A fast moving, high growth, FinTech startup providing Product Lifecycle Management software and services to all sectors within Financial Services. Accountable for all aspects of technology.

Early stage investor and subsequently technology advisor to CEO of Apprenticeship Management platform provider. Took ownership of and led an emergency migration from the incumbent development partner to a robust cloud hosted environment. Quickly sourced and engaged onshore and offshore teams to stabilise and enhance the platform, implementing DevOps best practices and approaches.

Interim IT leadership roles and consultancy engagements focused on the following areas:IT Management: CTO, CIO, IT Director, Enterprise Architect, IT Delivery DirectorConsultancy Services:Overall IT Strategy developmentTechnology roadmapsArchitecture process and capability build

A very fast moving, dynamic FinTech startup focused on disrupting the mortgage sector. Accountable for all technical aspects of a green field setup including organisation structure, hiring, product technical architecture, Azure hosting, Azure DevOps, CI pipeline, third party contracts, incident and support processes as well as all support services such as Office365 and other collaboration technologies. Wrapping up and handing over to permanent successor by mid-June 2020.

Joined the Unipart IT executive leadership team as part of a significant business transformation. Fully accountable for global IT operations as well as application change delivery and IT engagement / business relationship management with clients such as Apple, Sky and Vodafone. Enabled achievement of client KPIs through five-fold improvement of service recovery time. Achieved this through redesigning and rearchitecting the solution to focus on service resilience and recovery. Improved resilience, service response times and support costs by simplifying and modernising integration technologies. Established roadmap to reduce integration technologies from 14 to 2. Executing this roadmap I then lifecycled out of support applications, established a resilient architecture and introduced realtime monitoring and alerting. Executed volume tests to identify failure modes and scaling options – an activity that significantly contributed to client confidence regarding contract renewal and significant expansion. Improved decision making and consistency of reporting across the Unipart organisation by introducing standardised business intelligence systems. Restructured funding mechanism to drive uptake. Established a governance framework then delegated report creation to end users. Standardised tools from 8 to 2. Standardised data capture mechanisms. Restructured 10 year outsourcing deal which, while financially attractive, did not provide appropriate resilience and support services. Established a cloud hosting strategy through engagement with key business and technical stakeholders up to and including the Chairman and CEO. Engaged with incumbent providers at executive level to identify potential win-win scenarios. Outcome was a restructured deal where 30% of the estate was migrated to an Amazon AWS cloud environment, key service towers such as security and networks were insourced and the relationship with the outsourcer was not only maintained, but improved.

Delivered dramatic increases in website conversion rates and functionality through technical delivery by scrum teams utilising continuous integration tools and processes. Changes were deployed to the £1bn p.a. turnover website every 4 weeks. Scaled the initial 2 agile change teams to 6 teams. Established additional Microsoft Azure cloud based test environments that are automatically spun up each morning and down each night. Worked with agile consultancy to coach agile teams to increase velocity and quality while maintaining overall programme governance and control. Expanded automated testing team and scope. Accountable for all technical delivery across a portfolio of £35-40m project spend p.a. Global team size 100+ architects, developers, designers and delivery managers covering SAP, integration / middleware, java and infrastructure. Improved supply chain operations through execution of compliance, safety stock and inventory planning optimisation projects, engaging directly with the Global Supply Chain Director and his teams. Improved agility and innovation by decoupling front end and back end systems by building out webservices for both internal and external use on the platform introduced in previous roles.

Increased agility, stability, performance and efficiency by consolidating end of life JD Edwards ERP platforms in Asia Pacific to a single global SAP instance. Created an additional monetised API revenue stream and established greater agility and responsiveness by deploying a web services framework capable of 100s of transactions per second with security, capacity monitoring and management built in. Implemented significant organisational restructuring and IT Operating Model changes to align to changing business context. Shut down regional development teams in Singapore and Japan, centralising change governance and development. Led the turnaround of the combined architecture and delivery team. Addressed long standing cultural, behavioural and engagement issues while maintaining delivery pace. Increased employee engagement by 16% within 12 months. Introduced agile methodology into ERP/SAP team for small change delivery, tightly integrating with analysis and testing teams. Increased pace and reliability of change by industrialising and modernising development tools and practices. Introduced codeline management tools and processes, documentation and agile support tooling, automated build, test and deployment tooling.

Worked with the board and their leadership teams to align divisional strategies and develop an IT Strategy that supported the digital transformation of the business. This IT Strategy initially focused on eCommerce but expanded to encompass product master data management (MDM), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain planning and execution systems, HR (enabling employee MDM) and sales support. The execution of the strategy created a £1bn turnover website at the heart of the B2B retail business. Owned and led the establishment of the enterprise architecture function, recruiting the team, defining approach, models, processes and governance. I restructured and aligned what was essentially an operational data team to play a more tightly integrated business-focused role that was recognised and respected by the executive directors and technology specialists alike.

Initially responsible for the execution of the earlier IT strategy, during this time of transition I supported 3 different CIOs in areas such as strategy development, strategic partner management, process redesign and employee engagement. Led and facilitated IT executive team meetings, strategic partner briefings, process redesign workshops, employee town hall meetings and employee engagement workstreams.

Founded and recruited this innovation team, set up following the implementation of SAP to deliver reporting and workflow applications. Implemented Sharepoint and created a low barrier to entry while maintaining governance control for self-publishing abilities. Built a number of workflow applications segregated into end-user developed / supported and centrally developed / supported. Established collaboration and upgraded intranet capabilities for over 5000 users globally. Worked with Asia Pacific executive management team to develop a bespoke solution to support Hoshin Kanri or policy deployment matrix deployment as part of the regional strategy.

Led the data archiving analysis of mainframe decommissioning successfully decommissioned this system within 3 months of SAP implementation saving over £50k per month. Joined RS as a solutions shaper – essentially a business analyst role. Initially engaged on eCommerce platform hardware lifecycling project, channel resilience projects and then mainframe decommissioning.

Deployed to ExxonMobil as part of the ongoing REX relationship. Joined initially as an analyst programmer, developing reporting applications, I quickly rose to the role of technical lead for the blending module, leading the rollout of this application across Europe and Asia Pacific. Minimised development and support costs by designing, developing and deploying standardised interfaces to an advanced process control module. As Technical Lead, I engaged directly with refinery managers, refinery technical managers and their teams in France, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Singapore, Thailand and Japan. Led multi-region remote training sessions and travelled extensively to lead analysis, operations and reporting team engagements. Engaged directly with global dispersed best practice team and contributed to statistical process control analysis and reporting.

While working for REX Software the majority of my time was contracted to ExxonMobil. During this time I was consistently the employee with the highest utilisation rate. Other achievements during this period were the successful delivery of an ‘Introduction to oil refining processes’ and the closure of a number of product licensing and consultancy sales related to an extranet product developed by the company.

Various project management and sales roles within the GEA group. Multiple successful sales campaigns including repeat business from a Japanese customer and closing the largest project the company had won in over 10 years. Increased spares department revenue by around 20% by digitising the key engineering data and using insights driven from this data and sales data to proactively target sales and marketing campaigns. Joined as a German speaking project manager / engineer, negotiating and procuring materials to the value of £800k as part of a packaged refrigeration plant for BASF and achieving chartered engineer status within 2 years.