TECHNICAL DELIVERY ASSURANCE MANAGER
Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA)
Total years of experience :27 years, 8 Months
• Senior IT Manager responsible for management oversight, governance, compliance and effective delivery of strategic and cross-functional transformation projects and programmes across my Portfolio of Business Units (circa £5m) covering Alliance Healthcare Germany, WBASL Corporate, Group IT Security, Integration Centre of Excellence (ICE), No7 Beauty Company, Boots Operating Systems, Technology Services and Global NDA Projects.
• Management and Financial approvals, oversight and authority for all onshore/offshore Project Managers, Senior Delivery Managers and Global Technology Services Teams comprised of internal and external technology partners such as TCS, BT, Microsoft and Third-Party Vendors to ensure the successful delivery of regional and global WBA projects/programmes.
• Stakeholder relationship management to identify, develop, maintain and manage customer expectations.
• Governance of multiple delivery methodologies such as Waterfall, Agile and Hybrid-models.
• Focus on assurance to facilitate and ensure the timely delivery of a broad spectrum of complex technology projects within budget, specifications and scope as defined to meet business requirements, ranging from the Naples corporate office move and building-out a completely new WBA Dublin (Ireland) satellite office, to Technology Services delivery management to Group Finance & HR Transformation Programmes.
• Ownership of all commercial risks, issues and negotiations with WBA technology partners ensuring the best financial and objective outcomes.
• Resourcing Management governance to identify constraints, challenges and recommendations to key stakeholders.
• Member of the Diversity, Equality & Inclusion (DE&I) Champions Team to recognise, respect and encourage colleagues on valuing every individuals unique differences, perspectives and benefits they bring to the organisation, and allyships.
• Senior Technical Consultant providing portfolio and projects management expertise on-behalf of The Education Space to all supported Local Education Authority Schools within the London Borough of Newham for systems and applications audits, solutions architecture, procurement, delivery, deployments, timely onsite service and support management.
• Overseeing multi-site key roll-out initiatives for new builds and deployments encompassing enterprise-enrolment, application installations, UAT and sign-offs of Google Chromebook and Windows PC devices provisioned by the Department for Education. Conversion management of laptops to Chrome OS through Neverware CloudReady solution on a case-by-case business justification basis or Windows 10 Pro upgrades. Ensuring continued on-going technical support and cloud-administration to students, parents and teachers involved in the schooling from home programs as necessary. Enabling the streamlined, effective and efficient roll-out of 300-600 devices per month.
• Technical audit reviews and analysis of current school IT systems infrastructure set-up. Providing design architecture planning and strategic transformational change management process from legacy local CC4 Curriculum and File Storage Servers to Google Workspace for Education cloud compute, applications and storage solutions.
• Managing the migration and decommissioning phases of CC4 Curriculum Servers to new Windows Server 2019 platform and transition to the LGfL USO single-sign-on initiative.
• Project management liaison, client-vendor relationship management and coordination between The Education Space (NPW) and London Grid for Learning (LGfL) in the implementation and management of school broadband connectivity, managed network services, on-premise server installations and configurations, End-User Computing support and services contracts.
• Senior IT Management & Commercial Pilot roles having responsibility for all client site survey flight operations and navigation planning, aircraft maintenance management, and IT transformation strategy (including IT OPEX & CAPEX Investments) for a firm specialising in digital imaging, LIDAR and aerial photographic surveys.
• Led IT strategy roadmap to transform technology platform and capability. Defined target operating model and full-stack technology design solution for a new high-performance data-storage array with integrated hybrid-cloud infrastructure supporting offsite disaster-recovery clustering. Plus, data-migration planning for the 8 million high-resolution data-image and video (2TB) data-warehouse with automated processes and information security management.
• Completed Commercial Pilot Training based in the UK & New Zealand to attain my European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) & UK Civil Aviation Authority (UK CAA) Airline Transport Pilot Licence (ATPL-A) qualification, including accreditations for Single & Multi-Engine, Instrument and Night Ratings, with final B737-800 Multi-Crew Cooperation (MCC) & Jet Orientation (JOC) Certifications.
• Global Services Manager with technical leadership oversight for core ORACLE Enterprise Applications supporting high performance trading systems, real-time applications, clustering systems and global database infrastructure for the bank.
• Assured systems resilience supporting day-to-day trading and financial operations of the Bank across 60 countries through our centralised database infrastructure, data-integrity (real-time information and security), 24x7 systems availability and global vendor management (ORACLE) ensuring alignment with all regulatory authority compliance requirements and timely operational KPIs.
• Implemented best practice Global Operations Framework & ITIL Service Management Strategy enabling the rapid deployment of Database SMEs on deep-dive expedited remediation of complex technical and performance issues.
• Global Manager for Technology Operations & Technical Services Support Teams (consisting of 50 SMEs) meeting daily SLA / KPI targets for global data and systems availability. Significantly improved SLAs from 50% to more than 95% during my management leadership tenure.
