Zayne Upton Email & Phone Number

Cape Town, Wc, Za

City Of Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

Taking ideas to the next level.

Johannesburg Area, South Africa

Johannesburg Area, South Africa

Executive, Team & Individual Coaching | Agile Transformation Strategy | Organisational Design & Development | Leadership Development | Culture Lead - Group Strategy Initiative Agile Transformation Lead- Consolidated the practises, principles and methods developed in the dHub and rolled these out across the Liberty Group.- Drove the adoption of Scaled Agile practises for Liberty’s largest digital programme.- Integrated the agile principles and values into the company’s DNA by means of Liberty’s Group- Strategic Initiative and Servant Leadership training workshops.- Incorporated Agile, Lean & Design Thinking processes into the entire lifecycle of financial product development.Digital Innovation Hub (dHub) - Lead Agile Coach- Lead the growth and development of Liberty’s digital innovation initiative from 1 to 12 teams.- Instilled Agile & DevOps practises across the teams. - Implemented a performance management approach based on individual & team learning & growth.

Johannesburg Area, South Africa

Agile Coaching | Organisational Design | Business & Systems Analysis | UX Design | Agile Development | Project Management | User TrainingStandard Bank Core Banking Transformation - Lead Coach- Enterprise-scale agile transformation programme coaching +/- 15 teams (400 people) during a migration from mainframe to SAP.- Team and executive level coaching. - Advising and implementing programme and organisational redesign for improved delivery.Standard Bank New Online Banking Platform - Lead BA | Coach- Agile coaching & transformation of multiple teams.- Software delivery across a multi-tiered technical landscape. - Redesign of processes touching internal and external parties.mPedigree African Digital Pharmaceutical Product Validation and Verification Platform - Lead BA | IM | UX- Remote Product delivery for Ghanian client. - Re-architected outdated solution for greater flexibility and future growth while delivering new functionality.JSE Revamped Website - Coach | BA | UX- Agile coaching & transformation of multiple teams.- Customer research for website.- Reviewed and advised on the design of their revised website.

Cape Town Area, South Africa

I keep the cogs oiled and running smoothly, ensuring the best customer service all the time.Advertising | Marketing | Strategy | Operations | Sales | Finance- Managed operations, sales and finance for Ad Dynamo’s primary region.- Streamlined operations and processes.- Expanded understanding of advertising domain, including digital display, mobile and social advertising.

Cape Town Area, South Africa

When the Founder and MD stepped down, I was asked to take over the role as MD. I focused on increasing operational efficiencies and growing and strengthening the relationships with our existing customer base.I continued to further my development and design skills during these years by getting to grips with Domain Driven Design and applying it to all the projects White Wall Web was busy with. I taught and mentored the development team to use this design philosophy, thereby increasing the team’s abilities and enhancing the quality of our work. I was involved with a number of development and business groups that came together regularly to discuss software development & design, which further expanded my knowledge and understanding of software design. White Wall Web also took on the developers from RSAWEB and worked together on their web-based platform to manage their various infrastructure systems. Notable during this time:- The redesign, technology refresh & rebuild of the RE/MAX website and Property Management System - The initial iteration of RSAWEB's Cloud Server Management System- Continuous technology enhancements to RSAWEB's customer portal system- An Internal Operations Transformation - Implementation of Scrum across all 4 development teams; - Test-Driven Development; - GIT distributed source control; - Automated rollout procedures; - Interactive wire-framing technologies; - User Personas; and Domain Driven Design for improved productivity and time-to-market

Cape Town Area, South Africa

Progressing further from my operational role, I joined the executive team as a company director. This role gave further experience at aligning the company's operations to the company's strategic growth, aligning well to my strategic and operational strengths.

Cape Town Area, South Africa

I moved into a managerial role, ensuring optimal delivery of all development projects according to spec and budget, as well as allocation of the development teams across the various projects.I continued to perform my Business Analysis role during this period as well as researching many development practises as well as project management methodologies. It was during this time that we moved completely away from the waterfall methodologies to Scrum, increasing the project success rate with greater client satisfaction.

Cape Town Area, South Africa

Ensured the clients issues or requirements were well understood.Gathered client requirements through a series scoping sessions with the relevant client stakeholders.Documented these requirements using tools such as UML or simple diagrams - whatever method was best for all stakeholders to understand.Scoped out solutions using mainly Domain Driven Design. This included- storyboards- user stories- business processes & specification- technical specification- system test cases- data design/domain design- change process plan- User Interface DesignAll our work was web-based and involved a lot of interface design and storyboarding using agile & iterative development techniques such as Scrum.

