Experience

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  • Senior Manager, Production Systems Operations

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  Macquarie Group

  • Toronto, Canada Area

  • Senior Manager, Production Systems Operations

    • Sep 2010 - Present
    • Toronto, Canada Area

    Hired to manage the construction and growth of a systems operations team for Macquarie's Banking and Financial Services businesses in Canada, I have successfully built a team of analysts to curate all production delivery.The infrastructure landscape includes AS/400 (i Series), Linux, several versions of Windows, Solaris, AIX and HP/UX, as well as the MS-SQL, MySQL, Oracle, Sybase and DB2 databases. Therein, I build broad cross-functionality into the team first to serve business needs, all while iterating towards a common platform strategy in the longer term.

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  Tucows

  • Toronto, Canada Area

  • Senior NOC Analyst

    • Sep 2008 - Sep 2010
    • Toronto, Canada Area

    The NOC (network operations center) is the 24/7 department charged with monitoring and maintaining the health and availability of the application service clusters; resolving incidents as they are escalated from the Support department or as monitoring or proactive investigation reveals them; escalating incidents to the Operations or Dev teams for further analysis and resolution when necessary; and coordinating with the customer-facing departments (Marketing, Account Management, Professional Services) when such incidents might result in abnormal service behaviour. As the lead of this team I am responsible for continuously refining the NOC to better discharge this responsibility. We do so by improving our incident management and risk mitigation process, expanding our aggregate technical skill set, and fostering an environment where tool sharing and peer education lets individual improvement increase the capabilities of the team as a whole.

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  Keane

  • Senior Consultant

    • Sep 2006 - Jun 2008

    Consultants on the Client Straight-Through Processing / Custody Level 2 team provide live trade troubleshooting and resolution for the entire trade life cycle. I was responsible for all IT liaison services to the business and are subject matter experts on all steps of the process: trade entry, breaks, correction, clearance, reporting and more.Investigated exceptions in the trade entry flow daily, and at all levels in the application tree. Read through Apache / Tomcat web logs and ServletExec / application logs to reconstruct user actions. Verified data in Sybase databases running on Solaris hardware. Tracked the steps of the enrichment process as trades were transmitted from Unix to a mainframe back-end. Ensured that mainframe processing was pulling data from the correct tables and transferring data back to the Unix side in the expected format. Actively monitored the Windows-based trade breaks report generation and the Unix-based report distribution processes.

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  Morgan Stanley

  • Level 2 Business Systems Analyst w/Keane Canada

    • Oct 2006 - May 2008

    • Routinely performed crisis command and control during outages with major client impact and severe firm financial risk. Coordinated client notification. Escalated to resolution teams and business stakeholders. Logged and documented resolution steps to speed resolution and help prevent reoccurrences.• Performed dozens of investigations to determine the source of recurring problems. From the investigations synthesized techniques, tools and documentation to allow team members to rapidly deal with future instances of the problem. Prioritized these problems and escalated them to development in order to reduce client impact.• Created and documented a tool to maintain a centralized archive of logs produced by many instances of a trade entry application, spread across many physical hosts. This archive facilitated and sped troubleshooting and trending and helped bring the client into compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOx) data retention requirements.

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  MekTek Solutions

  • Business Analyst, Web Designer

    • Sep 2004 - Nov 2005

    I built websites, programmed tools, debugged software and processes, assembled hardware, created and documented business and technical procedures alone and as part of a small team.• Analyzed a process for updating an inventory and availability system with the goal of decreasing the time, effort and potential for error. Abstracted the workflow, inputs and desired outputs into a functional document for client review. Created a workflow with supporting tools that accelerated the process by several orders of magnitude and removed all of the sources of common errors.• Migrated a client from an Outlook-based mailing list solution to one developed from scratch, informed by guidelines and requirements rather than the operational model of the legacy system. This let the new system inherit all of the workflow while providing a much stronger data model and distribution back end.

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  NAFTA Secretariat

  • IT Administrator

    • Aug 2003 - Sep 2004

    At the NAFTA Secretariat I provided support for a small team of international trade lawyers. I helped implement necessities such as PWGSC-mandated X.509 certificates for secure emailing between government agencies, a multi-tiered backup strategy, data format conversion for compliance with government web accessibility standards, and procedure documentation. The agency offered the interesting challenge of implementing critical infrastructure within tight constraints of budget and time.• Helped author, review and audit a business continuity plan to guarantee continued operations in the event of a simultaneous and complete facilities and utilities failure• Created, documented and tested a data replication solution which backed up and archived email and document repositories across the entire network via encrypted tunnel to an off-site, secure facility.

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  Convergys

  • ISP Incident Resolution

    • Nov 2002 - Aug 2003

    Convergys, formerly Taima, provided outsourced technical support to several national broadband ISPs. I worked on the Road Runner contract and provided technical support for every aspect of connectivity between the wall socket and the chair. This position required superb verbal communication and interpersonal skills and strong, rapid troubleshooting. Convergys required resolutions within tight timeframes and strict responsibility guidelines.• Wrote a web-based tool for dealing in real time with an iterative problem discovery system. The tool allowed a CSR to minimize time spent typing and maximize time spent listening to the customer. • Condensed, regularized, fact-checked and expanded on large portions of the internal troubleshooting documentation. Streamlined the fact-finding process and sped the average investigation by using simpler steps that revealed more information and avoided common communications problems.

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  Statistics Canada

  • IT Administrator

    • Jun 2000 - Sep 2002

    At Statistics Canada I worked with a small team to test software updates, create distribution packages, and monitor progressive distribution to carefully scheduled office divisions for success and failures. Duties also included backing out problematic packages to ensure the uninterrupted availability of servers, desktop machines and network infrastructure. IT was tasked with increasing the accuracy of the reporting tools used for monitoring failure rates of remote installations and for the billing of internally developed software packages. • Created a data analysis package which revealed, explained and quantified inconsistencies in reports produced by the solution used for internal software billing and auditing. With the aid of this package and several months of historical data, created a report which revealed a large and increasing standard deviation, and highlighted and explained the underlying technical reasons for these results.

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  Guppy

  • Chief Guppy

    • 1920 - 1921