Curriculum Vitae

Personal Details 

 Career Overview 

Summary

Derek is ideal for a senior role in Contract, Business or Service Management that enables him to utilise his skills to examine processes and ensuring operational delivery of service, be it customer or supplier. Derek has a good understanding of the need to examine the P&L to show short term issues and forecast problems. The value of contracts that Derek has had Service Delivery responsibility for is up to £10 million. Derek has many years experience of managing teams of Service Delivery managers and IT technicians. 

In his time with [snip], Derek gained valuable insight into Business Service Management and how this may be achieved. 

Derek was able to translate the skills learnt in the IT industry to his role as National Contract Service Manager, with [snip], which supports the railway industry. Derek achieved this by focusing on ensuring people have a clear understanding of their role. Derek has also looked at problems as an end to end process in Problem and Change Management terms. This has broadened Derek’s horizons and outlook in examining business process and procedures and their application across a multitude of businesses.

Derek has gained an excellent understanding of commercial IT through his time within the IT outsourcing arena. Derek has a thorough understanding of the importance of Problem and Change Management and the importance of ensuring projects are managed effectively. The impact to the business if any of these falter or fail must be rectified as soon as possible. These disciplines ensure that internal or customer issues are managed quickly and effectively, that risk associated with change is managed and reduced, and that an organisations resources are managed effectively.

 [snip] are a supplier of server based gaming. 

During his time at [snip] Derek headed a team of Business Analysts looking at implementing Remedy Version 7. This was to include Incident and Problem Management, Performance Manager, Event Manager and Service Impact Manager plus a Configuration Management Database (CMDB). This was to lead to achieving Business Service Management. This was coupled with looking at Service Intelligence information being returned from the end points to enable dynamic tracking of errors. It also included looking at remote fix tools to enable interrogation of the end points. 

A change of [snip] strategy in this area has led to this being outsourced and the role being redundant. 

[snip] supply telecom solutions, faulting and maintenance, to the Railway Industry. Derek manages a team of four Service Managers to some of [snip] client base. The role requires management of the service issues raised and ensuring internal action is taken to implement fixes. The P&L of the customers are scrutinised to ensure service is maintained at the budgeted levels.

The current responsibilities have run for 30 Months and include the following: 

1         Ensure that the contracts are profitable and actions are taken to address issues arising from the P&L.

2         Total contracts value is 8 million pounds.

3         Continuous improvement of the service delivered to the customer by reviewing operational aspects of service delivery.

4         Involved with high-level Problem and Change Management and how it affects business processes, operational issues and finances.

5         Ensure that service reports are provided to the customer and that processes are in place to ensure accuracy.

6         Liaison with all areas of [snip], operational and support, to ensure that the customer receives value for money and has an escalation route for issues.

7         Assess impact of third party suppliers to the provision of service and raise issues with [snip]’ Supply Chain to enable resolution.

8         The Service Management team are co-ordinated in their approach and that appropriate documentation is in place.

9         Close liaison with the sales/account team to enable a combined and responsive approach to [snip]’ customers. 

On joining [snip], Derek had a dual role of looking after [snip] third party IT outsourcer plus the responsibilities above. 

 [snip] are a business outsourcing company, which utilises IT as a business aim. They also offer outsourcing solutions for desktop, bespoke application and data centres.

On leaving [snip] Derek operationally managed four IT suppliers to [snip]. These supplied WAN, ICL Mainframe, IBM Mainframe and printing service solutions. The role involved looking at the service being provided against contract and cost, instigating fixes for service issues by examining the end to end processes and attendance of monthly service review meetings. Another requirement of the role was to ensure that the suppliers provided effective Problem and Change Management and that it interfaced with [snip] own internal processes. Derek managed one other Alliance Service Manager. 

Derek also managed [snip] data centre outsourcing helpdesk. The team comprised of a Problem Manager, a Change Manager and four Helpdesk Analysts. The role initially required a clearer definition of each of the Helpdesk roles, which Derek achieved by writing Terms Of Reference (TORs). The TORs were agreed with senior management and implemented. It also required examining ways of ensuring that the Helpdesk could start providing Service Reports to [snip] IT customers and the use of their Problem Management tool.

Derek initially joined [snip] IT outsourcing division within their data centres and was employed as an IT Service Manager to one of [snip] customers. The customer was a large Motoring Organisation who had outsourced their IBM Mainframe to [snip]. The role involved attendance of monthly service reviews and presenting a service report, assessing internal delivery issues and highlighting areas for improvement. 

 [snip] is an IT Outsourcing provider. 

Derek’s final 8 months with [snip] was working on a financial clients project to alter their applications to cater for the Euro. This required providing the necessary JCL and test application environments.

Previous roles, the first listed being the most recent, that Derek had whilst with [snip] were: 

1         Implementing IT automation at customer site. This included a visit to the customer’s U.S. IT Data Centre to understand the IT Automation techniques utilised and to implement them in their London Data Centre.

2         Management of minor projects at customer site. These would plan as two-three days duration and involved the implementation of file transfers of financial data to various customer sites worldwide using the multi platform file transfer software Connect:Direct.

3         Management of Disaster Recovery Test of MVS Mainframe systems plus write the post test report which included recommendations for improvements.

4         Managing team of Operations Analysts involved with the migration of finance workload from Frankfurt to London. This included a visit to Frankfurt to document the operations system prior to the migration.

5         Supervision of a team of six Operations Analyst at [snip] Data Centres

6         Migration of workload from Liverpool to Greenford, West London.

7         MVS and DOS/VSE Operations Analyst.

8         Operations Supervisor at a DEC PDP 11 site.

9         Helpdesk – Customer Support Technician. 

[snip] were a manufacturing company based in Colindale, North London. At the time Derek joined they were converting their IT systems from a Honeywell mainframe to an IBM 4300 mainframe. Derek’s duties were to help develop the Operational side of the IBM processing and write the code for running the applications. Shortly after he joined, [snip]’ made a commercial decision to not continue with the migration and as a result Derek left their employ. 

[snip] is a Book Club, which ran their workload on an IBM 4300 mainframe and was based in Wembley, London. They employed a two shift system and Derek’s duties included running the shift and training of staff. 

 [snip] sold Life Assurance and are based in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire.  

On leaving [snip] Life Derek was running a team of operators providing cover for [snip] IBM 4300 Mainframe. Duties included running the workload, printing, delivery of output, and training of junior staff. 

During Derek’s time at [snip], they converted from an ICL 2900 Mainframe to an IBM 4300 Mainframe. This provided invaluable experience in seeing the requirements of a major conversion of the applications and systems from one platform to another. 

Derek started with [snip] as a Trainee Operator working on [snip] ICL 2900 Mainframe. 

 [snip] provided IT services on their ICL 1901A mainframe to local secondary schools in the [snip]. The role Derek had was assisting in running this workload. 

 Education 

 Management Courses

Presentation Skills                                 1988

Team Leadership                                  1989

Project Management                             1991

Influencing Skills                                   1992

Management Course                             1998 

Hobbies and Interests

Spending time with my family, football, cooking, wine and reading.