Taunton, England, United Kingdom
I fell into IT. Whilst I was living in a shared house I helped run cheap co-ax cable round the attic to create a network (and giving the side benefit of boosting the tv signal) and a friend showed me how to build a cheap PC from spare parts. I was hooked. That was the first step on a career path that has spanned many years and has led from 1st line support, through 3rd line, system administrating, and now focused technical management on bespoke projects. Whilst I love IT I have also seen that it needs balancing with proper management in business, and have aimed to straddle the divide between IT technical proficiency, and IT management. Whether that means proper project, change or incident management, or system and infrastructure management, or personnel management, I have taken those skills on board alongside the range of technical skills I have learned throughout my working life.
Line manager to a small team of platform developers and SME for broking platforms (SSP, Applied, and Acturis)
• In house technical scheme developer. On SSP Pure Broking this has included the development of the rating engine in Excel, the schema creation in XML, and transforms in XSLT, and full coding of the risk screen logic in Visual Basic. I have also been trained in developing frames on the Open GI Core platform. • Project management, which has included projects relating to new scheme releases, technical application changes, and process efficiencies. • Change management and implementation of technical changes within the insurance software environments. • Management of the insurance software platform (SSP), including user management, system management, and exchange configuration. • Technical subject matter expert for insurance software, system capabilities, and technical efficiencies.
• Full 3rd line support of all installed servers, (windows 2008 and 2012) and all network infrastructure, including phones, switches, firewalls, NAS, printers, etc. • Management and support of Windows server roles including DNS, DHCP, Active Directory, WSUS, Hyper-V, and Exchange, and third party software server installations like Sage HR, Pegasus, backup software like Symantec Backup Exec, Altaro, and Cloudberry, and antivirus software including Webroot and Symantec Antivirus. • Planning, specification and requirements setting, configuring and installing all IT hardware including all servers, and network infrastructure • Creation and management of the IT yearly project plan including identifying future requirements, obtaining costs and running the projects when agreed with the board. • Business Intelligence, including the production of monthly management information reports and producing ad-hoc reports for management from disparate data sources. I was also responsible for creating the templates for these reports using Access and Excel and writing any associated procedure documentation. • Creation of a number of very in depth Excel spreadsheets that act as quote engines for insurance products allowing staff to give full quotes from a quick set of information.
• Manager of the 1st line technical support call centre. Staff management and management to KPIs for all faults. Managing of technical fault reporting including issues with customer facing applications to universities, schools, and individuals. • Manager of the Desktop Support team for all internal desktop fault resolution in UCAS for desktops including hardware, and software printers, network connections and network infrastructure. Technical support for all audio-visual equipment including video conferencing and ISDN voice conferencing, projectors, and conference room equipment. Technical support for the Avaya phone system including installation and configuration of phones. • Staff computing and phone equipment moves. This has required the team to do moves from a single person up to 44 people in a single move and 160 computers in a new hardware role out. • Active Directory 2003 and Exchange server 2003 management for the company including new account creation and management of existing accounts, containers, group policies, security groups and distribution lists. • Escalation point for 1st line and desktop support for all technical and customer services issues.