As Head of Professional Services I took over responsibility for a number of software integrations written by a bioinformatics consultant who had previously left the company. One of these integrations was supplied to a parnter organisation and had been reported to have an undetected design flaw which raised a ‘highest severity’ ticket. No-one in my team was familiar with the code, so I had to reach out and coordinate with DevOps and Engineering for assistance.

Through bargaining and persistance I secured some time of one of the lead bioinformaticians to take a look at the code, review the clients requirements and make the changes. This was the easiest part – I recognised the issue with the code myself, but as I wouldn’t understand the genomics interpretation part, I did not want to make edits myself. The second part of the issue was with clinical decisions that had already been made with the flawed code. There was little that I could do here, but it was down to me to make sure that the right resources were aware and assigned to figure out which decisions had been impacted to report back to the client.

The code fix was done within SLAs, finding the impacted clinical decisions took longer. My final action was to ensure that the application was correctly documented for future support and ensure that the client sign off on the new implementation of the code (to ensure that there is record of agreement that it now worked as expected – which was missing before).

I was also engaged with this partner through organising a resource to work on custom reporting, using a combination of python and flask. I acted as liaison and project manager with the customer ensuring that the code was developed to specification and that milestones for delivery, test and sign off were met.

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I was responsible for the improving the managed service architecture of a multi-year service contract already in-flight. There had been significant issues raised over the quality of the service up until my engagemement.

The main complaints were:

• Support resource not seen to be solving any reported issues
• Missing roadmap meetings
• Not feeling the value

An action plan and strategy was put in place, for me to conduct quarterly service reviews where I would present the latest features of the products and recommend strategy for upgrade and utilisation of these features, including any enhancements we could provide to the service.

The support resource issue was identified as being a follow on outcome of the customer not willing to log tickets and instead engaging the named resource directly. In this way the resource was being treated as a contractor and being asked to work on various unspecified tasks and issues. In discussing the issue with the client, I suggested they could either continue with no SLAs and agree to the support resource under 1-day per week effort, or that in order for us to track performance and ensure requests were deailt with, they would need to engage with the service and log tickets.

However, as many of the requests would have been out of the scope of the service and meant engagement with professional services, they did not want to implement this change. They prefered to carry on under the existing arrangement, without further complaint.

During this time I was also able to implement health checks for them and identify a number of security vulnerabilites which were esclated to their CISO. One was the identification of plaintext username/password strings in running processes, and the other was production level software running under a non-service account credential.

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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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