Simon Preece Email & Phone Number

New York, Ny, Us

New York, Ny, Us

Swindon, Wilts, Gb

I was engaged with the Nationwide Building Society migrating their Incident and Problem Management system from Remedy to ServiceNow and renovating the Problem Management processes to enable proactive problem management; creating and running workshops with a variety of audiences and engaging with multiple third party providers to ensure effective engagement. Involved in extensive redesign of the process and supporting tooling to enable better problem management and reporting.

I was engaged in a project with Lloyds Banking Group, setting up a 24x7 monitoring and recovery management desk specialising in the recovery of bespoke payments applications and databases running primarily on UNIX and Mainframe back-ends; this team kept a constant watch on key batch runs and scheduled events to ensure that there were no delays and spotted potential issues before they became service impacting. The team handled the recovery of any such incidents along with payment related incidents raised by the rest of the group, as well as providing and supervising SME input to incidents in other areas.

Hoofddorp, North-Holland, Nl

I worked on contract as a major incident manager for TNT Express the 4th largest global package shipper in the world helping to set up a shift based Incident Management team and train permanent staff in its operation.During this time I was part of a team working 24x7x365 called on to manage all major IT incidents impacting the UK or global operations ensuring that the right resources were brought to bear on any major IT outage and that focus was always with the most operationally impacting incident depending on the time of the day and countries online.The role involved rewriting processes, liaising with senior IT and business stakeholders, facilitating and managing of major incident recoveries and group wide communications.

Gogarburn, Gb

I worked on contract as a Global Incident Manager for the Royal Bank of Scotland, working with a team responsible for all major incidents across all banking divisions including multiple high street banks (RBS, NatWest, ABN AMRO, Coutts), insurance vendors (Green Flag, Direct Line, Churchill), trading floors and all associated back office functions. The role involved management of all such incidents from discovery right through to recovery and resolution; liaising with multiple departments and teams and providing senior management updates for incidents potentially carrying billions of pounds worth of impact or risk.ResponsibilitiesArranging and chairing recovery meetings for major incidents.Providing management information and updates on major incidents to senior business representatives.Working with internal teams, external outsourcers and vendors ensuring incidents are recovered as soon as possible and that mitigation is put in place wherever possible to limit impact.Managing recovery of aged or escalated incidents.AchievementsSuccessful recovery or mitigation of several high profile, high value incidents (£500,000,000+) and aged (>1 year) incidents, exposing the business to significant risk or operational impact. Heavily involved in recovering the recent headline grabbing major incidents in Ulster Bank, NatWest and RBS during the summer of 2012.

Mclean, Va, Us

I worked on contract for Capital One in Nottingham providing ITIL Problem Management services and expertise.Working for Capital One internally in an outsourced multi-vendor environment, it was my role to ensure that problems were raised both after major incidents and pro-actively from a number of sources including monitoring and capacity management. Once problems were raised I worked with multiple vendors to ensure that they were dealt with in a timely manner; prioritised and worked on according to relevant risks, urgency to the business, ROI and a number of other factors.A large part of my role involved a major revamp of reporting capabilities to ensure that relevant management information regarding the ITIL problem management process and problems were made easily available and that progress and key indicators became measurable.

Miami, Fl, Us

I worked as Onsite Support Lead for the UK and Ireland for Sitel, a global Contact Centre Outsourcer. My team provided technical onsite services for all sites in our region, including PC Support, desktop installations, telephony support and comms room planning, support and maintenance.Due to the nature of the business and the often short term nature of our contracts, this support involved constant equipment moves, build design and planning and management of change.My role involved visiting sites and ensuring my engineers were not only working productively and proactively, but that they were well provisioned for and their concerns properly handled. I helped implement implement effective asset management, saving tens of thousands of pounds by avoiding unnecessary purchase of equipment and managing the termination of leases which had long since gone into penalty clauses prior to my arrival.A large proportion of my work involved prioritising conflicting workloads and last minute requests for new business, ensuring that IT met the needs of the business in the most effective way possible.Achievements• Successfully managed the termination of several aged equipment leases which were costing thousands of pounds each in penalties every month.• Managed the merger of our head office and a call centre site together at short notice and within a short time frame (6 weeks total), with no impact to business.• Stabilised the various regular reporting tasks from all sites.• Created effective asset management systems enabling the company to save over £100,000, by reallocating assets where required throughout Europe.• Coordination of a varied team of engineers spread throughout the UK.• Managed the desktop provisioning for eleven new lines of business over 6 sites.• Managed roll out of Patching and Anti Virus to all PCs in UK

Houston, Texas, Us

I worked for HP, in their Enterprise Services IT outsourcing company (formally EDS), providing IT services to their client SKF, a global manufacturing client specialising in bearings and friction reduction systems.I performed the role of Workplace Service Operations Manager for the EMEA region, which also included global responsibility for all Wintel based services to SKF’s 17,000+ users. I worked with and managed several teams including: four linked IT Service Desks acting as a single virtual service desk; procurement and asset management, Wintel server, messaging, field support and local area network teams. These teams were spread throughout Europe, the Americas and Asia Pacific providing service to over 350 locations.AchievementsCreated single SLA calculation system helping effectively prioritise support to achieve SLAs, reducing penalties by up to $500,000 / month.Successfully avoided hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of penalties by managing and performing audits of all Adobe software vs. licenses, overcame lack of software asset database and poor record keeping to do this.Created a series of processes, work instructions and toolsets; enabling the SKF account to drastically reduce the length and impact of outages caused by malware.Designed, wrote and maintained a web based meeting system using .asp and SQL2000 to keep track of daily meeting attendance and produce email reports. The system is now in use by a number of other accounts within HP.Saved thousands of man hours yearly by sourcing the software and designing the supporting infrastructure for an SQL based remote auditing system, capable of maintaining a record of configuration items and their status.Restored service and client confidence within India by travelling there and initiating a Service Improvement Plan after serious service failings in the area, saving our business interests locally

Reduced the number and frequency of high impact incidents by over three quarters in the first year, by implementing ITIL problem management across the entire SKF account.Designed the processes, selected, configured and in some cases wrote the tooling to enable them.Set up and ran regular 'Problem Resolution' meetings with client governance board.Instrumental in designing key standards for problem management processes across accounts in the EMEA region.

Moved to the newly signed SKF account to help start up the service and transition SKF from internal to outsourced IT.Created and managed the ITIL Incident Management processes for the SKF account, set up tooling and trained staff in ITIL basics with a focus on incident management.Heavily involved in negotiations to agree final SLAs for the account.