Co-founder and CTO of Rate Your Kicks

Freelance Interim CTO, Cloud, Architecture, Engineering and Agile project delivery Consultant

Responsible global for the technical delivery to our end customers. Managing Customer Engineering, Support, Implementation, Service delivery and Customer success as a cohesive customer facing solution delivery function.Railsr provide sophisticated and innovative solution upon which customers build their business. The solutions take away much of the pain in standing up a complex and deep financial services solution, but there is still the need to work very closely with each customer to… Show more Responsible global for the technical delivery to our end customers. Managing Customer Engineering, Support, Implementation, Service delivery and Customer success as a cohesive customer facing solution delivery function.Railsr provide sophisticated and innovative solution upon which customers build their business. The solutions take away much of the pain in standing up a complex and deep financial services solution, but there is still the need to work very closely with each customer to deeply understand their business model and goals and to guide them through their implementations.The Global Customer team manages this end to end from APIs to business launch and growth. Show less

Initially brought in as an Interim on the advice of the investors at Fuse to replace the incumbent CTO and review their technology strategy, team and delivery methods. Latterly joined the company full time as CTO / Head of Product. With broad responsibility across product and engineering we built a single slimmed down technical/functional delivery capability. My initial focus was quality and cost management improvements to the platform with the clear need to improve customer… Show more Initially brought in as an Interim on the advice of the investors at Fuse to replace the incumbent CTO and review their technology strategy, team and delivery methods. Latterly joined the company full time as CTO / Head of Product. With broad responsibility across product and engineering we built a single slimmed down technical/functional delivery capability. My initial focus was quality and cost management improvements to the platform with the clear need to improve customer satisfaction. We established customer NPS measurement, and we set about moving to a positive NPS score.Strategically we re-evaluated the technology strategy, our competitors and the market needs. From this we implemented a new technology direction, pivoting strongly towards a search-based data centric platform. This opened many additional commercial opportunities as well as helping continue to improve the satisfaction of our existing customer base. Show less

Working with a long term collaborator and friend delivering cloud solutions rooted with solid Engineering and DevOps practices for many large organisations.

A Board member responsible for leading, Technical Strategy, Architecture, Engineering, QA, DevOps and Delivery. During my time at RDT I was able to lead the technology strategy and delivery teams building the cloud based Equator high performance rules and quoting solution. Delivering over 50 million insurance quotes a day, with a sub 1.1 second response SLA. over 5 x 9s uptime and daily, live software updates. We also built a cloud hosted managed service for the core Insurance… Show more A Board member responsible for leading, Technical Strategy, Architecture, Engineering, QA, DevOps and Delivery. During my time at RDT I was able to lead the technology strategy and delivery teams building the cloud based Equator high performance rules and quoting solution. Delivering over 50 million insurance quotes a day, with a sub 1.1 second response SLA. over 5 x 9s uptime and daily, live software updates. We also built a cloud hosted managed service for the core Insurance management platform Landscape, along with many other Web and cloud initiatives. Show less

Reporting to the Publicis Board, this was a highly visible and strategic project for them and their delivery partner Keytree.I took on the role of programme, project and technical manager, looking after UX, design, architecture, delivery, support and handover of a project to provide a highly useable and intuitive web and mobile UI for the global Timesheet and Expense management system (SAP). We delivered the project in 9 months, on time and on budget.

