Good afternoon gents(and ladies...),
I've been a permy now for some 8 years, having gone through about 5 or 6 different roles in that time, predominantly technical... however through change of company structure and attractive salaries I find myself in an operations management position. This has had it's up-sides, but predominantly it's a grind that I want to get out of. Having spoken to a couple of ex colleagues and a close friend, the prospect of contracting seems like it might be the way to go for me because put simply, I don't like to stay in one job for too long, I like new challenges and to be honest I like being my own boss. I'd like to go down a more technical route given that's my background but having been in permanent employment for so long it's difficult to make the assessment of whether I'm marketable or not! For reference my last few jobs have gone like this:
Let me know your thoughts!!
I've been a permy now for some 8 years, having gone through about 5 or 6 different roles in that time, predominantly technical... however through change of company structure and attractive salaries I find myself in an operations management position. This has had it's up-sides, but predominantly it's a grind that I want to get out of. Having spoken to a couple of ex colleagues and a close friend, the prospect of contracting seems like it might be the way to go for me because put simply, I don't like to stay in one job for too long, I like new challenges and to be honest I like being my own boss. I'd like to go down a more technical route given that's my background but having been in permanent employment for so long it's difficult to make the assessment of whether I'm marketable or not! For reference my last few jobs have gone like this:
Career History:
Symantec, CPE Application Support – Operations Manager March 2011 - Present
Key Achievements –
• Delivery of critical government accredited email security environment into production following 2 year build project.
• Introduction and continual backing of Operational Acceptance for Government accredited environment.
• Instrumental in driving the adoption of ITSM processes and procedures through continual service improvement initiatives.
• Implementation of Corrective Action process allowing operations to take control of repeat events & incidents and deliver time saving value to Global Operations.
Responsibilities –
• Team management of 10 engineers (EMEA region) with responsibility for Operational support of Symantec Cloud services infrastructure, including Database, Linux, Windows and Storage roles.
• Escalation and co-ordination point for Major Incident & Client Impacting issues handled by the Global Client Support centre.
• Continual service improvement advocate – delivery of service management metrics, process/tool optimisation activities.
• Change management sign off authority for changes to Symantec global infrastructure.
• On boarding/acceptance of internal or customer facing products, including UK Government security services and Managed Security Services to Fortune 500 companies.
• Directly responsibility for Problem management function - highlighting and driving solutions by metrics, for all problems related to both major incidents and repeat incidents.
• Participation in management on-call rota for out of hours escalations relating to Incident and Change.
Symantec, QA Technical Services Manager (Acting) Feb 2013 - June 2013
• As below plus:
• Management of infrastructure maintenance and labs augmentation budget.
• Expanded span of control including both Canada and India based staff.
Symantec, QA Technical Services Team Lead June 2012 – Feb 2013
Key Achievements –
• Business Improvement Award.
• Drove the implementation of replacement labs in Gloucester, Reading, Toronto and Pune with a strategic design able to support both performance and functional test or development environments, with physical and virtualised components.
• Reduced lab footprint in Gloucester from 20+ racks of legacy equipment to half that number, supporting approximately 6 times the number of environments allowing further room for expansion.
• Drove the automation of tens of different server components across different operating systems from manual, undocumented builds to automated builds able to be deployed in a number of hours. Reduction of environment provisioning time from months to days.
Responsibilities –
• Team management of 7 engineers.
• Management of entire environment delivery roadmap including scoping of environment scale.
• Worked with key stakeholders in project delivery to meet often strict timescales.
• Ensured standardised deliverables for each project based upon repeatable templates and processes.
• Management of environment footprint and enforcement of a strict “one use” policy for all project environments, as well as a strict refresh policy for permanently stood up environments.
• Continual driving of environment build defects to reduce build time significantly and allow for almost a completely unmanned delivery for fully virtualised environments.
• Implemented the vision of a “hands off” datacentre where hardware is “racked and stacked” then repurposed remotely to suit the requirements of the project.
• Implemented complete traceability around any physical or virtualised component in any lab globally. Including management of environment components, IP address allocation, physical component allocation, power allocation etc.
Symantec, QA Technical Services Engineer Mar 2011 – Jun 2012
Key Achievements –
• Continual driving of lab rationalisation and reduction of footprint.
• Rationalisation of build techniques.
Responsibilities –
• Worked closely with the project teams to gather exact requirements for projects, and architecting test solutions.
• Delivery of full end-to-end testing and development environments that mimic the Symantec production infrastructure to allow timely delivery of projects often under very tight deadlines.
