Steve Ager Email & Phone Number

Hereford, Herefordshire, Gb

Managing a team of software developers across four agile teams, supporting them to deliver robust industry standard innovative software solutions.Driving the strategic direction of the products and services taking into account the emerging technologies.Creating and maintaining a professional culture within the team where individuals take ownership and are fastidious and proud to deliver excellence and quality.Managing and supporting the move from a waterfall Software Development Life Cycle to an Agile Software Development Life Cycle implementing software, practices and process to support that move including implementing an intranet and knowledge base to support the various communities..Maintain and enforce the Software Development Life Cycle, Coding Standards, Branching Strategy and Design Principles ensuring they remain up to date with the latest technologies and methodologies.

Hereford, Herefordshire, Gb

Design the technical architecture and strategic vision to give a future roadmap for the development team. Lead and coordinate software development activities to meet pre-agreed business requirements ensuring accurate and up-to-date web-site deployments. Assist the business analysts in gathering or interpreting business requirementsManage the development team against planned tasks as defined by Project Plans.Motivate the team, focus on high quality development and implementation, providing technical direction, overseeing and reviewing designs and code, and ensure system integrity and a scalable architecture.Perform Personal Development Reviews with the team to establish KPI’s to monitor and report on the team’s personal progress to establish any training requirements that may be required. Develop the processes to ensure the delivery of quality code.Recruit and maintain a team capable of developing the current software architecture but also capable of delivering the strategic vision.

Hereford, Herefordshire, Gb

Hereford, Herefordshire, Gb

Take the MandMDirect website from a classic ASP / VB6 architecture to ASP.Net 4, XML/XSLT and C# .Net 4 architecture while at that same time redesigning the database and website to enable multiple channels or points of sale to be a possibility with full support for branding and Multi Lingual capabilities. Architecture changes included rewriting the interfaces between the mainframe and the web by implementing the Microsoft Add-in framework . , designing and implemented a new Database attribute model allowing the products to be classified and stored in a structure that enabled better searching and full multilingual support using the Full Text Catalogue in SQL Server, converting the Admin software from VB6 to C# as well as being updated to support multi channel and multi lingual text, implemented a new log system to handle messages from the various code components allowing the support services to quickly recognise and respond (via auto alerts) to potential problems before they occur and the implementation of Continuous Integration using Hudson linked to SVN and Trac to create quality tested and configured deployments.

Integrate the existing Image and Workflow architecture with a group wide framework using SOA principles.

London, England, Gb

Design and implement the web services to support new functionality at the Till and E-Commerce channels. House of Fraser had limited time and resources to implement a Wedding List solution so the web front end was out sourced to a third party and I was brought in to develop the web services to enable the third party to interact with House of Fraser systems. This meant creating a Service Orientated Architecture of the existing services to expose functionality on the servers to provide an interface for any third party channels to create orders.

Designed and Implemented the Image and Workflow solution.

To lead the team from the Financial Services Division liaising with the central platform team in order to ensure that the Group wide solution satisfied the need of the Financial leg of the Group. This clearly wasn’t the case and the decision was taken to detach the Financial division until the central platform was stable (and implemented for General Insurance) My role then changed to head up the sureing up of the current architecture to ensure it would be stable for another two years. This involved upgrades to software and hardware. I also took over as technical lead / Architect for a small but failing project. This project lacked direction from Users and Developers alike and needed to be driven politically as well as technically, liaising with clients and development staff from different companies across multiple sites. This project was turned round and successfully delivered just three weeks later.

Gb