish and manage the data and communications network to connect Smart Meters to the business systems of energy suppliers, network operators and other authorised service users of the network. My primary role was to ensure that all of the Operational obligations defined in the Smart Energy Code (SEC) were being met by the Business Readiness / Operational teams and that Compliance to the code could be demonstrated. This meant identifying all obligations which impacted on Operations and tracing these through to Operational artefacts such as Work Instructions, User Guides, process maps, staffing rotas and so on. Particular emphasis was placed on SLA-related obligations. The role required extensive stakeholder consultation and management across the whole of the DCC organisation. Other activities included the production of Operational artefacts in support of major releases and planning and scoping activities for the Agile implementation of the SMETS1 project covering the integration of legacy Smart meters onto the new network.

Hythe, Hampshire

rrmSolutions deliver a range of Revenue Assurance-related services into telecommunications operators and advisory bodies worldwide including education & training, risk & maturity assessments, procurement services, analysis, consultancy and operational support services. As preparation for the delivery of training courses in addition to consultancy services I am currently undertaking a full end to end familiarisation exercise and review of the training material including the following:• Checking for consistency and errors• Identification of new questions and exercises• Creation of trainers notes

Hook, Hampshire

Employed as a Cartesian Associate in a Business Analyst role on multiple business transformation projects including:• The successful migration of around 100,000 Virgin Media customers base to Talk Talk thereby achieving VMs strategic aim to divest themselves of their off-net customer base. • A follow on project to decommission the infrastructure used to support the off-net customers within Virgin Media which specific emphasis on customer data and retention requirements.• Upgrade of the eBilling and Payments platform which serves the Cable customer base covering the upgrade of physical infrastructure and the tokenisation of customer card data in order to enhance PCI compliance.The projects required engagement with key stakeholders and business end users to elicit both high level and detailed requirements via a variety of methods including workshops, use cases, wireframes and customer journeys. Deliverables included High Level Requirements, Detailed Business Requirements and End-to-End Process documents with requirements being traced through the complete project life cycles.

Livingston, Scotland

Employed as a Cartesian Associate working on a major transformation project for BskyB involving the successful migration of around 500,000 broadband telephony users from Telefonica UK (TUK) onto the Sky network. Working as a Business Analyst within the Service, Quality & Billing department my role was to monitor the progress of the migrations and to pro-actively identify any issues which would impact the billing integrity of those customers. Activities included:• Management and reconciliation of the migration of TUK customers to Sky• Organisation of data sampling and post-migration checks on migrated customers in order to identify, log and resolve all identified integrity issues. • Customer journey re-engineering and review• Ensuring that trial migrations were executed to agreed entry and exit criteria• Maintenance and delivery of migration metrics and control documents, RAID logs and senior level management reports

United Kingdom

One of a small team of Business Consultants with responsibility for being both domain and product expert and for participating both in implementation projects and Presales activities in support of Sales teams. Acting as the key bridge between customers and internal development teams the role involved extensive stakeholder management and requirements gathering expertise, much of it performed on client sites. Customers included: Cell C (South Africa), mCel (Mozambique), Telecom Slovenia, Turk Telecom, ZON Multimedia (Portugal), Orange Mali and INWI (Morocco). Activities undertaken included:- Provision of support to on-site training courses to ensure that clients got the best value from the implemented solutions• Facilitation of Business Requirements workshops• Production of Business Requirements Documents, Functional Specifications, Technical Specifications and User Acceptance Test documents• Provision of support to off-shore development teams through the development life cycle• Low level root cause analysis and data mining• User Acceptance Testing and training• Production of presentations and other supporting materials for Presales activities• Preparation and running of interactive product demonstrations for prospective clients• Production of Proposals in response to RFPs including completion of compliance matrices, generation of effort estimates and gap analysis• Production of RFP documents and Risk Assessments for clients

United Kingdom

Responsible for the successful delivery of Connexn's product-based Revenue Assurance projects including the implementation of an RA system for KPN Telecom in the Netherlands which was Connexn's biggest ever project win. The project was staffed with a joint team of Connexn, KPN, Atos and PwC staff and was implemented on the KPN site in Den Haag. Consequently it involved a great deal of client stakeholder and day-to-day team management as well as regular status calls and meeting with the US-based Connexn Cx team.The project won the award for “Best Revenue Assurance Project” at the World Billing Awards, 2005.Also managed successful projects for Eurotel in the Czech Republic) and TIM in Greece.

United Kingdom

Employed as a Senior Business Analyst with the overall responsibility of ensuring that project implementations were delivered in line with customer expectations, acting as the link between customers and internal development teams. Activities included:• Production of controlling documents defining the Scope of Work both prior to contract and during implementation.• Ensuring scope of project deliverables were in line with proposals throughout the life cycle.• Mapping customer requirements to product capabilities to ensure that they were deliverable.• Functional and technical design of product enhancements to meet non-core requirements

United Kingdom

Employed as User Acceptance Test Manager for the implementation of an automated interface between the ICSB Billing system and SAP. Responsibilities included:• Acting as liaison between the London MIS team and seven Worldcom operating companies throughout Europe.• Creation of the UAT plan and for managing successful execution of the testing up to the point of operational handover.

United Kingdom

Initially employed as a Principal Business Analyst / Technical Consultant on a project for Airtel (now Vodafone Spain). Working with partners Accenture, had the responsibility for performing the gap analysis between Airtel's requirements and the capabilities of the core Arbor/BP billing system. Subsequently produced the Functional and Technical Design of a custom module to meet the requirements for real-time call monitoring and alerts. This module was later built into the Arbor/BP core product.In a Project Management role was responsible for the successful delivery of the Global Crossing project. This involved managing a team of four Kenan staff, liaising with Capgemini who were acting as system integrators and working with other Kenan/Global Crossing teams throughout the USA and Europe to implement the solution worldwide.

United Kingdom

Employed in various roles including:• Analyst Programmer• Database Administration• Design Authority• Technical Consultant• Team Leader• Project ManagerProjects worked on included:• Projects in the oil, gas and water utilities sectors including Mobil, Anglian Water, Arco and National Grid.• Projects in the telecommunications sector including Hong Kong Telecom, Orange UK, Jersey Telecom, Gibtel (Gibraltar), CYTA (Cyprus), Manx Telecom (Isle of Man), Cellent UK (now O2), Q GSM (Estonia) and CamGSM (Cambodia).• Flight planning system for the Civil Aviation Authority.

Bsc (Hons), Engineering Mathematics

Activities and Societies: Inter mural football teamEngineering Mathematics

Education record

- Studied and passed 8 O Levels and 4 A Levels - Represented the school in numerous sports including football, rugby, basketball, cross.