Curriculum Vitae

I was initially the lead developer on a project to increase the size of two fields on the main mortgage database. This project had board level oversight as had it gone in late, the society would have had difficulties selling mortgages. Although this did not require a database restructure, it did require a close examination of every single program that accessed those records, along with a large number of screens and external files. It was my specific responsibility throughout to ensure that the DDS was maintained in such a way as to ensure other systems and projects were not inconvenienced. As this system interfaced closely with a lot of other systems, many on other platforms, within and without the society, it was necessary to ensure all these systems were made aware of the changes to the mortgage system, and to ensure that any changes in the interfaces between systems were properly tested. As the project progressed I became responsible for working with the senior users to ensure the smooth running of the system testing.

I became responsible for the planning of the various initial production releases as autonomous parts of the project became ready, and was instrumental in the planning, implementation and support of the final production release; which required coordinating with two other systems as it was discovered that they would have to implement their changes at the same time. This eventually required over 400 modules, COBOL and AM, to be released to production just before Christmas.

After the final main release, the team was scaled down to just myself on a part time basis to identify and fix any faults that were discovered from the release. At this time, and for the remainder of my contract, I began to work on a number of small changes to many parts of the Mortgage system: general bug fixes, small system enhancements, and one-off reports. I also worked on a small data cleansing project, identifying accounts with errors in insurance premium calculations.

Working primarily on the 'Metered DCS' project, this involved the design, coding and testing of both batch and online TP code for the new Debt Collection System for Metered water accounts. I wrote the implementation plan for the project, and was closely involved with the live implementation. During the latter stages of the project I was involved with supporting the User Acceptance Testing phase, helping to diagnose and fix faults, as well as running batch jobs as requested by the Thames Water UAT team.

During the latter part of December, and all of January, I was the designer, programmer and tester on the CRYPTO project, identifying and generating letters to all properties affected by the Cryptosporidium outbreak in North Wales. This involved generating reports to enable Welsh Water staff to check and correct customer data prior to sending out Boil notices, All clear notices or Inconvenience Payments, as well as generating the Inconvenience payment processing.

I was also the designer and developer for some important changes to the Automatic Refunds processing and have also done some coding and testing for the interface to the new Banktec Payment Protection System, and to the Affordability Discount system.

Responsible for designing, coding and testing for any aspect of Northern Rocks business as required. Responsible for the maintenance of the Code generators, as well as the RTE test environment. Responsible for development of part of the BACS requirements for the transfers of Direct Debits and Standing Orders between financial institutions.

This employment was spent partly working on the Red Emperor site in Luton, and partly working from home.

During the time spent working in Luton I helped to develop and extend the functionality of the main Red Emperor game The Ancients. This involved changing and extending both the HTML templates and the perl scripts which drive the games interface. I was involved, at a basic level, with some changes to the MySQL database most notably in the membership parts of the database. I was also responsible for writing the membership renewal system, and for its interface to the Royal Bank Of Scotlands world-pay system which Red Emperor uses for credit card payments.

From home I developed the complete user interface to the new game Conquest which is a simplified version of The Ancients. This involved the merging of various 'Ancients' HTML templates, as well as the merging of the related Perl scripts. Writing a small number of new scripts, and removing all the unnecessary parts from the newly merged scripts. I was also responsible for the new colour scheme, having been told simply to change from blue to red.

Since then and on a part time basis, working from home, I am in the process of developing and writing from scratch a completely new game that is not based on any of the existing Red Emperor games. This will involve all aspects of the MySQL database and data design, the basic HTML templates, as well as the perls scripts for both the interface and the turn processing 'batch'.

I was responsible for the production and testing of code for the RDF client (Northern Rock Building Society). This involved just about all aspects of the clients business, mortgage maintenance, insurance, broking, etc. I was responsible for the programming and testing, including generation of test plans and logs, of batch and TP code, both COBOL and, where appropriate, SCL. I have also been responsible for the design and development of tools to assist in the generation of production SCL, and to validate code against current site standards.

Working as part of a large design team on the next release of the Job Seekers Allowance Payment System, my job involved taking a high level design, and turning that into functional and technical design packs, developing test plans for both system and business testing, and arranging revues and sign off of the various packs. Due to the nature of the work, there were often tight time scales, and working long hours was not uncommon. I worked on two principle projects alongside a number of smaller pieces of work. The first was database tidyups, dormant case deletion, involving a lot of complex batch procedures, as well as one off batch runs. The other involves the generation of statistical information for the new Joint Claims being introduced by the Government. Once programming began, my responsibilities extended to supporting the programmers, giving talks on how the proposed chnges were to work, helping them to identify the actual code changes required, and resolving any difficulties that they may have with either their coding or testing.

I became responsible for ensuring that the user departments were able to write their own test conditions and test scripts, explaining quite complex computer processes to non technical people.

