About me

Skills

Leadership & management

Leading people and departments

Professional management

Building capable, motivated teams

An experienced, flexible technical team manager who takes ownership and builds a successful group of skilled, capable individuals — establishing trust quickly and leading from the front.

Manager leading a team meeting
Department head / director

Leading multi-team structures

Capable of leading a multi-team structure across international boundaries, with a wide variety of goals and objectives. Skilled at giving departmental focus and clear goals — organising and putting the right people in place to achieve them.

Leadership team in a meeting around a table
Strategic planning

From conception to completion

Versed in defining business cases and leading projects from conception to completion. While capable of immediate decision-making, I'm a strong believer in operational planning and risk management. Departmental and team structures should match an overall strategic plan — and I define and control the roadmap for technical delivery.

Strategy planning with notes on a glass wall
Business & personal development

Objectives that connect people to goals

Establish departmental objectives linked to team and individual objectives — achievable, measurable and concise. I use personal development plans to help employees identify their own growth and career direction, plus the steps and support needed to reach it.

Manager mentoring a colleague in discussion
Driving quality

Quality as the foundation

Much of my approach is built on quality controls — defining current status through gap analysis and risk assessment, then pushing improvements across all aspects of the SDLC and the product or service. Ultimately, customer numbers and satisfaction are the final metrics that prove success.

Reviewing quality metrics and charts
Full life-cycle control

End-to-end efficiency

End-to-end efficiency from conception to support. Every team needs to work together toward the same overall objectives — which often means restructuring and applying agile methods to suit the occasion.

Mapping a process on a whiteboard
Technical

Deep technical foundations

Maturity models

Finding capability gaps fast

Well versed in both software and test maturity models to speed up the identification of team capability gaps and process issues — CMM, CMMI, TMM, TPI, GMM and more.

Analytics dashboard on a laptop screen
Frameworks

The right tool for the situation

Experience across many development and testing frameworks, languages and systems — fitting the best tool to the situation and establishing the right cost and metric controls to prevent spiralling costs when scaling and maintaining.

Software source code on a screen
Automation & AI workflows

Pipelines that ship quality faster

Building automation into development is mandatory to be effective today. Well-structured pipelines with integrated unit, static and dynamic testing save thousands in downstream issues. Increasingly, I extend this with agentic-AI workflows — using AI for generation, testing and triage — so functional and non-functional delivery speeds up while quality holds through rigorous, continuous improvement.

Close-up of a circuit board
Technical knowledge

Three decades, hands-on

Coding since the age of 11 on a ZX Spectrum 48K. Over a career spanning more than 30 years I've been a software developer, tester, support engineer, installation engineer, quality engineer, team lead, manager and now head. I've designed, developed and supported systems across all the major operating systems (and a few others), am well versed in many coding and scripting languages, and have administered a huge assortment of databases and infrastructures.

Developer writing code on a laptop
Start our journey together

Elevate your engineering team's potential

If this resonates, I'd be happy to discuss the possibilities.

Contact me