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 was contracted to help win a bid for providing a managed service worth $200k to a large US-based vehicle manufacturer. They were intially discussing a multi-year deal for plant inventory discovery, however it was quickly realised by the client that it would make sense to turn this into a managed service.

The service included upgrade of current Discovery solution with right-sizing the architecture, installation of Remedy with CMDB and support services. The scope of Discovery was to scan the plant networks – the challenge being that these were on profinet and were not only sensitive equipment but scanning was only permitted under very strict windows.

We managed to complete the implementation of the solution upgrade and installation, with the implementation of the full managed service coming later due to delays on the client end. As part of value add of the service, the customer was also provided with a custom solution I developed in python that worked with the Discovery API to be able to load IP ranges with updated location information and automatically update the scan data and schedules.

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I was the technical lead on a project worth $170k to migrate the on-premise Discovery solution to to Helix Discovery SaaS.

This was a significant project as it was the first migration I had been asked to architect, so I had no templates or documentation to work off. I created the SOW, Solution Design and Project Plans. I decided that the best approach was to conduct a gap analysis and then work out what needed to achieved from there. As I had already worked several project with the SaaS platform, I was not totally in the dark.

The SaaS migration in some was would be technically easy because it was about determining what functionality would be decomissioned as it was not avialable in the cloud. However this needed to be carefully navigated with the stakeholders to reassure them that the functionality was either not needed for the SaaS platform, or there would be an alternative method/workaround for them to achieve the same results they got from the on-premise solution.

One of the interesting things turned up from the gap analysis was that they were under-licensed. As well as my company as a partner company being affected, we had a fiscal duty to report this back to the vendor. This did trigger a discussion with the client which was not initially well-recieved.

After many discussioned had taken place at the c-level I was asked for technical input as to whether there was a way they could be brought back into compliance. Fortunately, I did have an inelligant workaround solution which required a slightly more hands on approach to managing the scanning schedules and data collection. It did however provide satisfaction of the client and vendor, allowing the migration to continue successfully.

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I was technical lead on a project worth $200k 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. All bugs were logged and tracked with the vendor, but thankfully sufficiently minor that they did not delay implementation of the solution.

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

AI Led Operational Improvements

I worked in presales to present insights into their ITSM operations gathered from Talos back to the client. My involvement was in data cleansing and preparation for injesting into Talos for supervised and unsupervised learning. Once Talos had created the reports, I would then import these to PowerBI to develop the insights. With AI we were able to identify:

• Issue candidates for automation e.g. “password reset”
• Categorical data located in unstructured notes fields
• Under-utilisation of knowledge and overuse of top 5 knowledge articles suggesting need to break down into multiple topics
• Poor knowledge tagging to incident correlation, impacting the performance of the chatbot
• High MTTR for self-service leading to higher phone-resolved issues with shorter MTTR
• Discovery of sensitive (GDPR) information in unstructured text fields

This was followed up with an offer to the client to deliver the recommendations such as service desk training, restructuring categories, data cleansing, and knowledgebase improvements.

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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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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 stepped into this project as Project Manager after it had started, but the key Solution Architect had left the business. I therefore needed to provide some guidance for the project delivery but also leverage my own technical skill to support the consultant.

There were a number of issues from workshop that had not been resolved and so the first task was to align with the client on what had been agreed. I then looked at identifying change requests from the client and arranged this into a Gap Analysis with estimates as to effort.

During deployment I was able to get hands on in designing the main Nimsoft/UIM Monitoring Dashboard using the built in tooling, I also leveraged my experience with ITAM discovery to assist with setting up the SNMP traps, despite not really being familiar with the tool.

The client were very satisfied that despite the loos of our Solution Architect, the project was handled carefully and delivered as expected.

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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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