Mark Preddy Email & Phone Number

Fenchurch Street, England, United Kingdom

As the Small Change Co-Ordinator, I was fully accountable for the management and delivery of all Group IS ‘Small Changes’. A Small Change is defined by its cost/complexity and business priority- typically changes under £20k are considered as ‘Small’. However several of the deliverables I managed were of significantly greater value such as printer refreshes and facilitating building moves and upgrades.The role was responsible providing a delivery management, coordination and governance to all small changes, ensuring they are following the correct process/principles and are aligned to the wider PMO guidance with appropriate reporting. The role sat on the Demand Review Board to review and accept demand into the Small Change process and the associated assignment to Small Change owners/resources to be implemented.

Greenwich, England, United Kingdom

I was engaged by the John Roan School To undertake a review of their IT provision in scope of this review is People, Process and systems including Access Control, IT Service Management, Hardware Management, Software review, IT Support by third parties. Any Other small projects that are identified by the business while it goes through the current period of transition. I am also managing the inhouse IT Team and Third-party suppliers to remedy any issues that present themselves during the reviews.

London, United Kingdom

Monsoon Accessorize had engaged a third party Microsoft supplier Brightstarr to deliver a single platform underpinned by Office365 and SharePoint. This would deliver a one stop shop for everything Monsoon and Accessorize, comprising of a head office Intranet, an International retail operations website and a UK retail stores intranet. The Head office functionality had already gone live when I joined, but my focus would be on the International business required functionality a Statement of Work and Functional Spec had been documented by the supplier. The functional specification had been written based upon revised business requirements after the IT budget was agreed to be 1/3 of the original development cost, hence the deliverable had been reduced by the IT Project Manager to deliver the functionality for all three business areas however significant key functionality was sacrificed without the full business understanding of the new deliverable.While at Monsoon Accessorize I was required to:• Create UAT scripts based on the functional Specification written by the supplier. • Complete 2 rounds of UAT testing feedback on bug fixes and design gaps and missed agreed deliverables• Undertake a Business Analysis exercise of the actual international Business requirements for their Retail Operations platform. • Perform a 3 way Review of the business requirements, the solution delivered by Brightstarr and an alternative offering by a third party called Concrete whose SAS platform is solely designed to support International retailers.• Produce business cases for further development of the Brightstarr platform or switching to the Concrete platform.• Re-write technical user guides as appropriate non-technical end user guides including step by step guides for reasonably complex processes to resolve design gaps in the solution. • Assist the business with interim solutions while they waited for International Retail operations platform to be delivered.

Newbury

As the UAT and Release Manager I was expected to maintain relationships with each of the internal delivery teams as well as the 3rd party onshore and offshore suppliers including HPe (integration Layer and operational support), Infosys (ATG Checkout), Accenture (Siebel and SAP), IBM (websphere), Aricent (testing resources), This work involved ensuring that the on-line code deliveries were tested to the required specification from a business and user perspective prior to releasing into production. The work was focused on a core Vodafone strategic programme and covered off all the areas that Vodafone deliver to i.e. mobile, fixed line, broadband and mobile broadband. I was also responsible for coordinating testing by third party onshore and offshore resources to cover off desktop and mobile experiences. I was responsible for reviewing all defects raised against the releases and validating the defect fixes supplied by each of the third party suppliers.While at Vodafone I led the UAT effort related to their new on-line shop experience facilitating the customer to purchase fixed line, broadband and TV services from Vodafone. The solution featured two front end customer facing platforms (WCS and WCP) and an integration layer that not only managed the communication between the two front end systems but also integrated with Siebel and other core business systems.Once the SIT and UAT scripts had been successfully run in the SIT environment I would then be responsible as part of the business readiness effort to present the new functionality to the business to ensure that the delivered developments were still fit for purpose.

Lutterworth

In 2011 George Clothing decided to develop international markets for their clothing that has been designed for the fashion aware UK market through a franchise business model. To minimise the risk to the existing business multiple new technologies were required. I was responsible for managing the development and implementation activities of multiple vendors to deliver an ecommerce business model using a pull catalogue solution for the new franchisee business with a budget of 3.5 million dollars.• A franchisee & Merchandiser web based ordering portal and master catalogue system based on the Momentis platform.• A Cognizant Enterprise Service Bus (Integration Layer)• A customized supply chain system using the EDItrack platform• Manage the delivery of a third party hosted data centres where both the ESB and Momentis would be hosted.• Facilitate the interaction with an image capture solution via FTP, Wal-Mart SAP Financials system through the SAP integration layer.• Partner data distribution solution for product data to enable the franchisee partners to be able to trade the product.In 2013 the business required greater flexibility to enable the franchisee partners to trade more efficiently and open stores faster while leveraging Wal-Mart’s existing global. With limited budget I worked with the Vendors to develop standalone processes to facilitate the business requirements allowing the business to push stock from the UK business to the franchise partners and also deliver product to the Wal-Mart markets via custom solutions for each market. The George International clothing offering is now available via Wal-Mart business’s in Japan, South Africa, Chile and the US via Walmart.com, and also in the Middle East, Europe and the Far East via franchise partners. The George International Platform now has the potential to scale to deliver the George Brand to 16 different international markets through the Wal-Mart partnership.

• Improving the focus of the CAB meetings so only high profile/service impacting changes were discussed and insuring that all stakeholders had already reviewed the changes prior to the meeting.• Introduced a prescriptive template for all change records recorded to ensure that all interested parties can understand the “what, why, when, how, who” and “where” for any planned activity.• Maintaining all of the change approval groups within the Lotus Notes based repository. • Reviewing all open changes approved all non standard changes, following up on any changes that appeared not to be progressing through the process in timely manner.• Implementing a “standard change process” for regular activities that follow the same repeatable implementation plan and as such are considered to be pre approved and have to be logged in the repository.• Establishing a 12 month Forward Schedule of Change that includes Business events, Facilities and Landlord activities, IT Project activities, planned IT changes and Bank Holidays.• Introducing a risk calculator to the change recording process to ensure that changes are assessed at conception with regards to the level of visibility required and that this will be checked during the peer and managerial reviews.• Introducing change management open forums where IT staff will be welcome to propose and discuss possible enhancements to the process.• Documenting and validating the existing asset inventories and where they don’t exist creating them for: Servers, Telephony, network, mobile devices, laptops and desktops estate, software and services. • Documenting of the relationship information regarding servers, Applications, Services and Business areas • Defining BDO’s requirements for Change and Configuration management and Align with Incident and Problem management. Prioritising the requirements into “essential” and “desirable” • Documenting tasks and training appropriate team members as cover.