London, England, United Kingdom
I'm a technology leader with over 25 years' experience of working predominantly with Microsoft technologies to transform how organisations work, with the last decade in leadership roles. While more strategic these days, I have a background as a deep hands-on technologist - managing development teams, leading Microsoft 365 and SharePoint delivery programmes, and writing code. I regularly speak at major Microsoft-oriented conferences and industry events, and have worked for Microsoft in the past as a SharePoint Premier Field Engineer (PFE). In technology terms, my core strengths are around the Microsoft cloud stack – especially AI, Microsoft 365 (including Teams, SharePoint and the Power Platform), and Azure. I've held Microsoft 'Most Valuable Professional’ (MVP) status for the last 18 consecutive years. This relates to content and thought leadership I create around Microsoft 365 and related topics, and I get significant early exposure to Microsoft technologies and roadmap/strategy in this capacity. I currently participate in several private programs as they develop their offering. I write a highly-regarded technical blog at www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com (receives 30000+ unique visitors per month) and share shorter posts here on LinkedIn.
I'm part of the Senior Leadership Team at Advania UK, responsible for shaping technology strategy and driving innovation across services and products – this includes leading a big part of our thinking and approach to AI & automation, and overseeing Fresh, our Microsoft 365-based digital workplace product designed for the AI era. I have P&L responsibility in this role and lead on some of our growth initiatives.
Essentially similar to the CTO role above (and still part of the Senior Leadership Team), but in this period our org structure had a centralised Products & Services function of 40-45 people which I led and had P&L responsibility for. This encompassed Product Directors in key service areas of AI, Modern Work, Azure, Cyber Security and Compliance, Unified Comms, and other technology teams including our ServiceNow and Fresh groups.
Same role as above, but while the company was known as Content+Cloud.
In this period I led the development group at Content and Code (15-20 developers), with a focus on Microsoft 365, Azure and SharePoint. Responsibilities included best practice, development standards and team readiness. Other aspects of Microsoft 365 including Microsoft Teams, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI and the Microsoft Graph were also fundamental to the role. In addition to strategic roadmap, I played a key role in winning business for the group. I helped land significant programmes of work which shaped the company's positioning in the market and with Microsoft. I also contributed to key projects in a hands-on capacity - ranging from providing strategic guidance around Office 365 implementations to writing SPFx and Azure Functions code to extend the platform to meet specific client needs.
Delivering SharePoint solutions to Content and Code's diverse client base.
I worked within the Premier Field Engineering division (UK), specialising in running the highly-regarded “SharePoint Risk and Health Assessment Program” for Premier clients. This is a deep SharePoint health check, which assesses where the client may have deviated from Microsoft best practice (and provides them the knowledge and guidance to remedy this). I closely analysed many SharePoint environments in this role, from small pilot installations to 100,000+ user farms. I was apparently the first non-Microsoft full time employee to be accredited to run this process in the UK.