Responsible for leading the Engineering function for ASOS.COM. Setting strategic technical direction and building the right team and processes to deliver against ASOS’ challenging growth strategy. This includes all aspects of the delivery process from solution architecture and design through development, QA, Scrum masters, platform engineering (DevOps) and release.Key Achievements• Assessed, restructured and rebuilt the Engineering function, introducing solid Lean and Agile delivery… Show more Responsible for leading the Engineering function for ASOS.COM. Setting strategic technical direction and building the right team and processes to deliver against ASOS’ challenging growth strategy. This includes all aspects of the delivery process from solution architecture and design through development, QA, Scrum masters, platform engineering (DevOps) and release.Key Achievements• Assessed, restructured and rebuilt the Engineering function, introducing solid Lean and Agile delivery techniques, technical and delivery competencies, career progression and remuneration.• Drastically reduced release issues, bugs in production and production incidents. Rebuilt maintenance team relationship and processes and measurements. • Established new relationships and process with the Programme delivery teams including a business wide backlog of change in an Enterprise Agile framework.• Established the strategic technical roadmap of change for ASOS.• Established a new software reference architecture for all new engineering activity and a new SOA based referenced architecture.• Established an ALM programme of change delivering source code and SDLC tools and processes, an automated build and deployment framework, restructured virtual development and test environments and automated testing.• Restructured the technology partner portfolio including rewriting service contracts, re-negotiation of contracts, assessment and selection of strategic partners.• Selecting, negotiating and building an Agile offshore delivery centre in India.• Grew the Engineering delivery capacity from 6 to 21 teams, 70 to 120 people. Show less

Shortly after Conchango was purchased by EMC, I took over the role as CTO reporting to the Senior VP of Consulting, EMEA. Responsible across EMEA for; Technical Strategy, Delivery Quality and Process, Engineering Practices and IP, Technology partnerships, EMEA and the Centre of Excellence (CoE) technical capability (Bangalore, Shanghai and Cairo), Training and development planning and budgets, Software tools and budget.Matrix manager for all leads covering all aspects the Technology and… Show more Shortly after Conchango was purchased by EMC, I took over the role as CTO reporting to the Senior VP of Consulting, EMEA. Responsible across EMEA for; Technical Strategy, Delivery Quality and Process, Engineering Practices and IP, Technology partnerships, EMEA and the Centre of Excellence (CoE) technical capability (Bangalore, Shanghai and Cairo), Training and development planning and budgets, Software tools and budget.Matrix manager for all leads covering all aspects the Technology and Application Lifecycle management including, Microsoft Development, Java Development, Platform Architecture, Unified Communications, Quality Assurance, Cloud and Virtualisation, Interface Development, Portal and Collaboration and Technical Service Delivery.Involved in many cross EMC Hardware and software architecture and strategy initiatives.Member of the EMEA Senior Management team responsible for the managing and delivering a project and consulting portfolio in excess of $100M per year. Show less

Managing Consultant, responsible for providing architecture, design and strategic IT consulting on Microsoft technologies. Leader of the .NET development and architecture community and member of the Microsoft .NET Partner Advisory Council. I lead the technical and commercial delivery on several projects including; Conservative Party, Project Merlin, Electoral Management system.A distributed country wide management system which imported the electoral register and allowed… Show more Managing Consultant, responsible for providing architecture, design and strategic IT consulting on Microsoft technologies. Leader of the .NET development and architecture community and member of the Microsoft .NET Partner Advisory Council. I lead the technical and commercial delivery on several projects including; Conservative Party, Project Merlin, Electoral Management system.A distributed country wide management system which imported the electoral register and allowed management potential voters and members especially useful for managing marginal seats. One of the first fully sharded and distributed database with central control, distributed across the country. Role: Architecture, Design, Commercial and team management, Principal Consultant, Delivery Lead. Lloyds of London, Project Atlas, Delegated Underwriting Market Portal.A key solution in the evolution of the London insurance market to help simplify and distribute the management of Delegated Underwriting. Delivered with a joint Lloyd and Conchango team this was the first successful market release for Lloyds for a few years and a key milestone for them. Given this is had high visibility up to the Chief Exec. Role: Architect, Scrum Master, Principal Consultant, Delivery Lead. Experian. Credit Assessment Rules Engine.Working in Nottingham with a joint Experian and Conchango team, I lead the architecture, design and implementation of a new, off-mainframe rules engine for the low-code delivery of credit assessment rules. Role: Architect, Design, Principal Consultant, Delivery Lead Show less

Managing the European e-Business team at the forefront of building Energy Trading solutions delivered on the internet. Many and varied projects, including the web delivery of a new trading platform for the German Energy Market.

LIFFE

Then called Hounsfield Test Equipment

Released my first commercial application written in BBC basic for the BBC B micro computer and then progressed in Turbo Pascal 5, Turbo C++ and Delphi writing various PC applications for companies such as Radio Rentals.