During this period I also became jointly responsible for ensuring that a large number of changes that had been specified were 'reflected' back into the baseline specifications, ensuring that the code changes and the specification changes matched.

I was responsible for a large number of correspondence changes related to Phoneday2, as the AA used a lot of 0990 numbers. I was also responsible for a number of minor changes related to ABI compliance rules, as well as a major data cleansing exercise.

Part of a small team, involved with the VME side of the Booker Food System, involving fix-on-fail for batch and TP, but also included developments and enhancements.

Involved in system fixes to both the AM and the TP cobol, some cobol batch fixes, and enhancements to the batch SCL.

Developed a batch suite to auto generate downloads to the unix based depot systems, alongside the development and testing of a number AM transactions that required splitting into smaller dialogues.

Two and a half months on backlog support, clearing very old calls, involving full access to the live systems, identifying whether they were data or code faults, and passing the information to the appropriate team.

Moved to a development team working on small and medium sized projects. My involvement began at the start of the programming phase, and once system and business testing had started, I would support these phases alongside the ongoing programming. I did some initial overnight support for the first live overnight batch runs. During all changes, anything that could have Y2K implications, was highlighted and specific tests applied to ensure year 2000 compliance.

I worked on two phases of the Customer/1 (OSE) project, involving the passing of money between the gas and electricity systems. Responsible for changes to lots of batch modules as a large number of record types on the files had extra data inserted to identify type of account, and for statistical aggregations. Also responsible for splitting the reports, into three, adding new functionality at the same time. During this project, I wrote a number of SCL procedures to help the system testers control their testing environments.

Developed new module to control tariffs available to customers in arrears, which had to be able to be run in both batch and TP environments and involved extensive batch and TP testing, using both ITS and TPES. Responsible for amending TP messages to enable the new processing, and also the development of new TP messages, based on existing ones.
Responsible for new TP messages for quotations of, and to put customers onto, advanced payment tariffs. I was also closely involved with the batch changes for the change in billing for when the credit ran out, or for when a customer asked to go back onto a standard scheme requiring a refund. Also involved with design re-work to cater for unusual conditions. Spent a lot of time supporting the business acceptance testing, helping identify unexpected results from tests, and helping in the setup of some test data.

Part of the Motor insurance development team, I was responsible for changes to all parts of the system, including batch, on-line and PC code. Also jointly responsible, for support of the live correspondence system, checking any failures as they occured, and repairing the failed letters.
Responsible for ensuring that new releases of the software were made available to the user support team. During analyst and user testing stages of a release, I was responsible for any fault reports returned, ensuring that they received prompt attention, either from the original programmer, or by myself in liason with the original programmer.

From January 1996 worked on the Home insurance fault team, diagnosing faults and liasing with the user support team in Newcastle. As the Home system is a clone of the Motor system, this involved liason between the teams, both to identify differences, where Motor code is not valid for Home, and to identify similarities, where a bug may be present in both. Developed ad-hoc programmes to identify and correct invalid data.

From January 1997, part of the Y2K team. This involved all phases after the user requirements stage, up to program test. I also did some pilot work on the home insurance system to try and identify, in advance of the main work starting, any problems that may occur or any good practices that may need to be followed for this and other systems.
Also designed, coded, and tested bridging programmes that allow Y2K compliant data to be passed to non Y2K compliant systems.

General development and support programmer on wide ranging areas of the BankMaster system, batch and on line: letter production, cyclic and non-cyclic actions, insurance, payment and residual interest calculation, multi-account loans, further advance processing, interest rate history, statementing, IPT, and account history. Responsible for introducing a number of SCL and Cobol standards, new IDMS protocols, and standardising data dictionary usage.. In charge of project ensuring all batch SCL would restart after a failure. Responsible for complete design plus initial development of large batch suite for when HMC bought the mortgage book of another company.

Chief First-aider at HMC, running all the first-aid team meetings which took place, ensuring new first-aiders recruited as necessary, and all certificates and boxes up to date.

Development of release 3 and 4, products database (PDB) in AM. Mostly design, coding and testing, though some analysis work was also involved. Responsible for setting up and testing IDMS re-organise and restructure procedures for release 3. In charge of release 3 implementation and initial support, including set up of query-views for release 4 and for the organisation database. Upgraded internal Lafis database from release 6.1 to release 8.1. Development, including analysis and design, of new lafis implementation. Designed and wrote SCL for IRAS-AR implementation. Responsible for documenting the availability of support documentation for a large number of systems prior to a transfer of support responsibility. Second line support for about 100 systems and implementations.

Development of DME to CPM and Supercalc link. Development of CPM based Nursing training records system. Development of VME Hospital Inpatient System (HIS), including DME to VME conversion software, in charge of DDS for project. Complete implementation, support and all end user training for Family Practitioner Committee (FPC) system at two FPC's. Implement and support IDMS/TPMS Manpower Management System (MMS). Responsible for planning the reorganise and re-structure of MMS. In charge of MMS liason with West Midlands RHA