IT Director
Future NAS
Total years of experience :29 years, 4 Months
Manage all the company projects
prepare budgets and analyze and rectify deviations
Manage relations with key customers
Manage relations with technology partners and vendors
Plan for marketing events
Plan for upcoming years growth and prepare the requirements
review business results
provide coaching sessions and guidance for team members and customers
Aljasser Group is a leading fast growing manufacturer in the fields of wood industry (eight companies) and the steel industry (three companies) with branches across the Arab countries like Egypt, Lebanon, and the GCC countries. The group needed to restructure its IT department to support its growth. They needed to build a network infrastructure that can accommodate for their growing and that was my main task. The company was in the process of preparing a full structure and process flow documents and I achieved the following:
1) Special high level management tasks assigned by the owner
With 30% to 40% annual growth, the group needed to have a clear organization structure and many other strategic documents, I was the lead of a development team working in cooperation with external consultants to structure the following documents:
Group organization structure
Job descriptions for all the top management and departments heads
Process flow and interdepartmental communications document
General work guidelines and templates
Mission and vision statements for each of the companies
Company bidding profile
worked as a part of the high management team working on setting the future strategy of the group
2) Restructured the IT department
• Developed the hierarchy structure of the department adding new divisions and new positions to cover all the IT areas of specialties
• Believing in management by objectives, I setup a system to manage the IT team and IT projects based of the SMART metrics that led to great enhancement in the level of service provided to users and the achievements of the projects’ objectives
3) Evaluating the company’s ERP solution
The company has an in house developed application on which its business totally depends. The software needed to be authenticated and for that I took the following measures:
• Tested the features, screens and modules of the solution
• Signed a contract with an IT audit house to audit the application from both functional and technical aspects
• Worked with the ERP development team to prepare full documentation for the application and got the documentation audited.
• Built a plan to act on the audit reports which required forming business and functional committees to fine-tune the process to match business standards
• Hired the needed technical skills to maintain the development of the application
• Put together policies and procedures to develop any new modules or screens and to put it into production
• Planned for full implementation of the ERP with all head of departments
• Provided redundancy, DR and security solutions for the webservers
• Upgraded the database servers and the application servers to the latest version totally transparent from users
4) Develop the group’s infrastructure
The Group has a very diversified network and needed to have solid connectivity between branches for that I started the following projects:
• Evaluate the network in all branches
• Build a datacenter for the company operations in Egypt that is equipped with all the hardware and software needed for the company operations across the branches.
• Designed and implemented the domain structure and the group policies
• Implemented the email solution for each of the companies
• Implemented different levels of data and network security
• Building a parallel data center in KSA to balance the load with Cairo datacenter
• Provide the group with domains and websites for each company
5) Telecommunications
Planned and managed to change the traditional telephony system to Voice over IP for the entire group to provide the company with cheaper telephone service and eliminate the international telephone costs and cut down the cost of telephones between branches to zero. The project is installed in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Bahrain, Qatar and UAE
Managing a team of systems engineers, systems administrators, network engineers and desktop support engineers to provide full support for Al-Suwaidi group operations and expansion. Al-Suwaidi Group is one of the largest 100 Saudi companies with offices and strategic projects across the kingdom.
In addition to that I also took care of some of the key customers for Al-Suwaidi information management technology company such as King Fahad Causeway Authority and Dammam university
The services provided to the group was bound by a service level agreement. To guarantee the quality of service and to meet the SLA requirements I setup a KRA/KPI system based on the SMART metrics and trained the team based on that. The results were great
Built a new helpdesk team to support operations in western, central and eastern regions.
Selected and implemented new helpdesk solution with international standards across the group.
Prepared annual budget for all IT needs of the group.
Monitor budget usage and expenses to control costs as per the budget.
Prepare upgrade and optimization plans to best utilize IT infrastructure and help company growth.
Prepare team skills elevation plans.
Manage ongoing projects and coordinate with project team and the group management to achieve project goals.
Put together Standard Operating Procedures for IT operations as per ITIL standard.
Prepare IT policies and plans for running IT department.
Review and discuss quotations from vendors to guarantee best price and performance.
Participate in all board meeting to answer for IT related inquiries.
Prepare the SLA every two years that controls the relation between IT and the group.
•Selecting the best candidates for the post of technical support engineer to join the technical support team.
•Putting together annual plans for software and hardware maintenance and split its targets through the four quarters of the year plus putting a detailed time schedule to achieve the planned targets.
•Submitting the bill of materials required for upgrade.
•Lead the team which Studies new projects and meet with the design office staff to get the best design for the network shafts, raceways network rooms and control rooms.
•Design the computer network, servers and services. (operating system and services like exchange, ISA, DNS, DHCP schema.. etc
•Get weekly updates of the current projects (normally more than 3 or 4 concurrent projects)
•Support and maintain the services that is provided to the group though the head office. Also make sure that links between remote sites and head office are up and performing at the desired speed.
•Design network security (software and hardware)
•Personally install and configure the group's firewalls, IPS devices and VPN connections.
•Test and improve the security design.
•The first to be there at disaster or down times using my technical experience to solve the problem.
•Plan the annual staff development plans to keep my team up to date with latest changes in the IT world.
•Hold a weekly staff meeting to make sure that plans are running as scheduled and that the staff is having no problems achieving targeted objects.
•Provide the IT general director with weekly progress report about the running projects and the progress in the annual plans.