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 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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I was brought into save a project for a leading UK logistics company where the Discovery solution had been chosen and deployed but the initial project team had failed to deliver. The challenge was that half of the budget had already been consumed and the client took a hardline sticking to their budget. This meant I had to deliver the full requirements in half the time.

I did not have time for workshops, so I had to identify the key stakeholders and go over their list of requirements from scratch, which they gracefully accomodated. I then manged to split the requirements between must-haves and nice-to-haves using MoSCoW. This allowed me to effectively prioritise what I should tackle first.

For this customer, I modelled the applications hosted on their WebSphere platform using a combination of out of the box discovery and some additional coding. I also managed to put together a Runbook and deliver on their nice-to-have reports. They were impressed and fully satsified with the work effort. The result was that they kept the solution and came back for more future work from us.

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