Summary of Work Experience

I am a very experienced IT professional with a degree in computer based information systems and membership of the British Computer Society. My academic background was mathematical and from there I moved into computing and information technology. In my long career in IT I have gained a lot of analysis and design experience as well as good experience in project management and strategic studies. Most recently I have been working as a Progress software developer with skills in V7, V8 and V9 GUI development as well as SmartObjects. Much of the software development work I have done has meant management and execution the whole project from establishment of the requirements with the users through to implementation and support. I have been getting to know Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Visual Studio.net, Visual Basic, C#, HTML, XML and ASP and using them to build Internet based applications. I worked for over 16 years with National Girobank starting as a systems analyst and working my way through analysis and design to project management and eventually technical architecture. While there I dealt with a variety for projects including bank account ledgering and maintenance, credit scoring & debt recovery. Part of this time I worked as a project manager with responsibility for planning, resourcing, coordinating, monitoring & controlling a number of projects. I managed a team of 9 people and obtained resources from software houses and consultancies outside the organization. I had to prepare invitations to tender and the associated assessment criteria including questionnaires and weighting systems. I then worked in a small IT team in Highlands and Islands Enterprise, the main government training and enterprise funding organization covering all of the Highlands and Islands. There I turned my hand to all aspects of providing computer based solutions for the business needs including a strategic study of the computer based systems needed for the business. I also led a project to replace the organizations financial system with a solution based on CODA financials and using Cognos for reporting. This project included integration of the new software with existing legacy systems. I prepared the invitation to tender and worked with suppliers who had expressed interest so that they could provide tenders which I then assessed and put into a pre determined weighting system. Since then I have worked in a variety of roles broadening my experience to other types of company; software houses, insurance company, automobile manufacturer, and to other ways of doing things so that my experiences included traditional project lifecycle developments as well as prototyping, internal developments as well as software house developments, bespoke as well as package based. I set up my own software house with two of other IT professionals to develop internet based applications using C# and other .net tools. To set up this company I had to develop a business plan and a proposal document for funding from the local enterprise company. I have worked at all stages of project development including feasibility study, data analysis, systems analysis, design, construction, testing, implementation and support. I have written a wide variety of documents along the way including feasibility studies, requirements specifications, outline & detailed design specifications, unit and system test plans, post implementation reviews, third party contracts, service level agreements, risk analysis documents, technical architecture, applications architecture, project plans and many others. I have liaised with many types of people including internal technical staff, internal users, managers, senior managers, directors, chief executives, software providers & external contractors.