Highly motivated IT professional

FIRST CHOICE HOLIDAYS & FLIGHTS - (April 2006 to September 2007)

He joined First Choice on a 10 week initial contract, in a back fill role, for a major infrastructure roll-out project.  After a few weeks he was asked to take over the principle role of project co-ordinator for the project.  The project entailed the design, specification and implementation of a major Citrix farm, based on 20+ Windows 2003 servers, installed in London, providing desktop application delivery to First Choice resort offices around the world.  The local client was to be thin client based technology, using Wyse terminals and Citrix, over ADSL links with redundancy and fall-back. Local networks used wireless networking and the global network was to become a managed virtual network service.  Heprovided technical expertise throughout the project, together with day to day management of the implementation. It involved him visiting about 50% of the 83 resort offices world-wide during the progress of the roll-out to facilitate the local installs.  The remaining resorts were covered by 3rd party contracts.  The project is now drawing to a successful conclusion.  Initially budgeted at over £2m, the project has completed at about £400K under budget.

NETWORK RAIL - (January 2004 to April 2006)

He joined Network Rail as a Local IT Support technician, on a 6 month initial contract.  This was a 2nd/3rd Line support role, providing local support for about 400 users specifically based in offices, stations and signal boxes throughout the Network Rail "Wessex" region. (Basically this was a triangle from Woking to Havant and Yeovil).  In addition he had to provide remote support in conjunction with team colleagues to several thousand users across the entire south and east of Britain. The role was a mixture of server, desktop and laptop support.  Initially the laptops were Windows 2000 professional, and the desktops were NT4, with a mixture of NT4 and Windows 2000 servers.

During 2005 a project was carried out to upgrade all desktops and laptops to XP and the servers were migrated to Windows 2003.  Other significant projects he was involved in during this time were two separate new printer roll-outs, first of Canon Ikon copier/printers, then of HP printers.  Five major new offices, including two brand new buildings were established, plus two new training centres at HMS's Sultan and Collingwood. Five minor offices were setup, and various office moves were carried out.  Several significant changes to the CISCO network were made, with new offices coming on stream and equipment and band-width upgrades all requiring the installation and configuration of hubs, routers and switches.

There were a couple a changes in backup strategy, with a shift from BackupExec to Vbak data warehousing.  When this then proved to be too expensive, HP Data Manager was rolled out.  It was one of his duties to ensure that the backups were carried out reliably and any restores done swiftly.

UserID configuration was done initially using Windows NT user manager tools and Enterprise Administrator.  When XP was rolled out, Active Directory became the dominant tool in use.  Exchange Administrator was used to maintain the Exchange network.

The support was a mixture of deskside, requiring many thousands of miles of driving during the course of two years, and remote support using SMS tools, and later the XP remote assistance tools.  Occasionally it was necessary to provide support to staff at their homes.

There was an on-call rota, which required him to attend major system failures during the night or weekend on several occasions.  This included a complete server rebuild to a Windows 2000 server after a disk array failure, completed successfully by 8am with no loss of service to the users.

IBM - (Lloyds TSB Group) (September 1998 to September 2003).

He joined IBM on the desktop services support contract for Lloyds TSB Group in Brighton initially on a 3 month contract as a 2nd/3rd line support engineer. His role was to support over 100 Netware and Windows NT servers and gateways, 2500 desktop PC and dumb terminal users running a mixture of Windows versions across the Brighton campus of 8 buildings.  Obviously with Y2K then looming there was a large degree of testing and upgrading to ensure compliance and support over the period.  Post Y2K, the next concern was the migration towards a standardised desktop and server platform throughout the bank.  This was carried out by 3rd party contractors but required a large amount of support by IBM.  The process was eventually complete so IBM advised him that his contract would not be renewed after 5 years of continual support.

During this time he acted as the deputy team leader for several years, and during the team-leader's extended sick-leave he entirely managed the team alone for several months.  Being extremely flexible he spent some time as a remote support engineer, visiting sites all over the south of England. He also carried out server installation and removal, and server acceptance testing at various sites and was very familiar with the bank's IT infrastructure, including aspects not under IBM support.  He frequently was required to "bridge the knowledge gap" between PC network and IBM mainframe network staff.

Throughout this time Nigel worked on COMPAQ and HP servers and PCs and IBM Laptops, providing support and assistance for users of Windows 9x, NT, 2000 and XP, and vast range of software products.

BRAINTREE COLLEGE - Consultancy (1997)

In December 1997 the college was experiencing a whole range of problems with their Windows NT network, including virus attack. He provided a consultancy service to establish and identify the causes of their problems and recommended what means of remedial action could be taken.  He then assisted college staff with the implementation of the solution.

CAPITA - Systems Controller (February 1994 - August 1998)

He joined Hadrian-Solway (a third party pensions administration company) initially on a six month contract as "Systems Controller", basically IT manager. He was responsible for a team of four staff, and a budget of £1/2 Million. He had full responsibility for the entire IT operation, but the main brief was the migration away from IBM mainframes based in Farnborough to a NetWare LAN in both Farnborough and Glasgow. His duties included monthly budgeting, contract negotiation for hardware supply, maintenance, support, and disaster recovery contracts. Personnel management meant all staffing issues, including recruitment, discipline and dismissal. This was very much a hands-on role with him taking charge of all the network development and support issues including router configurations, and all telecom aspects. A new network was designed, installed and configured with "voice-over-data" between the two offices, to reduce the company phone bill. During this time the reliability of the network was dramatically improved, and savings of approximately £100,000 were achieved in various areas, especially the hardware supply and maintenance contracts.

