As part of a larger digital transformation I was responsible for the architecture of their Discovery, modelling application architecture and data integration pipelines to the CMDB.

The initial deployment was minimal and did not cover the whole estate, which was airgapped. I was challenged to come up with an architecture which would be suitable enough capture data across the airgapped environments. The proposed solution involved manual DB snapshots which would be transferred by ftp, however this was later dropped in favour of deployment of a mutual shared platform, which was desperately needed.

This was a part-time multi-year engagement, during this time I developed and delivered various customatisations to their data collection and pipeline, such as:

• SSL Certificate Discovery
• Netcool edge device intergration
• Service modelling
• Reporting and analytics
• Written maintenance manual

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My company was initially approached directly by this large telecoms company to deploy Discovery with CMDB. My role as the Principal was technical lead for the project and Solution Architecture. Having worked with the client to draw up the Solution Design, they dropped the project after the first milestone, and used my Solution Design to deploy it themselves.

We were then approached approximately 12 months later by a large managed services company that had taken on the client and wanted to outsource to our Asset & Configuration service solution since they did not have the technical expertise. An intial gap analysis revealed they had mostly followed the design but were struggling in some key areas.

I worked with the MS provider to (now our customer) to workshop and architect the service, worth £240k, that we would provide which included the following roadmap:

• Extend the current deployment and resolve gaps in estate scanning
• Integrate with with Rapid7 to enhance CMDB with ownership details
• Data Quality Assurance
• Deployment of uControl for service modelling
• Credential and license management analysis
• Initiative to identify application owners to reduce risk and improve efficiency in reporting

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I was in charge of the architecture for the deployment £200k worth of solutions and a managed service for a large German consulting firm that wanted to implement a new Asset & Configuration Management function using BMC’s toolset.

Once the deployment was completed and the customer onboarded, I acted as an 3rd line escalation point issues logged through the managed service. In particular I got involved with issues with Data Quality and modelling their network environments. As part of the service they were also gauranteed regular health checks – which we provided in the form of a unique set of analytics written in Python which were exported to Power BI for presenting insights back to the customer, such as:

• Root user logins
• Vulernable open ports
• Recommendations for search and query optimisation
• Compliance issues
• Data quality issues

This unique service was provided only by the company I was working for at the time where I developed it.

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I was part of a consultancy team to deploy a new ITAM function and I was specifically responsible for discovery and integrations to the CMDB, a project worth $3m over 3 years.

The particular challenges faced were that all of their IT functionalities were outsourced to different partners and vendors and some of these partners insisted on work orders to help us with data gathering. This was a complex challenge which required some level of obtaining buy-in and negotiating with the client to get work orders processed as quickly as possible to meet our tight deadline.

I held multiple workshops with the client and partners – and we deployed a “waterfall” data pipeline for populating the CMDB.

After deployment was completed, an issue arose with the accuracy of the CMDB and the wording of the contract which was “95%” accuracy, with no caveats. The first milestone payment was held back whilst the team resolved this critical issue.

I was not directly involved with the client by this time, but as part of resolution I suggested to the account management team that they needed to ensure the contract wording was updated in future to specific automated data only. I also assisted with identifying the sources of data, and types of data – such as that which would be manually entered and would ultimately be down to the client to ensure it met “95%” quality.

The final approach with the client was to review all CIs and fields within the CMDB to be populated and adopt a MoSCoW approach, determining which data were neccesary and which data they agreed, for example, would be impossible to obtain. This massively improved the baseline results and showed that CMDB population was already very close to “95%”. After some additional work on the data pipeline the customer agreed to release the first payment milestone.

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As part of my time as a Delivery Manager I worked with an account to deploy an IT Asset Management solution as part of a Global Programme, and to fill in as Test Manager for the new Workday HR system.

The account management team for this company had been selected interally, and did not have a choice about taking the solution so there was a lot of resistance, particularly using security as a blocker. This was overcome by a global CISO sign off, however I listened to the concerns of the account that the licensing would take them over their budget and knew there was a better way to create a Win-Win scenario for them and for us.

I advised the Programme Manager that we needed to not only deploy the ITAM solution but create a package of benefits for them – which required setting up some reporting an analytics. I asked the account director to provide a breakdown of their charges for services and an export of their current asset data.

With this information, using Discovery, I was able to identify that they were underbilling by £50k annually, primarily on database services to their client. Another highlight was to replace their manual spreadsheet tracking of software with the product’s up to date OOTB software lifecycle reporting, allowing them to save time on querying manually and implement accurate, up to date record keeping.