• Build of physical and virtual servers using iLO, PXE, VMware ESX server and other deployment technologies using Unix and Windows servers.
• Management of the .cloud test networks in Gloucester and Toronto, as well as remote test systems hosted in London, based on Cisco switching technology and F5/Cisco 11500 series load balancing and Linux IP tables.
• Continued work with the architecture team to rationalise the existing Gloucester and Toronto networks and server infrastructure. Approximately 300 servers consolidated.
• Key involvement in delivery of new production virtualisation platforms for Gloucester, Toronto and eventually India. Close working with third party vendors to ensure delivered infrastructure fit for purpose.
Symantec, CPE Application Support – Operations Manager March 2011 - Present
Key Achievements –
• Delivery of critical government accredited email security environment into production following 2 year build project.
• Introduction and continual backing of Operational Acceptance for Government accredited environment.
• Instrumental in driving the adoption of ITSM processes and procedures through continual service improvement initiatives.
• Implementation of Corrective Action process allowing operations to take control of repeat events & incidents and deliver time saving value to Global Operations.
Responsibilities –
• Team management of 10 engineers (EMEA region) with responsibility for Operational support of Symantec Cloud services infrastructure, including Database, Linux, Windows and Storage roles.
• Escalation and co-ordination point for Major Incident & Client Impacting issues handled by the Global Client Support centre.
• Continual service improvement advocate – delivery of service management metrics, process/tool optimisation activities.
• Change management sign off authority for changes to Symantec global infrastructure.
• On boarding/acceptance of internal or customer facing products, including UK Government security services and Managed Security Services to Fortune 500 companies.
• Directly responsibility for Problem management function - highlighting and driving solutions by metrics, for all problems related to both major incidents and repeat incidents.
• Participation in management on-call rota for out of hours escalations relating to Incident and Change.
Symantec, QA Technical Services Manager (Acting) Feb 2013 - June 2013
• As below plus:
• Management of infrastructure maintenance and labs augmentation budget.
• Expanded span of control including both Canada and India based staff.
Symantec, QA Technical Services Team Lead June 2012 – Feb 2013
Key Achievements –
• Business Improvement Award.
• Drove the implementation of replacement labs in Gloucester, Reading, Toronto and Pune with a strategic design able to support both performance and functional test or development environments, with physical and virtualised components.
• Reduced lab footprint in Gloucester from 20+ racks of legacy equipment to half that number, supporting approximately 6 times the number of environments allowing further room for expansion.
• Drove the automation of tens of different server components across different operating systems from manual, undocumented builds to automated builds able to be deployed in a number of hours. Reduction of environment provisioning time from months to days.
Responsibilities –
• Team management of 7 engineers.
• Management of entire environment delivery roadmap including scoping of environment scale.
• Worked with key stakeholders in project delivery to meet often strict timescales.
• Ensured standardised deliverables for each project based upon repeatable templates and processes.
• Management of environment footprint and enforcement of a strict “one use” policy for all project environments, as well as a strict refresh policy for permanently stood up environments.
• Continual driving of environment build defects to reduce build time significantly and allow for almost a completely unmanned delivery for fully virtualised environments.
• Implemented the vision of a “hands off” datacentre where hardware is “racked and stacked” then repurposed remotely to suit the requirements of the project.
• Implemented complete traceability around any physical or virtualised component in any lab globally. Including management of environment components, IP address allocation, physical component allocation, power allocation etc.
Symantec, QA Technical Services Engineer Mar 2011 – Jun 2012
Key Achievements –
• Continual driving of lab rationalisation and reduction of footprint.
• Rationalisation of build techniques.
Responsibilities –
• Worked closely with the project teams to gather exact requirements for projects, and architecting test solutions.
• Delivery of full end-to-end testing and development environments that mimic the Symantec production infrastructure to allow timely delivery of projects often under very tight deadlines.
• Build of physical and virtual servers using iLO, PXE, VMware ESX server and other deployment technologies using Unix and Windows servers.
• Management of the .cloud test networks in Gloucester and Toronto, as well as remote test systems hosted in London, based on Cisco switching technology and F5/Cisco 11500 series load balancing and Linux IP tables.
• Continued work with the architecture team to rationalise the existing Gloucester and Toronto networks and server infrastructure. Approximately 300 servers consolidated.
• Key involvement in delivery of new production virtualisation platforms for Gloucester, Toronto and eventually India. Close working with third party vendors to ensure delivered infrastructure fit for purpose.
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