Operations Manager

• Jan 2020 - Present

HR & Training Manager

• Jul 2017 - Jan 2020

Recruitment and Support

• Aug 2015 - Jul 2017

Recruiting candidates for the business during a time of heavy growth. Processing advert applications, CVs, conducting telephone interviews, screening and handpicking well suited candidates for further training as vehicle inspectors.

Customer/Driver Support Co-ordinator

• Apr 2015 - Jul 2015

Working directly with management to support and motivate inspectors in the field, and liaising closely with clients to ensure that SLAs are met and customer satisfactory is maintained at a high level. Also involved in auditing the work of vehicle inspectors to ensure that inspection standards are kept to a very high standard.

Vehicle Inspector

• Sep 2014 - Apr 2015

Responsible for the timed inspection and delivery of new and used vehicles around the UK, to private and professional customers. Inspections carried out by use of PDA.

Owner

• Jun 2009 - Dec 2014

www.thegranarycanvas.co.uk www.thegranarycanvas.co.uk

Data and Voice engineer

• Feb 2011 - May 2012

Installation of structured networks and cabling points of small to large sized venues (residential, commercial, and educational). Involved in the installations of multimedia, security, RJ45, Ethernet, fibre runs, COAX, Panasonic VOIP phone systems, computer systems, software, LAN points including termination at both ends, and installation of comms cabinets and racks in comms/server rooms. Installation of structured networks and cabling points of small to large sized venues (residential, commercial, and educational). Involved in the installations of multimedia, security, RJ45, Ethernet, fibre runs, COAX, Panasonic VOIP phone systems, computer systems, software, LAN points including termination at both ends, and installation of comms cabinets and racks in comms/server rooms.

Service Manager

• Apr 2005 - May 2009

• Service Management team in supporting 28 online systems and 17 business units hosted both from within the Experian data centre, at remote offices, and at 3rd party hosting companies. • Ensuring that infrastructure is appropriate and reliable across Production, Development, Test, UAT (stage), and Live platforms. • Management of incidents during major service outages. • Working closely with internal and cross divisional departments to determine severity of problems and establishing workarounds and resolutions for system failures. • Root cause analysis process following unexplained major outages. • Establishing and maintaining relationships with internal and external service providers. • Driving down service delivery and general operational costs. • Conducting service reviews with internal customers across remote EBS UK offices and maintaining relationships. • Recommending best practice plans and integrating acquisitions (National and International) in to the EBS network. • Assisting Head of Operations in ensuring the budget accurately reflects the business’ expenditure, recommending value for money options for existing and new infrastructure, and claiming back rebates where appropriate. • Facilitating solutions and offering quotes for new products and services. • Acting as Project Manager for internal projects where Experian Tech Services is not required. • The ITDR for the business and ensuring that the pertinent representatives within the business are up to date with procedures. Additional elements:- • Out of hours support for business continuity and ITDR events. • Provide out of hours on call assistance and escalation point for all live system issues. • Keeping a permanent online record (SharePoint) of all major medium and long term work being carried out by my team. Secondment Roles:- • To carry out due diligence interview with prospective international clients at site (Belgium) • To act as surveyor/interpreter for new business development in Cyprus Show less

UK-National Application Support - Deputy Team Leader

• Sep 2004 - Apr 2005

This promotion meant that I had to take a step back from dealing with the daily technical incidents and get involved in the operational aspects of the department. Issues would be mainly based around:-• The daily running of the team resolving daily work issues.• Attending new project meetings.• Attending PM and IM meetings to assist in ensuring that incidents and issues are dealt with correctly.• Playing a key role in following through SIPs (Service Improvement Plans), resolving site problems, hitting SLA targets and daily system downtime.• Reviewing breached incidents so as to justify their closure time and reason. Additional elements of the role included working with other expert domains to identify sites with ongoing problems by way of trend analysis and historical data, and then to arrange short term and long-term work-arounds until a permanent solution was established. This involved working closely with the problem management team.Ensuring that the department’s major functions were kept up to date was also in integral part of the role. This meant that call types, incident scripts, resolution codes and work instructions required updating every 6 months, which included signing off work instructions. Show less

