stephen smith

As company wide IT Technical Support Manager, reporting to the Operations Director, I covered all aspects of IT across the 100 or so retail outlets and the Stockport head office/distribution centre. I had 30 direct reports.

Working for a Manufacturing Company of around 400 people, I was responsible for IT Development and Support at Production (Factory) and Research facilities. Responsibilities included understanding business requirements and communicating these to third party software suppliers; acceptance of supplied software and its subsequent support. This job had a significant hands on programming content in addition to strategic and people management, including Oracle Forms development, Oracle DBA, VMS (mini) Novel (PC Networking) Systems Management. Whilst with Chloride I also developed and implemented a comprehensive, company wide IT Disaster Recovery Strategy and plan.

Technical Skills : C/Ingress/VMS system Management/Proprietary Programming Languages.

* Technical Skills : C/UNIX Oracle Forms, - PL * SQL and DBA

Data Warehouse/BI Reports Project Manager for Astra Zeneca. Full life cycle management of a $2m Enterprise Data Warehouse/BI Spend Monitoring application requiring significant business process re-engineering and including data analysis and extract from regional AZ SAP systems. Also delivery of a $2.5m reporting solution, again based upon enhancement of the existing EDW for a new CRM, rolled out globally throughout AZ. This role includes initial estimation and commercial pitch of the solution through to its deployment and integration with existing AZ BAU live support. Both major developments require significant amounts of Business Change in tandem with the new IS being delivered. At AZ I have also been Scrum Master for smaller EDW developments using the Scrum sprint techniques.

During my first stint at Barclays essentially, in Prince II terms sometimes I was a Project Manger with clients in the business; sometimes a Senior Supplier with clients who are other PMs. I have lead both Application Developments and Infrastructure Projects. During my time at the bank I was been able to develop my skills in working with international third party supplier organisations (Accenture, Satyam, Xansa etc). I feel I have a particular flair for building harmonious and integrated project teams from diverse suppliers who are geographically remote from each other and owe allegiance to numerous thirds party supplier organisations. Coupled with my previous experience in Application Support this enables me to efficiently build new applications which as well as meeting client’s requirements, on time and to budget are robust and straight forward to support. Projects range in size from around 200 to 2000 man days using the Barclays Data Warehouse to provide marketing, operational and regulatory MI/reporting.

Position: IT Product Manager in the Water & Waste Water Business A similar role to my current one at Barclays but also including responsibility for on-going support of the IT products after their development. Whilst I gained some experience working with third parties (Xansa, Tarta TSC, Accenture and Sun Micro Systems) my project and support teams were mainly drawn from the onshore Vertex pool. I particularly enjoyed being responsible for the professional development of the team membrs assigned to me, something I miss in my role at Barclays.

Whilst responsible for the support accounts of twelve different Water related software packages, chiefly associated with Operational and Regulatory monitoring of both treated waste & drinking water quality, I was able to reduce costs from over £1 million pa to around £700K by recognising technical synergies and cross training individuals from complementary teams to produce a single multi-skilled team. This enabled me to reduce reliance on expensive contractors and have more skilled developers available for supplementary, chargeable, enhancement work. Support responsibilities included not only the delivery of fix on fail and user support against existing SLAs (Service Level Agreements) but the ‘organic’ development of said SLAs, with clients, as the supported applications evolved. Some applications became more ‘mature’ whilst others underwent major redevelopment. I was also Project Manager of these redevelopment and enhancement programmes, responsible for delivery to time and budget.

TDM for Unsecured Loans working with Hybrid teams from third party Suppliers Fidelity IS and RR Donnelley (Print/Communication Solutions). A significant portion of the Barclays Unsecured loans accounts were found to be non-compliant with the 2006 Consumer Credit Act (CCA3). I have spent my first year back with the bank leading the technical side of the programme to, first off stem the flow and latterly remediate the historic non-complaint accounts. Working our way steadily through the Open and healthy, Open in arrears, Closed, Charged Off and Written Off cohorts we have designed, built, tested and executed utilities to remediate each type of account. We completed on time and to budget 95% of the accounts by the year end (2014).

After graduating in Pure and Applied Physics I spent a year in the Applied Maths department at UMIST studying Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics. For this I became involved with computational modelling and became fascinated by IT. I abandoned my studies, with a post grad. diploma and embarked upon my career with computers!