Nick Grant Email & Phone Number

Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom

Delivering features and epics to improve colleague experience and transform how we can help customers. Rollout of Genesys Cloud for IVR and Desktop to modernise the telephony experience. Transforming data use, including Visualisation, Large Language Models, Genrative, Machine Learning and other types of Artificial Intelligence.

Dunblane, Scotland, United Kingdom

Trustee for local Makespace Community Interest Company. I also volunteer to teach people to use a CNC Router, 3D Printers and a Laser Cutter. We are open to anyone who wants to learn and actively work with schools and community groups to increase digital skills.

Build a QA/QE community across multiple delivery teams and scrums. Define the Quality Strategy and build a culture of sharing best practice. Promote the use of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) using pipelines of automated tool scripts and reusable libraries.

Owner of the development and delivery of 2i's Risk Mitigation Framework - Assure RMF. I helped companies of all sizes and maturity take control of their business and gain certainty of their project deliveries. I'm delighted how many people we helped with their goals. “2i undertook an audit of our processes and approach adopted in a highly complex programme with some unique challenges. Providing us several key strategic recommendations enabled us to re-focus our approach enabling more efficient and effective processes required to deliver our products to the Ambulance Services in England, Scotland and Wales” Stuart Murphy, Senior Programme Manager, NHS

Glasgow, United Kingdom

Working as part of a global Production Management team I had several roles within multiple Programmes with a common theme of making the business more resilient and efficient. ● Root cause analysis of production failures followed by implementation of actions and fixes to significantly reduce the change of recurrence.● Driving the rollout and testing of a microservice platform to over one thousand applications to enable automated failover at an application, database, hardware, and operating system level.● Development and enforcement of a change control quality process to prevent poor quality code or documentation from entering the production environment.

Glasgow, United Kingdom

Following the separation of CYBG from National Australia Group there is a commitment to migrate to stand alone systems in CYBG. My remit was a number of projects including the Finance Systems (Oracle Hyperion Financial Management), email servers (Domino for Lotus Notes), SRAS (Secure Remote Access System), Marketing System and User Access database. ● Produce Test Strategies to cover all phases of testing including Unit, System Integration, UAT, Performance, Security Disaster Recovery and Operability.● Management, governance and quality assurance of all resources to perform testing.● Risks, Assumptions, Issues and Dependency management and regular reporting. ● Ensuring key stakeholders and comfortable with levels of risk and test coverage. ● Delivering to budget including reducing the impact of change requests to maintain dates and costs by utilising resources effectively across the projects.

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

The CR IMS Programme is upgrading the Charles River Investment Management System from V8 to V9.3, CR IMS caters from Front and Middle Office Buy-side investment functions. The Standard Life database manages £300BN in cash. ● Management of Integrated Testing through multiple client side applications and partner testing with Citi, via scheduled run books, daily trading and overnight batches. ● Strategic view, planning and dependency management over all testing work streams. ● Governance and Quality Centre management across multiple test streams on the project. ● Defect management via process and daily meetings to chase defects to resolution.● Daily status reporting to track progress across all work streams. ● Management of resources via two different consultancies to deliver testing.

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Brought in to define the strategy and build a Test Team for the 3rd Phase (Credit Cards and Loans) of the migration of Sainsbury’s Bank from Llloyds Bank to FIS Systems. ● Defined the team structure, roles and responsibilities, test approach, framework, project plan and gained agreement with the client and key suppliers such as Cognizant.

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

OPAL is the migration of legacy Transfer Agency systems across multiple locations onto a consolidated platform (Rufus). ● Responsible for Test Managers in Luxembourg and Ireland and a team of Testers in Edinburgh, a mix of consultancy, contract and permanent resources.● Providing governance across test levels and writing the overall Programme Testing Strategy for six concurrent projects. ● Delivering reports on testing at all levels up to the Steering Committee.● Managing change and in the Programme and minimising impact. ● Budget and resource management down to a day by day level of task tracking.● Recruiting and developing the team across multiple locations.

