Michael Sumsion Email & Phone Number

Bristol, England, United Kingdom

Bristol, England, United Kingdom

Largely a continuation of my previous role, but with an updated job title, which reflect my strong focus on the more technical areas of the role. In addition to leading my own implementation projects as we onboard new clients, I have also taken primary responsibility for the technical elements within all implementations (as required) regardless of the project manager assigned to lead the project. In larger projects I have lead the technical workstreams alongside the overall project lead. In addition to working with customers onboarding, I remain responsible for the ongoing customer support team, managing both the team, and the service desk used to provide the service (inclusive of managing the service at the technical level, and also contractually as the supplier level). I also remain responsible for the IT infrastructure managed at the Agylia business unit level. While some elements of IT have been taken over by group level functions, significant services remain controlled at the business unit level pending the completion of the technical merger. I work closely with the Civica mergers and acquisitions team to progress the integration, working both to move the process towards completion, but also to ensure that proposed solutions meet the needs of both teams, and critically ensuring that productivity is not hindered by the merger process.

Bristol, England, United Kingdom

Following Agylia Group's acquisition by Civica last year, I transferred to Civica UK, continuing my work with the excellent team in the Agylia business unit, and now the wider Civica group. Inevitable changes to my role began as aspects of my role were absorbed into the larger group functions. I took responsibility for working with the Civica teams to integrate elements of the Agylia business into Civica, focusing primarily on IT and information security. Leading from my work as the Information Security Manager role within Agylia it was a natural fit for me to assume the Information Security Management Representative (ISMR) role for the business unit within Civica. Ensuring good practice, and that we could respond rapidly in the event of any breach are core goals for ISMRs and I work both with the Divisional Compliance Lead on ensuring operations and development activities are captured, and compliant, as well as with product management to help achieve this. Additionally, within the operations team, I work to integrate our project management methodologies to align with the Civica processes. My work split evolved with the business, and I moved more into customer-facing roles, spending more time working with new customers, and guiding them through the onboarding process. I also continue to lead the Agylia support team, providing guidance and training, with responsibility for staff recruitment and retention. I routinely looked at challenges within the team, identifying areas and tasks which often required escalations, and developed solutions to those problems either personally, or by working with the product ownership team. This has resulted in both implementation teams and support teams being more self-sufficient, reducing time and effort to resolve issues, reducing the load on the development team for routine tasks, and in some cases critically removing single points of failure. I was nominated for a Civica Innovation award for my work in this area.

Bristol, England, United Kingdom

An evolution of my existing role, as I evolved with the business, saw my involvement in product testing cease and my customer-facing role expand. I continued to be responsible for IT infrastructure within Agylia, managing the day-to-day needs, planning and managing larger projects, and working with suppliers, negotiating contracts as appropriate. I expanded my responsibilities within the information security field. I became the Information Security Manager as part of our ISO27001 certification and worked with the Quality Manager for our ISO9001 certification. While continuing to improve both our quality processes and procedures, and improve the information and cyber security readiness of the business we were also always aware of the cost of these processes. We worked hard to ensure that new processes did not impact productivity wherever possible, ensuring that mitigations were in place before applying any policies which could not be as flexible as the business may have liked, or that the business may have been used to. In addition to validating policies and ensuring appropriateness for the business, we also began integrating our management systems, to produce a single management system that brought together all of our policies and procedures into one place. This simplified the onboarding of new members, reduced management effort to maintain our standards, and avoided unnecessary duplication which could easily result in ambiguity across standards. The customer-facing elements of this role saw me move into project management, working as an implementation manager to onboard new customers. I would be the primary point of contact through the process, responsible for status meetings, tracking actions and deadlines, monitoring effort, and delivering to customer expectations. I would typically also deliver face-to-face customer training (although often delivered online due to changing working patterns), which I would adapt on a customer-by-customer basis.

Bristol, United Kingdom

Agylia was a division of CM Group, and the brand used for our Learning Management System that I both test and support. CM Group was subsequently rebranded as Agylia Group.

Tortworth, Bristol

I have a combined role in which, as the IT manager for the group, I manage the small IT team, providing guidance and direction to the small IT team, and liaising with directors to agree on projects and budgets to ensure the company has a robust and performant IT infrastructure. The infrastructure combines both on-premise services with hosted solutions including both SaaS and PaaS solutions. Primarily using the Microsoft technology stack, and managing both Office 365 and Windows Azure environments. In addition to managing the team, I am also responsible for managing supplier relationships, ensuring that those relationships are the best fit for the business, and evaluating other suppliers regularly to ensure that this remains the case. Where larger contracts were being agreed upon, I am responsible for ensuring that the terms of those contracts meet our business needs (before a more formal legal check). As part of this work, I have often identified areas of contracts of significant concern that have resulted in multiple-page addendums, modifying or striking terms not appropriate to the business. This is combined with work as a member of the software development team. I am the Software Test and Support Manager in the software team, and this aspect of my role requires me to ensure both a high level of customer service through our support team and a high-quality product through thorough test methodologies.Primarily working on the Agylia (formerly CM Luminosity) range of products, but also any other projects as required, I am responsible for testing our software solutions across multiple platforms including Server (Windows), Desktop (Windows/Mac), Tablet/Phone (iOS/Android/Windows), and associated browsers (IE6+, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge).

Working as a member of the software development team to ensure both a high level of customer service though our support team, and a high quality product through thorough test methodologies.Primarily working on the CM Luminosity range of products, but also any other projects as required, I am responsible for testing our software solutions across multiple platforms including Server (Windows), Desktop (Windows/Mac), Tablet/Phone (iOS/Android/Windows), and associated browsers (IE6+, Chrome, Firefox, Safari).

I produce technical documentation, for example product guides and MSDN articles, in addition to both instructor led and online (elearning) training courses. Primarily I work as the subject matter expert on technical topics, but I have also used my instructional design skills to develop training courses on non-technical subjects where I am not an subject matter expert. This role relies heavily on my ability to learn quickly and adapt to changing environments. I typically work on documentation for new products, often prior to or around the point of release. I cannot rely on previous experience as this is a new product, and so I must learn the product fast. This can include learning through experimentation in a sandboxed environment, or working directly with development team SMEs, all while applying transferable best practices. As well as technical authoring, I also produce bespoke software solutions, most commonly web solutions built by using the Microsoft technology stack including .NET (typically C#), MVC, as well as SharePoint.

Content Master is a subsidiary of CM Group Ltd. The IT Manager aspect of my role includes management of the IT infrastructure and team for the Content Master division.

Content Master is a subsidiary of CM Group Ltd. Much of the technical authoring work I do, particularly for US based clients is under the Content Master brand.