Mike Ward Email & Phone Number

Chorley, Gb

I am currently a Major Incident Manager dealing with any P1 incidents and Major Service Outages. Responsibilities include sending out clear, timely and accurate communications whilst engaging technical resources and tracking a timeline of events. Post incident I produce post-incident review documentation as well as working with problem management resources to look at root cause and future preventative measures as well as lessons learnt.

Chorley, England, United Kingdom

I was the technical team lead managing the day-to-day activity and workload of a team of 15 engineers across technologies which includes Wintel, Unix, Storage, Cloud and Tooling. The team was responsible for planned changes, requests and mini-projects. Within two months of becoming team lead the queue numbers decreased by 90% across the board, request resolution times halved - now meeting SLAs, and it attracted very positive senior management feedback. I also navigated the team through the pandemic, where we went from mandatory office working to all working from home. Escalations decreased from a minimum of 2 per week to zero and the perception of the team also vastly improved into being a "helpful, capable and approachable team".Within 2022 I had the opportunity of taking a 3-month secondment within DXC to help a team which, after a year of going live, wasn’t adding the value the customer was looking for. After three months with the team, it started delivering that value. One such way is I identified the new monitoring toolset put in place, Nagios, was not being used due to lack of knowledge and process. I put in a brand-new documented process, from scratch, with full training. Within 24 hours the new process had been used to raise a critical alert which was sent to the correct team for resolution before the customer were aware themselves. Over the following 2 months, 64 high severity incidents were raised with the new process ensuring quality incidents were raised by each engineer to the correct team with the same information. This received very positive feedback from both the customer and end resolution teams.Whilst being team lead I also remained technical; still carrying out my regular engineering duties. In this engineer side I was involved in multiple vCenter upgrades, infrastructure stack upgrades, rightsizing projects and capacity planning projects whilst becoming the go-to person for cloud questions and issues.

Chorley

I moved onto being a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at DXC. Responsibilities included building, supporting and maintaining multiple customer environments within cloud, from multi-tenant environments to single occupancy bizclouds. I was involved on multiple large scale projects, building a new virtual environment for customers or upgrading their existing. This includes deployment of vCloud Director vDCs, building of VMs and configuration and testing of disaster recovery. I was principal engineer for a large financial sector company project which involved building over 300 Windows servers across 2 VCE vBlocks. I was also involved in performing the acceptance of new cloud deployments and infrastructure to accept them into the support BAU team as well as providing 2nd and 3rd line infrastructure and VM incident resolution. I am still the principle on-call engineer for Cloud incidents.

Chorley

I was responsible for maintaining and growing the secure IL3 network that CSC use to support IL3 secure contracts. Although technically a Wintel Support role tasks were varied and a knowledge of the whole environment was needed, from the networks to the servers. VMware knowledge was built on heavily as most servers were VMs, and I gained an in depth knowledge of Citrix as it was used as a front end throughout. Other responsibilities included Active Directory, tickets, security applications, investigating potential breaches, modification of group policies and the acceptance of new clients into the environment. I also worked very closely with the Project Managers for these new clients, advising how the existing environment is set up and offering opinions and guidance.

Preston, United Kingdom

Working at CSC, a leading service outsourcing company, as a Wintel Technical Graduate. gave me many skills from which I could build upon. I am worked on the BAE Systems defence contract supporting the server infrastructure including both physical and virtual servers, as well as the VMware layer beneath. Main responsibilities include dealing with incoming tickets, monitoring server performance, Active Directory changes, designing powershell scripts to configure AD, and building new virtual servers.

Derby, United Kingdom

In my third year I had a full time placement job the global chemical company, Lubrizol, as a global helpdesk IS Assistant. The main responsibilities were Site Support for the Hazelwood site, with around 350 people on site, European helpdesk for emails and global helpdesk for all English speaking calls. I was also in charge of the backup tasks, and I helped out in many projects such as the global project to upgrade to Windows 7, a Network Switch refresh for the Hazelwood Site and IP Phone installations in other sites.

Derby, United Kingdom

With my job at the university as an Education Liaison mentor I helped plan events and sessions run by the university aimed at school children. These events ranged from Study Skills to Maths Conferences. At the latest Maths Conference I designed the Pythagoras and Algebra sessions including creating the slides, handouts and materials. I then ran the Pythagoras session myself, teaching it to 4 groups per day while the conference was running. This gave me a good insight into planning, teaching, communicating a complicated theory to an audience and also speaking in front of an audience presenting.

Bachelor Of Science (Bs), Computer Networks, First With Honours

Graduated from the University of Derby with a First Class Honours Degree in Computer Networks. The course was CISCO accredited and whilst.

A-Level, Ict, Geography And Mathematics, B, B, C