London Borough of Southwark – April 2023 till November 2025
Role: Programme Manager

Objective: Managing the migration from all current servers, databases and applications from the on premise datacentre to Microsoft Azure.

Detailed overview:
Financial responsibility for the programme, £8m and staff responsibility 50+ FTE
Technical direction on cloud hosting, SaaS and cloud printing
Providing financial control on Microsoft Azure spending through FinOps
Technical direction of a Zero Trust Network Architecture to provide a secure environment
Responsible for the business justification of direction on cloud
Writing the Gateway report for procurement and contract management
Managing third parties and off-shore development

Cloud migration detail
During the 2 years and nine months the London Borough of Southwark worked together with Infosys on the migration of all servers with their application to Microsoft Azure. The approach was to build a SQL cluster in Azure and migrate the databases from the Brent datacentre to Microsoft Azure. Subsequently analyse the servers and map out the applications that need to be migrated. Applications that were running on 2008 R2 server or 2012 and 2026 server version needed to be upgraded as part of the migration. The migration approach was to look at the applications and see if there was a Software as a Service option available. What this would cost in comparison with cost of running it in Microsoft Azure and with current support. If there was a business case for using the SaaS option than this would be the preferred option.
The cost of running servers in Microsoft Azure oppose to an on premise datacentre to Microsoft Azure can be a lot higher so it is important to make sure that servers are decommissioned when no longer required. Test environments not left running if the testing is completed and making sure that there is a general tidiness around housekeeping.

London Borough of Lambeth – October 2021 till July 2024
Roles: Senior Technical Project Manager (October 2021 – March 2023) Cloud Consultant (March 2023 – July 2024)

Objective: SD-WAN and cloud migration

Detailed overview:
SD-WAN – Full end to end implementation if the migration from MPLS to SD-WAN. This included governance, procurement using Crown Commercial Services RM3808, design planning and site by site migration of circuits. The contract was signed on 4th April 2022 and the project team started with the planning of the migration from MPLS to SD-WAN. The new contract after the contract award started with a pilot and later bigger locations and finally the core sites. The Council had over 120 MPLS circuits and not all circuits were required going forward. This cleanup exercise saved the Council over £100k a year.

  1. Procurement phase
  2. Due diligence phase; mapping the locations with site contacts circuits reference numbers and comms cabinet layout in terms of power and room for the new router
  3. Design phase and configuration
  4. Procurement of hardware
  5. Pilot phase
  6. Migration phase

Microsoft Azure – Lambeth Council wanted to move to the cloud and migrate all their servers and applications to Microsoft Azure. I created a business Case and a Cabinet Report to secure funding for this work to commence. The migration of applications to Azure requires knowledge of what is currently installed on the servers and if the application can be migrated to Azure. I started this by doing an application landscape exercise.

  1. What applications are in use today
  2. Prioritising them into categories of importance, core and non-core
  3. Looking at the application need in terms of in memory, CPU and load balancing
  4. Are there legacy applications that need to be replaced
  5. Do applications need other servers to communicate to
  6. Who are the vendors and is Azure supported
  7. What contracts have we got with suppliers
  8. Create a Migration Business Case with cost breakdown and migration path.
  9. Provide hybrid options for application stacks

The plan was changed to a migration to Amazon Web Services instead. During the planning I was involved as an consultant.

How it was done: For details on how to do a MPLS to SD-WAN migrations, please the published paper. For details on the Azure migration see published paper.

OneSource is a internal service provider for London Borough of Newham and London Borough of Havering – September 2019 till September 2021
Role: Programme Manager, Senior Project Manager

Objective: Remediation on servers and network

Detailed overview:
Network workstream – The infrastructure components such as network and servers had reached or even exceeded end of life status. The network hardware could not be re-procured as it required a complete redesign of the the network. Newham and Havering Council under the managed service of OneSource had their networks merged without an holistic view on how to create a single network. The intention was to create a zero-trust network that would be secure and give the same level of security working from home as working in the office. It would be based on Cisco hardware with Palo Alto firewalls.

Applications workstream – Most applications were running on servers that were hosted in the on premise datacentre. The intention was to find suitable candidates for migration to SaaS and migrate the majority into Microsoft Azure cloud.

Backup workstream – The servers were backed up using older software and it was known that backups were failing and no restore was possible. A new backup was urgently required but with SaaS and Microsoft Azure the footprint in the on premise datacentres would reduce requiring a smaller backup array.

AOVPN – The VPN solution was Direct Access and with the rollout of new laptops it was a senior management decision to replace Direct Access with Always on VPN.

