Robert Dyer Email & Phone Number

Oxford, United Kingdom

Global Technology Lead for the delivery of digital projects to the Academic business, in accordance with technology strategy and enterprise architecture and by building relationships with external partners as part of SAFe release trains. ● Facilitated quarterly project planning sessions to establish objectives, development priorities and dependencies for the Academic release train● Conducted due diligenece and negotiated the provision of SaaS solutions and ensured these were operationally effective and met service levels● Improved account management of third party partners through executive reviews and by building new trusted relationships leading to better service levels and operating processes● Managed risks, arranged development resource and monitored delivery for a major infrastructure migration project to a cloud hosted solution● Coached the Higher Ed and Asia Ed businesses in adopting agile and acted as Scrum Master to lead and serve the team in improving practices and overcoming blocks● Audited the use of tools and technologies across the full development life cycle and made recommendations for convergence to best of breed solutions● Determined and implemented the web usage analytics strategy and set up standard processes and a community of practice

Swindon, United Kingdom

Accountable for leading multi-disciplinary teams to deliver projects providing smarter solutions to business problems across a number of industries (e.g. manufacturing, retail, banking, utilities, management consultancy, construction), based on Google Cloud Platform technologies and machine learning:● Introduced the concept of stable cross-functional teams to deliver projects to the value of >£1m to clients such as Jaguar Land Rover, PWC, Unipart, Travis Perkins and Morrisons● Forecast and planned resourcing to meet customer demand and provided progress updates to customers and the Managing Director● Assumed line management responsibility for over 20 business analysts, scrum masters, Java developers, testers and DevOps engineers● Reviewed and contributed to the evolution and roll out of new ways of working within a rapidly growing organisation, including defining Discovery Workshops to respond rapidly to new propositions and identifying clear inputs and outputs to support collaboration at each stage● Continuously reviewed and improved development processes and practices and incorporated feedback from the development teams, leading to measurable increases in output and quality and also ISO27001 certification● Provided training and coaching in the use of agile methods and took on the role of Scrum Master as required during agile release planning and iterative delivery● Liaised with the Technical Design Authority to ensure that customer products made best use of existing accelerators and aligned with approved design patterns and Appsbroker technology strategy ●Provided transition of completed applications into BAU Operations and offered 4th line support● Broadly understand and champion Google and associated technologies (e.g. BigQuery, BigTable, CloudSQL, Dataflow, PubSub, AppEngine, Docker/Kubernetes, Machine Learning APIs)

Oxford, United Kingdom

Responsible for the portfolio management of UK learning and examination services, web and e-commerce channels and CMS solutions with a budget of over £2.5m and over 4m users across the schools and FE market:● Ensured that product road maps were set and prioritised against capacity and budget by quarter and that commitments were delivered and any impediments addressed.● Proposed and reviewed annual operating budgets and CTO Technology Engineering resource profiles for the UK Schools business. ● Recruitment and direct line management of 20+ Platform Managers, Architects and Developers with matrix management of 50+ UX designers, programmers, testers and deployment engineers.● Directed QA and TechOps centres of excellence to increase maturity against standard frameworks, including implementing automated 24x7 availability and performance monitoring and alerting. ● Liaised with Enterprise Architecture to align product road maps with architectural runways and to converge technologies onto core platforms.● Rolled out the Project Delivery Life Cycle and Technology Investment Review Board processes for UK Schools platforms.● Set and collated monthly operational KPIs for platform usage, performance and reliability and reported these against targets at SVP level.● Provided personal support and acted as a servant leader to the Technology Engineering team during business transition and challenged them to continue to deliver and improve during organisational change.● Drove safe transition of 11 growth propositions to an offshore Technology Delivery Centre in 9 months, simplifying the resource profile and leading to cost savings of 80%.● Stood as the chief representative of Technology Engineering at operations meetings, portfolio planning meetings and project boards.● Won funding to set up a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) training programme and achieved certification for 60 Pearson staff.

Oxford, United Kingdom

Accountable for the development and operational support of Pearson’s learning, qualification and content production and management platforms for UK and global markets, based on .net, SQL, Oracle, PHP and MySQL stacks with HTML5, CCS3 and Javascript/jQuery interfaces:● Increased the portfolio from 7 to 18 platforms and online services within 3 years.● Brought together development road maps around the key themes of regulation, resilience, revenue and retention. ● Created platform development standards to drive and measure increased maturity in technical excellence, quality assurance, service delivery and regulatory compliance.● Embedded a major new release process for all platforms increasing the success rate of deployments to production by 86%.● Oversaw the roll out of the Bug Club platform to new markets in Australia, Turkey and the Middle East.● Worked with the Finance team to create a model for platform funding that distinguishes capital and operational expenditure and tracks the total cost of ownership.● Created usage and performance KPIs for online services to enable data driven decision making.● Collaborated with the architecture team to design and advocate a service orientated approach to platform development to support globally reuse of a shared catalogue.● Promoted the creation of common components for bulk user upload, messaging and automated document/image conversion.● Led the roll out of agile practices across the UK Schools business through the use of pilots and by setting up and coaching stable teams overseen by an Agile Cadre.● Set up a certified agile training programme for 100 technology and publishing staff.● Assumed vendor management for both onshore and offshore partners at Director level.● Gained reward and recognition through being selected for the Talent Programme.

