Alex Groundwater

Main Contractor appointment and subsequent RIBA Stage III validation with the design team, continuing to a fully developed Stage IV technical design for a unique manufacturing facility in the London area. Comprising Grade C clean rooms and ATEX rated labs, as well as general warehouse and office space, this is a challenging project, designing an MHRA approved facility capable of manufacturing a state of the art T cell therapy product.

30,000sqft fit out of the recently IPO’d company’s HQ and main Process Development and Translational science laboratories in the newly refurbished 245 Hammersmith Rd building. Achilles, who are on-track to produce the first personalised T-cell therapy for lung cancer patients, removing the necessity of invasive surgery or radio and chemo therapies, required a state of the art facility to refine their processes before manufacturing. Also responsible for creating the selection criteria and analysing HoTs and responses for a 5,000sqft East coast USA laboratory. Finally, wrote a proposal for the automation of the building, environmental and manufacturing control and execution IT systems for their planned manufacturing facility in South-West London, defining options and requirements, allowing them to go to RFP and select a suitable supplier for this critical component of the corporate strategy.

Delivered Bracken House, the FT’s new 186,000sqft, Grade II listed, London HQ. Reporting to the COO; chaired fortnightly steering meetings with the C-suite, Managing Editor and HR Director. Built and managed a team of delivery leads for the 8 major workstreams: Cat B building refurbishment, technology, furniture, business change, video studio, FT build additions, relocation and dilapidation of the old office premises. Responsible for a team of over 120 programme staff, managed a > £45M budget and was responsible for setting and delivering the overall timeline. This was a transformational programme for the FT, moving from fixed desk to agile working whilst implementing best of breed technology and furniture solutions across the building to enable enhanced collaboration and agility.

Helping the FT relocate from the current Southwark Bridge office back to their historic home, Grade II listed Bracken House on Friday Street, and providing them with a technology user experience that transforms their collaborative potential.

Transformation and relocation of the company’s two datacenters comprising: over 1,200 virtual servers, the main Contact Centre telephony and 1.6PB of data, to prepare them for the move to Cloud services and GDPR compliance, in-line with Swinton's 60th anniversary re-launch. Implemented a new data strategy, infrastructure configuration, security principles and aggressively rationalized and virtualized legacy systems, resulting in a 45% reduction in hardware and power draw costs, prior to migrating both sites to new premises. Matrix managing a team of 30 internal staff and 7 external suppliers including contract negotiations and full budget control, reporting to the COO. Completed on time, with no loss of data or material negative impact to the running of the day to day business.

Management of 22 PMO, BA, PM and Testing staff on this multi-million pound transformation for one of the UK's largest private hospitals. The programme comprises over 20 major projects, including; data centre build and workload migration, full LAN and WiFi replacement, End User Compute standardisation and upgrade, Clinical Application selection (VNA, PACS/RIS, ICU etc) and implementation, as well as the virtualisation of the main Hospital Information System. As the phases progress the Programme Office is also responsible for coordinating the initial mapping of the overall business process within the hospital and working with new, enhanced, security policies to provide mechanisms for secure data transfer of patient information. Reporting to the CIO and presenting business cases and progress updates to the CFO at weekly programme board meetings, the role also requires the management of all in-flight project budgets, risk assessment and mitigation and planning for any new initiatives.

Strategy Creation, Validation and Planning for the refresh of the entire EDF Energy Telecoms estate, comprising: Group WAN, LAN, WiFi, Security, NAC, Voice and Unified Comms. Enabling initiatives such as: EDF Group synergies, BYOD and mobile-working for 21,000 staff, in 40 offices, 8 nuclear and 3 conventional power stations. Working with manufacturers such as Cisco, Microsoft, Unify, Polycom, Jabra, Check Point and Palo Alto. Managing a number of 3rd party partners: Vodafone, Telindus, Cap Gemini and Unify to create a showcase environment to demonstrate to stakeholders, and the wider business, the art of the possible whilst identifying features, practical concerns and issues within the proposed configuration.

Global integration of advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) into the Publicis Groupe infrastructure following the July 2012 purchase.

Integration of Bales Worldwide acquisition into Virgin Holidays IT infrastructure

As part of a global consolidation of Universal Music’s Finance functions (P2P, R2R and O2C) involving an offshore business process outsource to Accenture and migration from JDEdwards to SAP at a 3rd party hosting facility, my responsibilities included; • Creation of all plans and logs relating to the technology component of the programme • Delivery of all internal & 3rd party hosted technology (over 100 applications from 40 sites) to Accenture’s network allowing the outsource staff to perform required finance functions • Recommended and managed the implementation of Riverbed Steelhead devices at all Universal and Accenture sites to reduce the need for increased MPLS bandwidth • Liaison with the business and all 3rd parties to ensure performance and reliability were acceptable and within predefined SLA criteria • Implementation of a new Document Management System for SAP • Communication with the Project Board, Finance Directors, Accenture management, Business staff, various technology teams & suppliers of all requirements and plans • Creation of operational procedures for IT with Accenture and Universal Music technology staff and handover to Service Delivery Manager • Extensive travel to both the Accenture Service Delivery Centres (Bratislava, Bucharest, Buenos Aires, Dalian and Delhi) as well as many of the 43 Universal offices impacted

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