The Retail Distribution Review programme delivers a regulatory change required to charge customers for financial advice. ● Ensuring that the General Ledger (SAP) and finance reports are accurate. ● Troubleshooting and providing support to all test phases where required.● Providing daily reporting of testing progress to business stakeholders. ● Management of Risks, Issues, Assumptions and Dependencies (RAID). ● Driving defects through to resolution and communicating the impact to business work

OneClaim is being implemented to unify the claims process for Chartis globally. The third release focuses on finance (Payments, Reserves, Recoveries, Reinsurance) and migration from the legacy system. ● Responsible for the Test Strategy, management and optimisation of testing, focusing on the E2E phase of Testing and working with the Finance Business Teams to obtain sign off of the new system. ● Providing weekly reporting on delivery milestones to key stakeholders. ● Weekly management of Risks, Issues, Assumptions and Dependencies (RAID). ● Administration of Quality Centre and defect management. ● Stakeholder management with business partners and third party suppliers in the UK, USA and India.

Bp - Canary Wharf

Assigned to BP to manage the Testing work stream on a new Contract Generation System for Energy Derivative Trades, the System comprises multiple components (Xceptor, Thunderhead, Captiva, Sharepoint, Wirefast) and interfaces to the existing Trading System. ● Responsible for the Test Strategy, management and optimisation of Testing throughout Unit, System, End to End, User Acceptance, and Technical (Non-Functional) Testing phases.● Collaborated with multiple delivery vendors and managed Testers provided by Infosys, Sapient and SQS, both onshore and off shore.● Facilitated discussions and demonstrations with Business users in London, Singapore and Chicago to promote early engagement and ensure Business Requirements are right first time. ● Successfully passed all Quality Gates and Quality Assurance reviews on schedule, sighted as an example of best practice for Testing. ● Introduced a new dashboard to allow stakeholders to track Testing quality and progress.● Tracked and managed RAID logs and provided weekly reporting to seniors. ● Managed environment deployment activities across four Testing environments. ● Delivered on time and on budget.

Appointed as Test Programme Manager to oversee all phases of Testing on the £100M Claims System Replacement Programme for RBS Insurance. Leading a team of 70 Testers across four locations through five Test Managers. The Programme utilises Agile and Waterfall delivery elements for different Workstreams. ● Responsible for the Test Strategy, management and optimisation of testing throughout Unit, Component, System, System Integration, User Acceptance, Non-Functional and OAT phases.● Providing reporting on delivery, finance, milestones and recruitment to key stakeholders. ● Control of Risks, Issues, Assumptions and Dependencies (RAID). ● Management of multiple levels of schedule down daily activities during execution windows. ● LEAN reviews of Test Processes have delivered 20% savings on original Testing estimates.● Driven the use of QTP to provide Automation Regression packs. ● Improved the use of environment to ensure that defects are captured and fixed at the earliest point in the lifecycle. ● Worked with various 3rd Parties and auditors to enable them to validate our approach to testing. ● Promoted a culture of innovation, transparency and empowerment.

The Sunrise Programme is the strategic review that has been undertaken in RBS to drive a return to stand alone strength. The Technology Services element of the Programme has to deliver £500M of cost saving benefits as a contribution to Business Services target. Flexibility is required to deliver a variety of tasks. ● Working with 3rd party suppliers to publish a robust proposal for a Centralised System Test Function for RBS. Underwritten savings of £100M over five years. ● Managing risks and issues across the Workload Transition element of Sunrise. Quantifying risk, managing mitigating actions and tracking closure. ● In depth statistical analysis of reports and submission of benefit claims to Finance and the Programme Office. ● Liaising with Chief Technology Officers and their representatives to ensure that plans are implemented and tracked to milestones. ● Process owner for all Testing process across Technology Services. ● Chair of the Testing Working Group and liaison with the Global Testing Standards Council.

Implemented a UK and India Test Factory Structure to the System Test Team and lead 5 teams (up to 60 Testers) to perform Scripting, Execution, Non-Functional Testing, Renewals and Defect Management for complex multi-platform (web, mainframe), multi-products (Home, Motor, Life, Travel, Pet) and multi-brand (Directline, Churchill, Privilege, Tesco, etc) applications. Generated a gross saving of £7M against the cost of testing. ● Reduced the cost of Testing in RBS Insurance from £5.5M per annum to £2M per annum, through creation of the Test Centre in the UK and India and the removal of contractors and expensive vendors. ● Increased productivity by 10% per annum by introducing LEAN processes and increasing automation with a key word driven automated test pack using Quick Test Pro. ● Managed the implementation of a bespoke data tool to reduce databases sizes from production volumes and scramble data to comply with the Data Protection Act. ● Introduced detailed Management Information Reporting to track daily testing status across multiple projects and environments. ● Successfully tested over 100 projects a year (£40M development budget) with no significant production failures (a system availability of 99.9%). ● Provided challenging development opportunities in the team so poor performers could improve and talented employees could achieve promotion.