Oxford, United Kingdom

Responsible for the delivery focused development and operation of Pearson’s planning, learning, video gallery and resource browser platforms to meet the current and future requirements of their end users.● Product Owner for the development of the I-Planner Online platform that was central to the market-leading Abacus Evolve brand with £200k investment supporting £4m revenue.● Worked with the publishing directors, the CTO and the Head of Design to create product backlogs which pragmatically balanced commercial requirements, user experience and technology strategy.● Introduced agile SCRUM to a team of developers, testers, designers, project managers and system administrators to ensure that the online platforms met the current and future requirements of their end users.● Enabled the platform to be engineered with sufficient flexibility that it enabled the launch of over 20 online products across 4 brands in 12 months. ● Reduced the technology cost of each successive launch from £50k to £4k through improved configuration and deployment processes.● Continued working closely with sales, marketing and customer services to support and develop a successful online service, increasing usage to over 4000 schools and 20000 teachers within 2 years.● Collaborated with local authority partners to establish single sign on solutions between education hubs and Pearson platforms as part of a commercial tender.

Oxford, United Kingdom

Led the delivery of new digital products across all publishing operations through the full software development life cycle (SDLC) and in accordance with the technology strategy:● Gathered requirements from stakeholders, created use cases and performed business systems analysis to write functional specifications.● Oversaw development and made difficult tactical decisions to ensure delivery within agreed schedules. ● Conducted full functional testing against test scripts and sign off criteria.● Completed a high-profile project with City & Guilds to deliver a new online platform that combined e-learning and e-portfolio components under a single, ground-breaking user management and licensing layer. ● Ensured access to the service was provided on a subscription basis through integration with the finance systems and the order fulfilment process. ● Designed the interactive content to be compliant with SCORM runtime standards, allowing its use in third-party systems, for which it received an industry innovation award. ● Authored a research paper on the compatibility of SCORM packages with leading virtual learning environments as part of the technical investigation.

Oxford, United Kingdom

Specified and implemented solutions for learning assessment products and a series of model-based presentation packages and accompanying marketing demos for the Secondary publishing division: ● Introduced additional rigour to the project process, including HTML prototyping and cost management and reduced Flash asset development costs by 10%.● Employed user focus groups, competitor analysis and system development methods to ensure that requirements were met through feature-rich, powerful and practical solutions.● Broadened the content development options by collaborating with external suppliers to build an improved toolset for producing QTI-compliant XML. ● Presented on digital product development to Oxford Brookes University students.

Oxford, United Kingdom

Manager of a web production team recruited for the planning, delivery and support of multiple projects for the Medical division. ● Developed subject portals (e.g. GastroHep) and marketing and e-commerce sites for the company.● Worked directly with clients in the pharmaceutical industry (e.g. GlaxoSmithKline, Wyeth and Shire) to provide digital products and professional development sites for clinical organisations, such as the Royal Society of Physicians and for the BJS.● Produced a blended learning and self-assessment site for the American Society for Hematology and presented this at their annual conference in Philadelphia. ● Designed a new company intranet and gave training on how to use the underlying content management system (Tridion). ● Established the web project process, peer reviews and costing model and helped to shape a new project methodology for internal IT applications.

Oxford, United Kingdom

Responsible for maintaining and expanding the corporate web presence and developing e-commerce opportunities: ● Oversaw a full design refresh and worked with internal sponsors to design and program new sections and features, including a SQL Server based shopping basket with credit card validation.● Improved the search engine optimisation and the search ranking of the Blackwells websites. ● Served on the Web Committee to determine the company web strategy - thus raising the profile of IT services● Took on a Web Producer to help with site maintenance using HTML, ASP, Perl, VBScript, JavaScript and SQL

Oxford

Managed the publication of a range of titles for the professional market and designed and developed supporting websites, including VetSite, EcologyPages, EarthPages.

Oxford, United Kingdom

Oversaw all aspects of journal production and was also heavily involved with implementing computer-aided production methods using SGML and LaTeX mark up tools.