Ok, if you've read the previous pages, then you'll know what I'm capable of so now we get to the detail of who I've worked with and what I did there.

Detailed Career History

1st Software - 2008 to Present - Role : Senior Developer

I joined 1st in October 2008 as a senior developer. My role is to diagnose and correct issues with the Adviser Office application and to design and develop new functionality to enhance the product.

As a senior, I am responsible for helping mentor the other developers in the team, documenting standards and procedures and introduction of new working practices.

This is very much a work in progress role as I prove myself to my new employer, become more familiar with their products and take on more responsibility.

While the work is primarily VB6, I tend to get involved in a few other areas, some of which came as a surprise to my new employers. I believe there was a little disbelief when I picked up changes to the installer (Wise) which went on to me picking up work to maintain the MSI installation.

I've since branched out to a little C# code and one of my apps is about to go live with the customers.

Lucidus Management Technologies - 1994 to 2008 - Role: Tech Services Manager

Recruited to design and develop a generic business planning tool - Integrated Performance Measures - that is focused on the translation and communication of corporate strategy into highly focused and manageable improvement initiatives. Developed originally for BP Chemicals, following its commercial success I established the necessary infrastructure to manage and support the operation.

My role is split between a developmental focus and managerial duties and encompasses pre and post sales activity. In general my responsibilities involve:

Integrated Performance Measures is a generic business modeling tool that allows you to manage all aspects of your business. It has been used successfully to reduce effort expended in unproductive activity and is in use by many major blue-chip companies, such as Pilkingtons, Yorkshire Water and the MoD.

The flexibility of the package is such that it is currently being used by vendors to assess, communicate and track the value of their products and services, giving them a competitive edge over vendors forced to sell based on price alone.

Other projects have included the development of software packages for 360o analysis of competence providing a practical delivery mechanism for competence frameworks and the development of Excel based management systems for managing budgets, tracking equipment and monitoring health and safety issues.

IMI Computing - 1994 to 1994 - Role : Senior Systems Consultant

My main sphere of operation was in the provision of troubleshooting skills for both in-house and customer managed projects. This called for both diplomacy and the need to deliver some fairly immediate returns on effort. Projects varied greatly from Mainframe installation, system upgrades, support to major systems implementations and performance tuning IMS/DB applications. Clients includes PowerGen, Severn Trent Water and British Sugar where I managed teams of between 1 and 7 systems programmers.

Latterly the role embraced the design and development of seamless connections between RS6000 under AIX, PC’s under Token Ring to IBM mainframes. Applications were diverse from Workflow to messaging systems.

Lucidus Management Technologies - 1989 to 1990 - Role: Consultant

Recruited to design and develop software for personnel management systems - primarily in C for PCs. Additionally provided a revenue arm as a Mainframe Systems Programming consultant.

IMI Computing - 1988 to 1989 - Role : Technical Consultant

Employed primarily in a Systems Programming capacity in VM/VSE/MVS. I was part of a Rapid Response team who were credited with particular skills in resolving high-profile mission critical systems. The most notable project being the design, development and management of the IT infrastructure for the Piper Alpha Oil rig disaster enquiry in Aberdeen.

Instrumental in establishing the environment for the companies first Outsourcing and creating the environment for the development of the first Community Charge System!

Hoskyns Group plc - 1984 to 1988 - Role : Consultant.

Attached to the Outsourcing Division (FM) I was involved in transferring customer centred workloads to Hoskyns Data Centres which included load-balancing and performance tuning against pre-set SLA’s. My success in running multiple projects led to my management of the Systems Programming team. Had extensive input to the design and development of new Data Centres.

Horizon Travel - 1983 to 1984 - Role : Systems Programmer

Joined to learn VSE and CICS, becoming responsible for the VM systems and maintenance of VSE and installation of commercial software packages..

Sun Alliance - 1977 to 1983 - Role : Systems Programmer

Effectively served my apprenticeship in Systems Programming, gaining experience of the installation and management of wide ranging applications and operating systems, such as VM and MVS. Designed and implemented a job scheduling system in Assembler - initially employed as an operator on VM and MVS/SP.

About Me

If you've got this far (well done you!) and you want to know more about me, then you'll probably want to go have a look at my hobbies page. From the home page, you probably also noticed that I'm a bit of a cat fan. You can read a little of the background of my three (sadly departed) cats on the cats home page.