HR Solution

I was asked to fill in as a Test Manager for a HR system rollout already in progress after the current test manager had left. The issues over resourcing meant that the delivery team had fallen behind and the deadline for implementation was at risk.

The key was to commit to being fully onsite, and obtaining buy in from the team to work extra hours to get catch up. I was in charge of ensuring that all the test scripts were completed, bugs were handled by the onsite developer, or exeptions were signed off.

With the combined effort of the team, we managed to pull the project back on track and able to deliver the implementation of the HR system to client satisfaction. Not all of the test scripts had been completed, but it was agreed with the client all significant bugs had been resolved and so the outstanding backlog were not critical to functionality and could be handed post go-live.

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I was hired as a Delivery Manager and Enterprise Architect for the global rollout of Discovery and CMDB for an international Managment Consulting company. This was a 2 year programme directed at North America and European regions worth €2m.

In the first year I identified and implemented €90k worth of cost savings to the programme by automating level 1 support so that the resources were no longer required. I led a team of 8 offshore engineers in India and Poland and was responsible for their training and managing their progress on the the deployment to individual accounts.

I reported to the Programme Manager and was responsible for not only the software architecture but the security design needed to obtain global CISO sign off and allow the programme to proceed when it hit a major hurdle and was blocked by security compliance. One of the many hurdles was implementing RBAC into the solution which had not been designed for full RBAC control.

I worked with one of my lead engineers to find and document all the group permissions available in the tool, then employed a hack to prevent certain pages from loading without the right permissions. This satisfied the requirements of Global CISO. During the process we even discovered a vulnerability that allowed access without permissions, which was reported back to the vendor. The vendor was so impressed that they asked if they could see our documentation.

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I project managed the deployment of a new ITSM system to an English County Council as part of their Digital Transformation drive. This called for multiple workshops to scope Incident, Service and Change management. One particular challenge was managing their changing requirements.

This would not ordinarily be difficult for a Project Manager to handle, but the consultant was not experienced with working under a PM or push back on requirements – therefore I discovered that the client had habit of going directly to the consultant with the changes they wanted, causing scope creep.

When I discovered this I instructed the consultant that they were to work to specification and not accept any more instruction changes from the client. This obviously did not go down well with the client who, rather than approach me, complained to the vendor directly. I defended my decision and cited the risks on delivery if the customer kept making changes to the scope without consulting the PMO.

Although they were unhappy, they did accept the points that I made. The business agreed with the vendor that we would extend the project and provide some free consultancy as a gesture of goodwill to the client, getting their agreement to stick to the budget and the plan.

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I have developed comprehensive health checks for BMC Discovery, Kubernetes, NFS and PostgreSQL. I have also developed exception reporting on data pipelines for data quality assessment. The health checks I have developed have saved customers in the following areas:

• Identified security vulnerabilities around plaintext usernames and passwords storage
• Identified issues around NFS performance
• Identified opportunities for license reclaimation
• Identified usage patterns for insecure practices (i.e. logging in as root user)
• Identified various misconfigurations in non-alignment with best practices

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Over the years I built a relationship with this global fashion brand in facilitating their ongoing digital transformation. The first engagement was in architecting and implementing a number of critical integrations with their CMDB from various data sources, allowing them to gain full central visiblity of their enterprise infrastructure. Later, I was again called upon to re-architect and extend the earlier integrations in preparation for a move of CMDB cloud platforms.

As a Principle Solutions Architect I also oversaw the technical delivery of their managed services – consulting on roadmaps and strategy with the client. I built a trusting working relationship and also proposed and worked on implementing a new feature of exception reporting, which helped them to identify, understand and narrow down the discrepencies between source data and CMDB data. The result was clear visibility and improved data quality of their CMDB.

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Over the years I have worked with a leading online betting brand to facilitate various technical and digital transformation requirements including straightforward software configuration to cloud platform migration.

My first engagement was to assist in improving their scanning performance and software license reporting which was accomplished within a three day deadline.

Later, I architected a move of their ITAM discovery solution from on-premise to a new cloud platform. I assisted in a number of areas which needed security clarification, particularly with the storage of credentials and data transfer. This did cause some delay in the migration but the client was grateful for our due diligence and went ahead with the move.

I also delivered corporate training to this customer, and worked on some customisations of their scanning solution with population of the CMDB. As a Principal Consultant at the time I oversaw the technical aspect of managed services solution that was provided to them.

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