Windows 2008 Server and TLS1.0x – The applications were a mixture of old and new applications with some of the older applications managed by the departments oppose to OneSource. The issue with this was that there was no driver to upgrade to later versions so applications became stale. With Windows 2008 r2 going out of support and Microsoft increasing (doubling every year) the extended support cost it was obvious that the applications needed to be upgraded and moved to the latest version of Windows server. The same was true for applications requiring TLS1.0 or 1.1 and later 1.2.

How it was done
The immediate concern was to eliminate the risk with the firewalls. There were 2 Microsoft Thread Management Gateway (TMG) firewalls pairs that had reached end of extended support and were failing. During the failure the other TMG firewall would take over after a manual reconfiguration but the user experience would be poor. The senior management team instructed the TMG firewalls to be replaced by 4 existing Cisco ASA firewalls that were still supported. The Cisco ASA firewalls were still older technology and not able to provide a zero-trust network but would take the pressure off in the first instance. The network team investigated the rules and we split out functionality that was coming off the TMG and would not go on the ASA. Once the rules were cleaned up the ASA were configured and tested. The first pair was migrated over the weekend with all application teams doing the UAT on the day. Withing 2 weeks both firewall pairs were migrated without any problems or disruption. The network architect worked with the project team to design a resilient and secure network. The design, business case and cost model were created and submitted for approval.
Windows 2008 R2 was out of support and we had a lot of applications that needed to be upgraded. The application either needs Windows 2008 and older versions of SQL and TLS and there is no upgrade possible. At a price, the application can be upgraded and there may be professional service time charged by the vendor. At best the application is working on a later version but just needs to be installed and tested. In this scenario at OneSource it was mixed.

The project started with the creation of a business case where all requirements and options were recorded. After that there was a Proof of Concept preceding the actual choice of what backup solution to procure. We asked ArcServe to provide us with 2 appliances and they were installed and the PoC was signed off and the business case was approved. Senior management did however not give the approval for procurement.

https://www.snowsoftware.com/Applications falling out of the Windows 2008 upgrade and that could be moved into Microsoft Azure were build and migrated. The project did an Azure Cloud Readiness Assessment with Microsoft to determine suitability. We also used Cloudscape eDiscovery and SNOW software.

London Borough of Enfield – February 2019 till September 2019
Role: Programme Manager

Objective: The business case for this programme was to reduce revenue spending and to replace unsupported hardware.

Detailed overview:
The core business applications were hosted by a service provider and these services such as SAP and Skype for Business needed to be migrated to the on-site datacentre and to Microsoft Azure. The the LAN hardware was out of support and required a large investment to replace. The WAN design had to be brought in line with the strategic direction of the Council and circuits to be upgraded or terminated. The laptops and desktops were older than 5 years and running on Windows 7 this needed to be replaced with new hardware creating a mobile work force.

  • Windows 10 device roll-out of 5000 end users devices (95% laptops and 5% desktops)
  • Building a on-site datacentre (HP servers, UPS, cooling and network)
  • BYOD implementation with Microsoft Intune
  • Cisco network refresh from design to implementation of all LAN hardware
  • WAN redesign
  • Skype for Business migration from on premise to online and to Teams
  • SAP migration (Virtual to Virtual) from hosted datacentre to onsite and Azure
  • Data centre migration decommissioning
  • Full procurement life-cycle of hardware, professional services and software
  • Programme value 10 million, staff size 30+

London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham – September 2017 – January 2019
Role: Programme Manager

Objective: Moving services and data from a shared service between Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea to a separate LBHF service

Detailed overview:
Average programme value 1.5 million, staff size 20+
Responsible for 3rd party management and full procurement process
Public Service Network (PSN) compliance project
Implementation of Artificial Intelligence AI software for the telephony system
Construction project ‘Stephen Wiltshire Centre‘

Kensington and Chelsea and Westminster – March 2017 – July 2017
Role: Programme Manager

Detailed overview
Bi-Borough wide technology review and strategic planning.
Windows 10, 5000 users, Cloud migration and Microsoft 365 (Office 365, Exchange, Skype for Business, SharePoint migration, OneNote and Intune), Strategic alignment of organisational direction and technology roadmap.

London Borough of Islington – October 2014 – December 2016
Role: Senior Project Manager/ Programme Manager

Detailed overview
Council wide Windows 7 upgrade on 4000 devices and end to end implementation of XenApp 7.11.
Office 365 implementation and Exchange mailbox and SharePoint migration.
Average programme value 1.5 million, staff size 20+.