Charged with establishing a new Test Department to deal with changes to multiple Business Critical Systems for the Home Office, the primary application supports 4500 concurrent users accessing a 1.5 Terabyte database. Responsible for 3 Test Leads and 25 Testers. ● Produced Test Strategies and Impact Assessments to cost upcoming projects. Liased with external testing vendors to consider the viability of outsourcing options. ● Created Test Process and Procedure to define the work conducted within the team and relevant QA checkpoints. This covered the Functional, Non-Functional, Integration, Performance and Regression phases of Testing. ● Recruited and developed a training program for new staff. ● Managed knowledge transfer of technical and business logic of the systems from the existing Development Team to the new Test Team.● Managed automated Stress and Volume Tests (Loadrunner and Winrunner). ● Liased with the Client (Home Office) to ensure that the requirements of the Business and the UAT team were satisfied. ● Reviewed work of Test Team and set goals to promote development of the team. ● Security cleared to SC level.

Brought in to establish a channel for Project Reporting and Test Tool Development for the Heathrow Worldwide Distribution Centre Project, a £500 Million project building a cutting edge International Mail Sorting Plant. ● Analysed testing process and refined strategy to increase productivity. ● Wrote Operating Procedures and Training Documents for the Testers. ● Planned Test Cycles using MS Project. ● Created and maintained an Intranet site to provide a portal for Project Information; this included access to ClearQuest Web and detailed Crystal Reports. ● Proactively liaised with Testers, Engineers, Developers, Senior Management and the Client (Royal Mail) to ensure that all testing and reporting requirements were delivered. ● Managed a team of ASP developers and SQL administrators. ● Designed and implemented ClearQuest (Defect Management) Process and Schema. Qualified as ClearQuest Administrator at the Rational University.● Produced ASP Test and Planning tools to assist with the commissioning of the plant. ● Provided constant enhancements, support and administration for the Project Planning and Reporting Tools.

Recruited as a permanent member of the management team to head the testing for eight different in-house Corporate Banking applications. Enabling constant product enhancements and regulatory changes to be implemented without negative impact to existing operations and within tight deadlines. Responsible for 2 Test Leads and 16 Testers. ● Tactical long-term resource and environment planning. ● Converted team from contractors to permanent staff with significant savings ($1 Million P.A.) to the bank through intensive recruitment and training.● Coordinated all parties in the development lifecycle to introduce V-Model testing approach. ● Provided feedback and six monthly appraisals to staff, this together with coaching led to several members of the team achieving promotions. ● Scheduled Test execution up to 12 months in advance using Test Director and MS Project, this included extensive UAT, Integration, Regression, Volume and Stress Testing. ● Reviewed all department procedures to IS0 Standards and introduced and developed department Intranet Site. ● Determined best method of testing for each execution phase, e.g. Manual, Winrunner.● Represented the group in Europe and USA whilst co-ordinating international projects and managed handover of Testing function to India. ● Subject Matter Expert for the client (Business Team) for the Liquidities applications.

Headhunted from Seeboard to manage Euro and Y2K testing for a key product in Cash Management. All testing was completed on time and on budget.● Contributed to weekly strategic meetings and conference calls. ● Analysed business requirements and technical specifications.● Reviewed changes for Risk and wrote Test Strategies accordingly. ● Ensured all documentation delivered to auditable standard. Documents produced by the team include Test Plans, Scripts and Results.● Regular monitoring and Management Summary Reporting.

Promoted to create and manage a team of 8 User Acceptance Testers to deliver functionality to allow Seeboard to compete in the open market for electricity customers. ● Established a team of competent testers through recruitment and training. Through coaching developed these staff into experience testers who have gone on to key testing roles.● Chaired regular negotiations with the external Software Vendors. ● Constructed templates and procedures for test script writing, data preparation, test execution, fault reporting and change control.● Analysed business requirements and technical specifications. ● Successfully passed several Government Audits, which were required for Seeboard to have a licence to trade in electricity supply.

Lead and motivated a team of 20 Customer Service Clerks, dealt with serious customer complaints, bill queries and metering problems. ● Won “Team of the Month” award three times during one year (out of twenty three teams, spread across three offices).● Established a reporting matrix for the whole of customer service.