Work Experience
Dals | Manchester | 2022 – Present | 32 people 7 teams
Head of Software Development
Providing interpreter and translation services for the UK . I’ve built up a large department from a small team of 6 individuals. Introduced development best practices with various agile scrum techniques across 6-squads, and a dedicated independent test team. Quality across all three product lines was increased from an error capture rate of approximately 0.05% to 92.7% in two years. All squads now operate with SMART objectives per feature development. Each developer and tester have personal development plans, which along with objectives are all linked to department and business goals.
L+G | Stockport | 2020 – 2022 | 16 people 3 teams
Test & Systems Manager
Developed and tested production systems for gas & electricity smart meters for the UK market in Romania, Poland, Thailand, Mexico, Greece, and Malaysia. Developed and maintained several production operating systems and application software. Across several infrastructure technologies and application coding languages and frameworks. Established new teams across the world. Consolidated processes and procedures and established better business continuity and emergency support systems with a combination of automated statistical process control monitoring, and tactical use of out of office hours support structure. Implemented a new production system from concept to deployment.
L+G | Stockport | 2016 – 2020 | 11 people 2 teams
Lead Test & Systems
Managed the team through a change in focus and structure. From old manufacturing engineering-based processes and procedures to modern software development and testing-based approach. Designed and implemented a new system for handling gas smart meters security credentials during production and delivery. Called SMKI involved 19 people across 9 teams. Used Linux systems running C and C++ code. Web based API portal was also developed in PHP. In addition, there was an upgrade to electric meter systems to migrate from MS SQL to HANA databases. Code written in C# using .NET frameworks. Elec meter code was stored in Microsoft TFS. Gas meter code was stored in Bazaar. Security signatures were implemented using an inhouse build web API communicating with security HSM (Hardware Security Modules) units for secure storage of keys. Also developed interfaces to SAP through the standard SAP API. This was to record material consumption in production environments.
L+G | Stockport | 2014 – 2016 | 7 people 1 teams
Lead Quality Process Improvement
Responsible for quality processes across both production systems in UK manufacturing site and R&D quality compliance.
Audited entire Gas metering production site & R&D department. Applied a maturity model to gauge effectiveness and capability. Test facilities required a focused test maturity model applying. Used TPM and TMM. Findings then had to be presented to stakeholders and recommendations talked through. Led to significant change in the R&D team, especially in the test teams.
Manage day to day people activities such as hours worked, overtime, shift cover for production, objectives, reviews, performance tracking, training, holidays, sick leave and a few disciplinaries.
Employed 6 sigma drive and improvements.
L+G | Stockport | 2008 – 2014
Test & Systems Engineer
Software developer responsible for web based reporting tools and production software systems. Part of a small team of 4. Also providing maintenance of systems and support across multiple production sites. Talked with stakeholders from various countries with regard to a wide variety of projects on a regular basis.
Lucent Technologies | Swindon | 1998 – 2008 | 6 people
Lead Senior Software Tester
Led a small test team as part of a much larger test department. Worked on 2G and 3G mobile telecoms in R&D. My team was primarily responsible for automation of test systems. Also acted as a test implementation service specialist for customers around the world. I helped our customers set up test teams and understand features we provided. Ran large variety of test suited functional and non-functional.