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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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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I was contracted to a this British Transport Company to provide consultancy services in the area of modelling approximately 60 business applications. Some of them had been modelled before but had fallen behind on maintenance and the model had drifted. Others needed to be modelled from scratch.

The method chosen by the client was to do the modelling through questionnaires to SMEs who would provide the initial seed data. This then allowed me to model the architecture for each application.

Whilst working onsite, I was asked if it was possible scan and report details of SSL certificates, as the company was having issues with certificates expiring. I quoted them work on developing a solution from scratch that would work with BMC Discovery. This was designed and implemented within 3 days, which allowed the client to save £20,000 on an anual subscription to a 3rd part piece of software.

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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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Pasta uses modules like pyautogui and keyboard to read the text in your clipboard and will re-type the text wherever you place the mouse pointer (even inside of a virtual environment window).

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This is quite useful in professional services for providing proprietary code and ensuring continuous subscription or forcing removal of code to render the application inoperable.

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