• Established Project Delivery Framework using AGILE / DevOps methods to deliver quick wins and enhance overall technology capability (systems, processes and people). Successfully turned around five business-critical projects, led end to-end portfolio delivery (10 key projects) collaborating across Technology Services SMEs on continuous improvements.
• Extensive client-engagement and relationship management with Senior Global & Regional Stakeholders understanding wider business priorities, developing future technology roadmaps/strategy and new regulatory compliance solutions.
• Appointed as Global Head of Oracle Operations, Infrastructure & Engineering (SVP) to recruit and form a new global ORACLE DBA operations, support and engineering team to build-out new formalised infrastructure and development of new strategic project deliveries in support for enterprise-wide applications ($47 BN global revenues).
• Global matrix leadership for Regional VPs & Technical SMEs delivering world-class enterprise support and solutions. Technical authority for achieving all service-level (SLA) targets, leading continuous improvement initiatives, delivering scalable solutions (20, 000 users worldwide) and troubleshooting complex problems through to resolution.
• Technical Leadership Authority on driving future strategic infrastructure development and roadmaps, including senior stakeholder engagements and technology lifecycle management. Expert technical leadership guidance on directing business-critical projects, technology selection and IT sourcing / global partners / vendor management.
• Working in a complex multi-stakeholder environment in a global matrix organisation. Collaboration across core banking divisions, project groups and business heads, notably Equities, Fixed Income, Foreign Exchange, Investment & Corporate Banking, Wealth, Commodities, HR & Legal ensuring alignment with FCA regulatory compliance requirements.
• Strategic Project Leadership (Global Database Group) - Established Global Project & Operational Delivery Framework to deliver ORACLE database solutions across multiple business units and core product groups. Worked directly with Business Heads & Senior Stakeholders on defining future requirements, scoping project initiatives and team resourcing allocations.
• Global Head of Oracle Database Technology - Leadership responsibility for ORACLE database solutions, infrastructure, future strategy roadmap, software development lifecycles, systems enhancements (upgrades), proactive monitoring (alerting), AGILE / DEVOPS (critical scripts), operational processes (automation), major incidents and escalations.
• Global Database Support Framework - Established global resilience framework supporting DBs for each product group, including systems security, auto-archiving, disaster recovery and business continuity planning for critical databases.
• Global Change Review & Approval Board for Enterprise Infrastructure (EI) - Chaired Senior-Level Steering Committee evaluating EI strategy and bank-wide platforms across different technology groups at both global/regional (EMEA) levels, including IT networks, databases, servers, datacentres, systems architecture and DevOps production environments.
• OTHER STRATEGIC INITIATIVES - Enterprise Command Centre (Incidents & Root Cause Analysis), Global ORACLE Lifecycle Management (ORACLE applications and infrastructure upgrades), Major Integration Projects (CITIBANK database integration and migration), ZODIAC Datacentre Migrations (state-of-the-art purpose-built Tier 4 UK Datacentres) and management of outsourced TCS-partnership technology operations support, engineering and solutions delivery projects.
• Led on people strategy, talent acquisition, mentorship and team development of high-performant teams and graduate recruitment (Early in Career) programmes. Member of the Promotion Review Advisory Boards & Management Committees for VP/mid-level promotions.
• Member of the EMEA Enterprise Infrastructure Management & Global DBA Management Teams. Led multi-disciplinary teams on tier 1, 2 & 3 operational support and engineering functions for Sybase ASE, MSSQL Server, IBM DB2 & Informix database platforms, enterprise server infrastructure and business-critical systems.
• Technical Leadership on strategic initiatives, continuous improvement projects and ITIL service management best practice standards, including full-stack technology solutions, systems architecture and core enterprise applications within a real-time trading environment. DBA SME and performance troubleshooting expert on complex business impacting outages/issues through to resolution.
• Managed in-house development (AGILE / DEVOPS), global vendor partner relationships and enterprise systems upgrades (ORACLE applications, databases, servers and security releases). Included critical enhancements, reviewing vulnerabilities, managing escalations and ensuring systems compliance to meet changing regulatory requirements.
• Senior IT Management Team member for Enterprise Infrastructure Database Operations, Engineering & Projects. Led the EMEA 24x7 DBA SME product support group as part of the global team.
• Responsible for real-time applications and trading systems, back-ups, SLAs, change management, high-availability, critical enhancements, security vulnerabilities reviews, regulatory audit and compliance governance.
• Recruitment and creation of a new Budapest off-shore DBA Team
• Global & EMEA Database Operations, Support, Engineering Development & Projects
• Y2K & European Monetary Union Projects
• Client Legacy Database Systems Analysis & Migrations Projects
Theoretical computer science with network engineering. Final year thesis to develop a passive network monitoring and intrusion security system by tracing and unpacking network packet headers for all protocols, in C/C++.
Aeronautical Engineering degree with final year project to completed the structural design and aerodynamic calculations for multi-purpose military trainer jet. Final year thesis for ESA (European Space Agency) to develop a computational model in Fortran 90 to produce tracking data related to the "Atmospheric Influence upon Orbital Space Debris Evolution" from the upper to lower earth atmosphere.