Hartshead acquired Hadrian-Solway in 1995 to become Hartshead Solway. The head office was now located in Sheffield, where they were running a Pathworks network, supporting clustered DEC VAXes. Obviously the role changed, and he was charged with the task of integrating the two networks, and providing ongoing support for the NetWare systems. In 1996 Hartshead Solway acquired the Motor Industry Pensions Scheme in Leighton Buzzard, and again he had the job of connecting the networks, which by now included Windows NT. This was achieved using Cisco routers, which Nigel installed and configured. He also visited many client sites, to install dial-in, ISDN, or kilo-stream connections to the company's network. By this time the IT team based in Farnborough had grown to a total of seven staff.

In 1997 the Capita group acquired Hartshead Solway. Once again mixed NetWare and NT networks needed to be combined. However, the Leighton Buzzard office was closed almost immediately, and he also had to project manage the network aspects of this closure. He then concentrated on Year 2000 issues within the company. In April 1998, Capita decided to close the Farnborougb office, with the work being relocated to Basingstoke, Sheffield, Darlington & Glasgow. His final task was to project manage this exercise, which was completed by early August 1998.

BRITISH SUGAR - Various contracts (1992 to 1994)

He worked for British Sugar on several different projects, over a two-year period. One was a VM support role for the IBM Mainframe. There then followed two separate internal PC rollout projects as they switched from  OS/2 to Windows but retained IBM PC-LAN. Finally a supplier/haulier depot PC rollout took place using X25 packet switching.

INTERNATIONAL DISTILLERS OVERSEAS SERVICES - Database & Network contract (1991)

He configured International Distillers NetWare Server/PC network in Saffron Walden, and provided database development programming for them.

KABCO WHOLESALE LIMITED - Upgrade contract (1990)

He provided consultancy services to Kabco when they were planning to upgrade their UNIX server. He also provided technical support when they installed Word-Perfect under UNIX and set-up a remote dial-in facility for the Managing Director.

LONDON BOROUGH OF LEWISHAM - Technical Support (1989)

He provided VM/VSE and SNA networking support for Lewisham council on their Comparex mainframes, for a nine-month contract. During this time one mainframe was replaced, the other upgraded and major changes to the network were undertaken. He specified, planned and managed these changes.

INDEPENDENT SOFTWARE SUPPORT LTD - Oct 87- Nov 89

He provided systems programming support, both on-site and by telephone for approximately 30 of the company's clients during his period of service.

The work was inevitably extremely varied in scope, complexity and duration. He installed, maintained or worked with almost every available version of MVS, VM, and VSE.  IBM networking was his more specialised (non-operating system specific) areas, but he also worked with many different databases.

For some clients he provided training courses, for others he acted as project leader or even Technical Support Manager. Capacity planning and performance tuning were frequent requirements. Planning and implementing hardware & software upgrades involved meetings with third-party vendors. On occasions he interviewed potential technical support staff for customers.

WIGHAM POLAND/SEDGWICK GROUP - Jul 82-Oct 87

He joined Wigham Poland as a Senior Programmer, writing COBOL applications for both batch systems and SHADOW/Il, and running a team of 4 analyst/programmers. He quickly became involved in upgrading both the hardware and the operating systems to VM, VSE, SHADOW and CICS. He also converted all files and programs from SAM to VSAM. Soon he installed and configured a remote network.  When the company was taken over by the Sedgwick group and all systems were migrated, Nigel oversaw the process.

He joined the Sedgwick Technical Support Group to become a full-time systems programmer. Taking control of all aspects of VM support, ORACLE and FOCUS databases were installed, and the user base rapidly grew to be in excess of 1,000

Gradually, systems were rationalised to just VM and MVS running on five CPUs at two sites. He set up a VTAM/SNA  network maintained using NETVIEW. Implementing the appropriate changes in the MVS environment, and with RSCS and VM/Passthrough on all VM systems. using the appropriate links, users could communicate or transfer data between any VM or MVS system on any processor, and could transfer documents between PROFS and the WANG office minis. Whilst training other staff in VM, he set up a separate test GCS and VTAM network to allow VM VTAM testing of changes to be carried out at any time. Finally he implemented ACF2 security across the board.

Once this was complete he decided to concentrate further on MVS. He started by developing and supporting the MVS systems, which at that time were 13 MRO systems. Next he worked on IMS/DB which also was linked to the CICS systems. He installed and implemented a new release of MVS including DBRC & IRLM, using CBIPO, and then evaluated and installed ADR/Librarian both under MVS and VM. All MVS work made use of TSO.

MECCA BOOKMAKERS LTD - Aug 81-Jul82

joined as a cobol application programmer developing in house applications, including hand-writing recognition software.

MAY & BAKER LTD - Jan 79-Aug 81

Started as a trainee programmer.  Eventually joined the payroll support team. 

BRITISH STANDARD ASSURANCE ASSOCIATION - Jan 77-Dec 78

Non IT role in a insurance company, dealing with motor insurance claims.