Cape Town Area, South Africa

I took a position at Rhino Africa to help them build a custom e-commerce platform for RhinoKit, a merchandising sub project for the main inbound travel provider.I taught myself Ruby on Rails for this project and custom built the e-commerce site from scratch on my own, as well as taking responsibility for stocking and marketing the site. The project was unfortunately shelved before it could be launched.

Cape Town Area, South Africa

Entelligence was a vibrant & young, web-based design and development company, specialising in technology solutions to common business problems. With products ranging from project management, knowledge management, balanced score-carding, through to medical recruitment systems, online payment gateways and new technologies such as Digital Pen and Paper Solutions, Entelligence has clearly established itself as a driving force in the custom-built solutions marketplace.During my time at Entelligence, I gained experience developing and managing projects built using numerous technologies: the Coldfusion Web Application Framework, the .NET platform, ASP, SQL, Flash, and custom Microsoft Office applications. I was also exposed to software design methodologies such as Mach II, a fledgling MVC framework, and Microsoft’s Application Design Framework, which allow Object Orientated Programming in a traditionally linear programming environment.Entelligence also become a leader in the emerging technology of Digital Pen and Paper, an exciting technology allowing the integration of digital technology with the traditional medium of print. I headed up a drive to bring this technology to market, developing systems that integrated with existing paper-based processes to deliver massive increases in processing speed as well as significant decreases in cost.During this time I gained a keen interest in Ruby On Rails and particularly the MVC paradigm.

Cape Town Area, South Africa

CommsCo was initiated as a means to consolidate the IT expenditure of the Remgro and Venfin groups of companies and thus focused primarily on Outsourcing. One of the first major steps for CommsCo was the outsourcing of the IT infrastructure of Transvaal Sugar Board (TSB). I spent 4 years managing Projects and Programmes for CommsCo. This has given me extensive experience with budgeting, time-management, and project planning, as well as enhanced my people and teamwork skills. Not only have I gained invaluable knowledge of large and complex IT installations, specific applications as well as specialised development of applications, but I have also honed my ability to grasp the high-level project view as well as the low-level project detail.The administration of the Project Office was also one of my key roles at CommsCo, giving me valuable experience in the backend functionality of a working project office.Some of the projects I managed:Econintel Treasury System implementation – This project was initiated to upgrade the existing treasury system for better management and risk control.Fleur du Cap Conference Centre – This project incorporated the restoration of historical buildings, the installation of leading-edge IT infrastructure, Video Conferencing and media facilities as well as the upgrading of the estate telecommunications infrastructure.CommsCo Service Centre – In order to facilitate the management of the outsourcing clients, CommsCo initiated a project to build a Service Centre, incorporating a Call Centre to handle the increasing volume of calls. Phase 1 of the Programme was the implementation of a Siemens Call Centre System, a 15 seater Call Centre with full redundancy, routing, statistics, logging and caller management. Phase 2 of the Programme was the development of the Service Centre, a centralised management facility for the entire outsourcing services department.

Cape Town Area, South Africa

My initial exposure to the Remgro and Venfin groups was as a consultant implementing Voice-Recognition technology for the Intellectual Property department, as well as for the Chairman, Mr Johann Rupert, and the CFO of Venfin, Mr Jannie Durand. I joined the company and proceeded to identify areas where technology could be used to enhance the business.I also used this time to expand my knowledge of systems and the technical aspects of PC-based computer technology, learning how to build and maintain computer setups, install and configure hardware and software as well as how to use key office and web software packages, such as Microsoft Office and Macromedia Flash. I also participated in various IT courses, ranging from programming in Visual Basic through to web development.

Johannesburg Area, South Africa

My initial career in technology was in the emerging field of voice recognition technology. West Technologies specialised in implementing solutions based around this technology for clients who generated large amounts of documentation. I started demonstrating the technology in Stores around Gauteng and worked my way up to Technical Manager within 2 years. My responsibilities included training the new recruits, developing training guides for the staff, meeting with clients to define their needs, training of the clients, and ongoing support and maintenance. I was also required to build customised solutions for some of the clients, using the scripting languages built into the software.

Mmus, Music

I continued my musical studies majoring the combination of music and technology.

Bmus, Music

I studied Music and Technology and worked for the department doing recordings of the regular concerts.