Greater Bristol Area, United Kingdom
An entrepreneurial project and programme leader who has consistently delivered best practice in training, simulation, and procurement solutions. Founder director of a multifaceted defence training service and product business. A creative and innovative chartered engineer, delivering cost effective capability to customers. An internationally acknowledged subject matter expert in air land integration, live, and synthetic training. CORE SKILLS PROBLEM SOLVING: I am persistent and resourceful in solving problems with thorough analysis, considering both tried and tested methods but often improving them or creating a new and innovative solution. PLANNING AND ADAPTATION: I am a disciplined planner and great believer in the adage that “if you have a plan the plan will be messed up, if you don't have a plan everything will be messed up!” I know the value of the plan and the necessity of being flexible, able to adapt plans in service of the overall aims. TEACHING, GUIDING, SUPPORTING: I get great fulfilment out of guiding and supporting motivated individuals to learn new skills, improve, and achieve their goals. I am enthusiastic and diligent in my work with students or mentees, enjoying seeing them succeed. EFFECTIVELY COMMUNICATING: I am confident at forming good arguments and illustrating clear principles, in written or verbal form, that are tailored for the audience and easily understood. IMPROVING: It is a core value of mine to continuously learn and improve myself, the processes, and products over which I have influence.
MilSim offers consultancy services to companies and organisations who are using simulation for training personnel. In particular, specialist provision of military simulation and training expertise in the complex field of air-land integration. - Design and Delivery of multiple simulation software training courses to multiple clients, both as MilSim and on behalf of other customers - Design and Delivery of a sales pipeline for simulation sales - Active Product Management - understanding user needs, triaging, translating to development tasks, and management of the overall product development pipeline in concert with business strategy - Advice, presentations, workshops in simulation subjects to business, MOD, conferences, and academic courses (including the Cranfield UK Simulation Employment Training Courses and Master's in Simulation) European Operations Consultant: Multiple disciplines including: Strategy, Account Management, Business Development & marketing, Product Management, Testing, and my favourite... Teaching and course development. - Production of JTAC accreditation evidence including video and image evidence of all criteria, bespoke missions, V&V matrix assuring customers of NATO-US Accreditation - Production of marketing content - video expos, social media, and wider market engagement; conference organisation; stand design, demonstration content; engagement plans and feeding into the business development pipeline Current and former customers include: Draken, Battlespace Simulations, FAAC, Cranfield University, UK Defence Science & Technical Lab (DSTL), UK MOD
- Accountable for identifying and growing the core product offering in the training simulation line of business: the benefits, vision, and roadmap. - Ensuring the business strategy in the training line of business is clearly defined, linked to overall company strategy, and that the plans for all solutions serve to advance it. - Representing the voice of the customer and the business within the day-to-day project team; translating capability requirements and desires, into prioritised engineering level tasks with clear priorities and exit criteria. - Ensuring that the development work directly contributes to the achievement of the trifecta of customer, user and business aims to meet the project vision.
- CEO and Company Technical Authority – Executive leader of team of 24 and accountable for all company products and services. - Product Management – Intimate understanding of use case, managing the interface between the engineering and commercial teams to ensure existing and new company products delight the customer. - Engineering Process Management – Established and continuously improving the company engineering processes – ISO 9001:2015 Accountable person. - Cost Modelling & Financial Management – Comparative analytical modelling, management of company finances as a whole and on a per project basis including devolving budgets to teams. - Requirements and Acceptance Management – Consulting with users, capturing and analysing user requirements, constraints, and overall intent; converting to technical specifications and developing candidate solutions. Liaising with customers to agree suitable test and evaluation procedures leading to rapid system sign-off in UK MOD and UAE Presidential Guard simulation systems. - Project Management – Practical planning and managing internal and external teams of engineers to successful delivery of multiple long duration high-value simulation systems and services contracts. - System Design – Detailed design of complex first-person multiuser simulation training systems ensuring accreditation and regular recertification to international standards. - Technical Authoring – Conception to submission authoring: major project submissions, contract bids, operations manuals, design reviews, to diverse technical and non-technical audiences. - Training Delivery – Consistently maintaining expertise in all aspects of systems and applications used to deliver company products and services. Frequently called upon to design and deliver bespoke training courses and consulted regularly by partner companies in the development of their products.
- Captured, analysed and engineered highly complex customer requirements & acceptance criteria, and communicated to non-technical audiences for £100M safety-critical training provision project High G Training and Test Capability resulting in a coherent testable requirement set for release to industry. - Conducted data analysis, solution generation and evaluation, to facilitate board-level decision making on £200M Tornado Synthetic Training Service contract. - Contract Management including Integrated Test Evaluation and Acceptance of high-value contractual deliveries. Negotiated, with defence stakeholders and industry, acceptable boundaries in contract change for Tornado Synthetic Training. - Authored persuasive concept documents that linked new High G Training & Test Capability to defence strategic guidance ensuring the £100M project was supported and government funded. The documents are used as best practice examples to train others. - Autonomous effective stakeholder management of very large tri service projects, and navigation of conflicting personalities, interests and opinions; developed strong interpersonal relationships with multiple stakeholders within the MOD and the Defence Industrial Base. - DOORS User, Microsoft Project User, Defence Systems Approach to Training (DSAT) Practitioner, Military Requirements Manager Training
Joint Forward Air Controller Training and Standarisation Unit (JFACTSU) - Generated a plan to address training needs and lobbied successfully for full delegated project management responsibility of two accredited, simulation training facilities that lowered risk to customers and yielded c.£3M annual savings. ->Special Recognition in Queens Birthday Honours List. - Conceived and implemented an improved planning & review cycle and a manning control system for the organisation, removing past inefficient practices. Persuading the staff to adopt this process, afforded a greater foresight and flexibility, to cope with risks to training and ultimately resulted in fewer lost training days. - Responsibility to Board Level in the Joint Air & Land organisation for ensuring two successful NATO and US accreditations of facilities, simulation training systems, and personnel. Ensured simulation could be used to replace live flying for maintenance of currency of front line forces. - Designed and then led the school through transition to a completely new training system that trained more personnel, to a higher standard, more efficiently, bringing substantial recognised benefits to Defence Air-Land integration. - Conducted the negotiations leading to the agreement of the scope of training, methods of instruction, and assessment of Close Air Support Pilot training for the squadron tasked with the majority of UK land force mission specific training. Designed and tested the syllabus with the customer, and supervised the provision of the early training that significantly raised the standard of ground forces about to deploy on operations. - As the UKs recognised defence SME for close air support training, consulted on a number of wider projects including: Estonian Air Force Training, NATO Simulation accreditation criteria, UK Advanced Fast Jet Training Syllabus, Tornado GR4 OCU Syllabus and Distributed Operational Training Capability (Land).