I was technical lead on a project worth $40k to implement the Helix Discovery SaaS solution. Since scanning hybrid infrastructure requires on-prem components there was still substantial Solution Design work required.

At this time the SaaS product was less than 18 months old and there were gaps in features and functionality in how it worked compared to the on-prem version. This led to challenges with unkown behaviour and bugs in the collector/outpost components which had to be resolved whilst maintaining client confidence in the solution they had bought.

An example challenge was in deploying shared outposts (documented as supported) between prod and dev SaaS instances. During deployment, an update was made to prod which delivered a change in key management to the outpost, and caused it to stop communicating with dev. The issue was resolved a week later when dev was updated, however it did mean that future architecture had to be updated to avoid this type of issue. Thankfully it did not impact delivery of the project.

The customer was also given value added data quality reporting allowing them to identify various gaps and misconfiguration across their estate.

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I worked as a Project Manager for a UK London based charity client who presented some difficult challenges. The ITSM deployment was standard Ivanti ITSM with Incident, Change and Service Request modules. Workshops were held and a Gap Analysis document was produced for the customer.

A standard project included only one round of review and feedback with a view to any revisions, however the client was very indecisive and had a lot of questions which resulted in several versions of the GA doc being proposed. After the solution was deployed issues were raised over design decisions – they disputed the latest version of the GA, and insisted that one of the earlier versions was the agreed version.

To resolve this, I took some time to quiz the consultant on how much effort it would be to make the changes they require, and after clarifying that it was mostly some ‘flick of the switch’ settings – I agreed that we would accomodate their disputed requirements.

After deployment, we also had to arrange training on each module. The client complained about the first trainer, so I arranged for a new trainer for the second session. This trainer also recieved complaints, so I organised another consultant for the final round of training – who predictably also recieved complaints.

As they had substantial complaints about not recieving the appropriate amount of training, I took the decision to deploy a consultant on-site for some extra consultancy days (agreed with the vendor) to for them to essentially request whatever changes they wanted and provide hands on knowledge transfer. This finally seemed to satisfy them and they even gave good feedback about my final consultant.

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A UK non-profit organisation planned datacenter move within the next 12 months. The required an understanding of their environment, the servers, applications and storage. Their main focus was on Production, DMZ and Disaster Recovery.

A successful proof of concept had been carried out prior and they were ready for deployment of the ITAM scanning solution.

A workshop was conducted to assess their capabilities and readiness as well as determine how the solution would be deployed. This results in a Solution Design and commencement of the deployment of scanning.

The client also required modelling of their application architecture in preparation, so they could understand the dependencies for the move. As well as delivering on these requirements within a six week timeframe, I was able to provide additional value by identifying approximately 100 Windows servers that were out of compliance.

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My first gig was transcribing the handwritten notes of a mother of a colleage who had passed away, for which she was very grateful and I was compensated a small sum, but I enjoyed it.

Other notes can be very difficult and STT will get you nowhere. Like the old journal below I was given to transcribe about 13 pages in all, but they can be interesting to read.

Anyone looking for assistance in digitizing personal hand-written notes should get in touch. I’d be happy to do it for them or offer some knowledge transfer in how to do it yourself with STT software.

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