Neil Hudson Email & Phone Number

A proven record of providing troubleshooting services and sound advice to senior executives across a wide range of organisational and technical arenas. The advice provided to clients is known for the rigour of its analysis and the validity of its findings. His troubleshooting is recognised as bringing clarity, control and resolution to extremely troublesome and complex situations.Extensive experience of operating inside large scale outsourced delivery models and of technical and commercial supervision the activities of tier-1 system integrators. Established and led effective globally distributed development and test operations. Management capabilities are complemented by very strong technical abilities and continual 'hands on' development experience.A team of associates with complementary skills provide the diverse capabilities that complex multifaceted problems require. All have previously worked for or with him and each has a proven history of successfully managing demanding work in difficult circumstances. Previous experiences of working together enables them to operate as an effective unit from day one. Associates include senior IT programme directors, highly experienced test programme managers, technical specialists and executives with experience of running large projects and organisations.Types of engagements undertaken have included:- Shaping and leading the recovery of enterprise software delivery programmes.- Providing non-functional assurance and improvement of critical IT solutions.- Injecting quality and pace into moribund software product development efforts.- Executive and health reviews of struggling development projects.- Technical due diligence reviews of a software IPR/product for potential investors- Helping organisations to systematically tackle IT / technology decision making.- Building and running large geographically dispersed development and test operations- Review of policies for and approaches to software development

SQC Technology is a specialist testing practice that supports clients by providing strategic advice, consultancy and high-value testing services. These increase the effectiveness of testing, reduce the risk of software failures and increase the value of software. Clients include organisations that develop complex software intensive systems and those whose activities have a critical dependency on software systems.A distinctive characteristic of SQC is a focus on innovation and an emphasis on driving assurance through well founded and disciplined analysis of both the business and technical problem space. The view is that effective assurance is a highly skill intellectually led exercise best delivered by small numbers of specialists. Fewer more knowledgeable and better motivated people making use of technology as a 'force multiplier' deliver a better return than an army of less engaged and capable resources. A twenty five year track record of great results has been underpinned by this philosophy.When leading on assurance transformation for a client, SQC ensures that the right things are done and done well. The transformations this enables delivers greater predictability, higher quality, and earlier and more frequent software delivery. When delivering testing activities SQC has a record of driving up the quality of deliveries finding large numbers of defects early in the lab that would often escape into production. Non-functional engineer, complex test automation challenges, critical feature testing and large programme test leadership are areas SQC specialises in.Personal leadership of SQC has ensured this innovative and disciplined approaches and a highly professional culture. Embedded in SQC, these characteristics consistently and repeatedly deliver results that exceed client expectations and materially improve the outcomes and values of projects.

Misys supplies banking software and was valued at £1.3bn in 2012. Transaction Banking products include TI Plus, Trade Portal, Cash Portal and Payment Manager. Activities in five countries were led by a team consisting of the Head of Development, the Head of Quality and the individual product development managers.The remit was to lead the transformation that delivered significant improvements in quality and predictability. This created customer and executive confidence and the capacity needed for strategic developments. It improved the approach to and performance of development and fundamentally changed the culture and practices around testing. It had three main aspects:Policy and practices: Guiding, formulating, piloting and policing policy and practices. Ensuring they were right for an organisation committed to the production of quality software in predictable time frames. Areas affected included organisation design, release patterns, software engineering and testing. This was done alongside a software community drive to adopt Agile patterns.Building and running the test operation: Re-integrating a disenfranchised and demoralised off-shore test operation. The test teams' view of their role and approach to work was changed. Their confidence and coherence was increased. Awareness of the objectives and constraints of the test and development remits was established. Robust coordination that dealt with issues of cultural and time zone differences was put in place. Improvements in the capacity, rigour and relevance of testing were delivered.Distributed embedded testing capability: Supporting the Agile development aspirations of the software team with an effective embedded testing practice. Evolved and applied effective practices for embedded testing with single collocated leads and remote teams. This formed a fundamental and the most effective component of the flagship strategic development project that introduced Agile working patterns.

BT Retail uses a complex IT estate to supply services such as BT Vision, support its sales and customer service operations, automate service provisioning and repairs, bill customers and provide customer access via BT.com. Their customer management system is amongst the largest and most sophisticated in the world. The business cannot function without these systems and they dominate the customer experience. The estate is dynamic, subject to frequent changes delivered by a high intensity development pipeline.'Retail Test' was built to ensure that investments in change delivered the required outcomes and, critically, to protect the services from disruption. It was established during a period of fundamental change driven by the regulator’s requirements for system separation. This was a period of intense pressure during which the main challenges experienced in this role was to build, virtually from scratch, an effective global operation with a diverse workforce nearing five hundred people and a £20M annual operating budget.Selection for this role followed successful test leadership on a critical and difficult strategic project. This new role had responsibility for and authority over the health of any system affecting Retail’s consumer and business customers. 'Retail Test' had to operate in a risky dynamic environment with many interdependent changes, including ones affecting systems shared with other organisations.The unit was an autonomous internal testing ‘business’. It had many of the activities seen in a standalone business. Testing was the mission but there were also finance, procurement, outsourcing, capacity management, human resourcing and policy activities. Leading this meant adopting various personas including the executive leader of a multi-million pound unit, the high technology testing policy and practice expert and the person in control of critical activities who took the high risk decisions.

Safeline manufactures detectors used in food and pharmaceutical production lines to identify and remove metallic contamination. Their flagship products use digital signal processing to create configurable solutions that reliably reject contaminated products whilst avoiding wasteful false positives.A consultancy engagement looking to ensure software complied with US Food and Drug Administration standards changed to a software management role when the incumbent manager moved to a CIO role in the nuclear sector. Plans to invest in a new generation of detectors meant the software team, which had been in a maintenance mode, now had to undertake a complex green-field development.An initial phase established and mobilised the project using the existing team. Technical leadership provided product concept synthesis, architecture formulation and component definitions. Delivery leadership mobilised the initial development work within the existing team in order to avoid wasting schedule time.A core phase consolidated the project, eliminated software risk and delivered primary functional capabilities. Approach, estimates and plans were consolidated. The team was augmented with more programming resource and testing resources. The architecture, principal components and primary functional capabilities for hardware integration and product owner review were successfully delivered.

Part of the GEC group, GPT developed telecommunications network equipment, the firmware that operated it and sophisticated applications to maintain, configure and monitor these devices. The Network Management division was responsible for these network-element management applications. EMOS, the flagship product, was an extremely complex and sophisticated state of the art application developed by a workforce measured in hundreds spread across three sites.The integration team was at the centre of this process. It had responsibility for the build process, building and deployment of the established application. It dealt with the technical testing of changes prior to their handover to the application test team for formal validation. The team was also the route by which system patches were prepared, verified and shipped to customers around the world.Additionally this integration management role was responsible for formulating and mobilising an integration and test strategy for a complete reimplementation of EMOS using state of the art object oriented development and model based code generation.Finally the integration manager sat at the heart of the release end-game practice. During these phases it provided leadership of project completion and problem triage whilst maintaining the balance between conflicting pressures and ensuring quality was not compromised.Principal achievements included:- Industrialisation of the build and integration practices in use.- Closing out of the end-game of multiple major releases of the established EMOS project.- Establishing an integration process aligned with the new technology approach for the EMOS redevelopment.- Coordination of multi-national development efforts undertaken in conjunction with Siemens in Italy.