UKNM Application Support Team – Systems Analyst

• Jan 2004 - Sep 2004

A growing Application Support team that covered over 20 bespoke systems and on a typical day would deal with between 50-300 incidents which were mostly governed by SLAs ranging from 4 – 30 working hours, with a first time fix rate of between 85% - 95%. My previous Microsoft technical knowledge made supporting the systems on the estate quite easy, with the main learning curve being the bespoke systems.The main day to day duties included:-• Constantly monitoring Remedy for new and existing incidents.• Specialising in resolving incidents and work closely with developers to resolve problems.• Writing work instructions to describe how to restore service in the event of incidents, which was a business requirement for ISO standards.• Being part of a team work rota. Show less

Service Manager for Carlsberg – Tetley Account (EDS contract) 3 month secondment

• Oct 2003 - Dec 2003

Assigned by the UK EDS Chief Executive to act as temporary service manager for Carlsberg – Tetley (Leeds). The task was to liaise and involve the technical domains and the support functions of the companies providing the specialist software for the ordering system which had been experiencing problems due to the company’s rapid growth.

Ad-Hoc Specialist Solutions Team

• Aug 2003 - Sep 2003

During times when various SLAs had fallen to unacceptable levels or a problem was having too much of an impact on the business, I was requested assemble a specialist solutions team to ensure the recovery of the SLA within a target period. This would entail commandeering resource from many different teams to work in a centralized team format so that SLA related incidents were dealt with, without unnecessary delay.

Problem Manager

• May 2001 - Aug 2003

Problem Management played a key role in successfully managing and delivering solutions to long and short-term problems, within service levels and maintaining and developing a healthy client relationship. This gave me the opportunity to see IT support from a very unique angle. A great deal of time would be spent compiling statistics and analysing trends to aid in the improvement of IT user education and fault resolution across the account.As a PM, I had been able to influence the way that incidents were handled and through team collaboration and trend analysis. The result was a reduction in incidents, and resolution of long standing problems. Having a technical background gave me a great advantage and helped accelerate the process.As a Problem Manager, my main responsibilities included:-• Holding Problem Revue Forums (PRF) with the customer and internal technical team representatives to ensure ongoing problems were kept updated.• Handling communications between the customer, senior management, relevant support teams and the call centre when major systems had failed and liaising with remote contractors and engineers, in and out of normal working hours to aid in the resolution of a problem or failure.• Implementing workarounds during times of system failure.• Updating the Call Centre, and the Incident Management team of any new solutions, workarounds or problems.• Investigating and producing statistics for major ongoing problems to identify key common issues, enabling the production of guidance to users to prevent repeat incidents and enhance service delivery.• Designing new Remedy schemas for Problem Management/Major Incident Management.• Producing monthly (RAG) status reports. • Visiting sites to assess situations, if a major problem was not reaching a quick resolution. Show less

Managed Services team manager

• Aug 2000 - May 2001

The role was to head up a managed services support desk with a base team of 8, plus 2 remote teams, consisting of 3 and 1 respectively. Contracts varied between £200k - £2m pa, across multiple OS platforms and business functions, requiring a flexible and adaptable support team. Contracts covered most sectors and ranged from 1 site with less than a hundred users, to hundreds of sites and hundreds of thousands of users. Support consisted of 3 tiers, covering 1200 calls per week.Responsibilities included producing extensive reports to show performance against targets ensuring client SLA’s were met, management of escalated calls, major issues and the definition of relevant support processes and procedures and justification of staff requirements and subsequent recruitment. Show less

IT Support Engineer

• Feb 1999 - Aug 2000

Remote and on-site support to a large portfolio of clients, mainly based around Windows NT technology but support extended to Windows 95/98, LANs and WANs, and a multitude of applications.