I support SMS Plc's in house product suite. This facilitates the installation of our Smart Meter devices and the collection of meter readings from them. I deal directly with our internal customers and escalate issues to our development teams when required.I bring knowledge and experience of working in a fast moving environment and use my knowledge of MS SQL to produce bespoke reports and make manual updates to correct data issues. As the senior analyst, I support my colleagues and pass on my knowledge and experience.

A continuation of my 11 years as a volunteer, I work directly with the Event Manager to help deliver the Race For Life series in Scotland, Northern Ireland and North East England. The role is varied and on any give day I might be setting up the course or start and finish areas or managing the stage environment.

I provide third line support to a number of Public Sector agencies as well as international companies who use DXC for their IT support. I support a web-based IT Service Portal running on IIS 7.5 (Windows 2008R2) and interfacing with Oracle and MS SQL databases holding user data. The recent migration of the domain name hosting the Portal application from HPE to DXC required that I produced several data extracts from an MS SQL database, joining data across several tables to generate the required output.I additionally took on support for a reporting application with Business Objects, Informatica and Oracle components after the last remaining analyst left the company. Due to the short timescales, the handover received was minimal and I have had to learn rapidly.I am also the sole support analyst for another in-house capacity and performance management system. I and an MS SQL DBA analysed the data processing jobs and optimised them, reducing the time taken for the daily jobs to run. This ensured reports were available for the start of day, as increasing volumes of data had meant the reports were taking too long to complete.In the last six months, I began supporting ServiceNow for DXC’s global customer base. I participate in customer meetings, working with colleagues in other teams to resolve the customers’ concerns. I support and mentor junior members of the team, helping with incidents and liaising with the development teams for more complicated ones. With my more senior colleagues in the team, we develop policies and procedures for ServiceNow support following the recent merger between HPE and CSC that became DXC Technology.

I provide third line support to a number of Public Sector agencies as well as international companies who use DXC for their IT support. I primarily support a web-based IT Service Portal running on IIS 7.5 (Windows 2008R2) and interfacing with an Oracle database for authentication, but also support other smaller applications which interface with an MS Sequel database. Recently I took on support for a reporting application with Business Objects, Informatica and Oracle components after the last remaining analyst left the company. Due to the short timescales, the handover received was minimal and I have had to learn rapidly, fortunately with some assistance from another team who support a similar application.I work remotely with the level two support teams, allocating incidents and assisting where required. For more serious customer problems I will work with other teams and incident managers and I have rapidly built up a number of contacts throughout the organisation who often now come to me for assistance. On several occasions, I have taken ownership of incidents that were not necessarily my team’s responsibility rather than allow them to be passed around without any clear direction. I engaged an incident manager and a number of other teams to work towards the incident resolution, providing a quicker solution for the customer. Where required, logs and diagnostic information is collected and supplied to the developers. As well as incident and problem resolution, I also participate in system upgrades.

I primarily support Barclays Wealth’s primary payment system on a 24x7 basis. This is a bespoke application using Apache Tomcat web servers running on Redhat Linux 5.9, TIBCO iProcess middleware and an Oracle database. In addition, I also support Windows servers which are used to provide scanned or faxed documents into the payments system, which run on Windows Server 2008R2.I work closely with our in house developers and our 4,000 users, responding to incidents as they are logged either automatically through alerting or via the Service Desk. Where required, these are raised with the developers and diagnostic information supplied with a priority set according to the severity and impact of the incident. I meet with business stakeholders to understand the impact an incident may have in their area and whether an incident priority should be adjusted accordingly. I also work with the test management team to ensure known issues that have been fixed are tested thoroughly and also to verify if production issues were picked up during test phases.When a new release is ready for deployment, I deploy it into the test environment for user acceptance and performance testing. Once this is complete, I then roll the release back to the previous version to make sure that this is successful before finally deploying the release again. I then work with the Change Management team to make sure that the appropriate change requests have been raised and the test evidence supplied and that communication is sent out to business users so that they are aware of any downtime.

I have been providing 24x7 custom application support to Everything Everywhere and to KPN in the Netherlands, Orange France, Orange Switzerland, Orange Slovakia, Orange Spain and Optimus Portugal, supporting key real-time X500-based database systems integrated into their mobile networks both remotely and on site. The customer installations require analysis and development of the upgrade process and production of documentation detailing the steps, all written against a defined process. All documentation undergoes peer review and rework before being issued to the customer.Before the release of new software features or fixes, I liaise with the developers, my project manager and the customer’s designers and project managers to ensure that their needs are met.I maintain and develop the test process followed by my colleagues, analysing test requirements and producing and executing the functional test scripts using the Ixia MGTS test harness. I also performance test the software to ensure that under load it performs correctly and meets performance levels. If a test fails, I investigate the point of failure, analysing logs, stats and network traces. I then write a report documenting the results and store any logs of the test results. I also analysis and develop the installation or upgrade procedures and produce documentation detailing the steps. Documentation is written against a process and undergoes peer review and rework before being issued to the customer.As a result of my experience I am the office’s technical authority on the Ixia MGTS test harness as well as having excellent technical skills in SS7 (specifically CAMEL, INAP and MAP), in Solaris and SUSE Linux and experience of TCP/IP configuration and troubleshooting.In addition to my main role as a systems engineer, I also provided local IT support to our Bristol office, building and configuring Windows and OSX based laptops and troubleshooting local IT problems.

I provided support to customers from America to the Far East in their use of the Apertio X500 database-based HLR and Directory Server products. I took support calls from customers and worked to resolve complex problems, from a platform being out of service to database corruption. The resolution of faults required an excellent knowledge of X500 and writing shell scripts involving LDAP commands to resolve problems with the databases and while working to a Service Level Agreement. I also worked with Apertio’s partners and provided them with Tier 3 support. During my time at Apertio, I was responsible for the installation of further capacity at Orange for their Home Location Register product, a project I completed largely without assistance.

I participated in a 24x7 support rota that covered the Prepay billing systems, Home Location Register, Interactive Voice Response and Corporate Services. I provided training on these systems to other areas of the business, including the Service Management Centre and Customer Services. I helped maintain and install the hardware and software running these services on a combination of Solaris 9 servers with Veritas mirrored disk arrays, Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Blades, AIX on IBM pSeries and Windows 2000 Server. The role required me to work within a team whilst allocated to a project but also to demonstrate resilience while working alone during callout.