Tate Galleries – July 2023 – August 2014
Role: Senior Project Manager

Detailed overview
Evaluation and design of a VDI platform using the DELL vWorkpace solution for virtual desktop.
Email migration from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010.
Average project value 1 million, staff size 10+.

British Telecom – February 2013 – July 2013
Role: Consultant

Detailed overview
Feasibility study and upgrade from Citrix 5.0 to XenApp6 and migration of 50 servers and a rollout of Windows 7 and MS Office 2010 to 9000 end users and migration of 5000 applications.
Average contact value 1.1 million, staff size 30+

Advanced 365 – April 2012 – January 2013
Role: Senior Project Manager

Detailed Overview
Implementation of Citrix XenApp6 environment, upgrade to MS Office 2010 and, implementation of a call management system (Zeacom), database migrations and virtualisation of servers.
Average contact value 1 million, staff size 7 internal and 3 external suppliers

Deloitte – September 2011 – April 2012
Role: Senior Project Manager

Detailed overview:
Implementation of Citrix XenApp6 environment, Upgrade to MS Office 2010 and Exchange 2010, hardware refresh and roll out of Windows 7, Telephony upgrade of the core telephony system and migration from Mitel Nupoint voicemail system to Microsoft’s Exchange 2010 UC product suite.
Budget responsibility 3.5 million and staff size 35 internal and 20 externals.

London Borough of Ealing – June 2011 – September 2011
Role: Senior Project Manager

Detailed overview
Managing the migration of staff and hardware between buildings of London Borough of Ealing.

Agilisys Limited – September 2010 – March 2011
Role: Senior Project Manager/ Programme Manager

Detailed overview
Managed the Workplace Strategy Programme and solution proposal phase for migration from Citrix 4 to XenApp 6, frontend and backend upgrade, roll out of a new software deployment tool, standardising to Windows 7, Implementation of videoconferencing and upgrading to MS Office 2010. Project size was 3,000 users and budget 1.2 million.

Capita PLC – August 2006 – August 2010 (permanent position)
Role: Programme Manager

Detailed overview

  • Building Schools for the Future – July 2009 – January 2010. To deliver the ICT Solution to Durham County Council, inspiredspaces intend to implement a centralised and resilient virtual platform to deliver key services over the existing WAN infrastructure. The key drivers for the design have been based around providing a high availability solution to support the schools, whilst minimising the quantity of physical servers and space required for the ICT Solution, both recognising and maintaining the green agenda. inspiredspaces will implement the solution within the Tanfield Data Centre with assistance and working alongside the Managed Service Unit (MSU) who will be taking over the support of the solution on completion of the implementation. The existing facility offers the highest level of resilience and security within a leading edge environment.
  • Group4Security Eviper – 26 February 2009 – 18 May 2009 The eViper application supports the Group 4 Securicor (G4S) Cash Services business by providing track and trace audit functionality on the movement of cash containers. The application allows Cash Services branches (or depots) to plan and schedule cash deliveries and collections onto what is known as a trip. Once a trip has been planned, details of scheduled deliveries and collection of cash containers are downloaded to a hand held terminal (HHT) via a docking station (cradle) at the “home” branch.  This is done at the start of a shift. All containers will be assigned a unique bar code reference number known as a seal number. The crew scan all containers scheduled for delivery, and take the HHT on the road, carrying out deliveries and collections.  All containers are scanned at the point of delivery and collection, and receipts are issued to customers to confirm date and time of collection. Once all deliveries and collections are complete, the crew return to their “home” branch and download all data from the HHT to eViper via cradles, transferring cash containers to the vault. Vault personnel also scan containers to verify what is being transferred from the vehicle to the vault. All transfer of data from eViper to the HHT is achieved using middleware called TaskMaster provided by a third party (TBS). 
  • CWA – The current estimate is that this project will be migrating 655 users on Neoteris, 628 users on Business Port and 265 users on IP Stream. Users will be migrated in small groups of not more than 100 users at a time. This is to ensure that the workload at Infrastructure Services Technical Operations is manageable and that any disruption is containable. Original access will stay in place till the new access on either of the 3 service offerings (Neoteris, IP Stream or Business Port) is proven to work.
  • Service Birmingham – Managing the business transformation at Birmingham City council. Transformation Methodology.
  • BBC TV Licence Bristol – The objective of this project was changing the way you can pay for the TV licence. Payments can now be taken over the internet. The project created this internet page and payment processing functionality.
  • Datacentre migrations at Capita Hartshead Pensions
  • Resolution Life Group in Glasgow – Separation of the infrastructure of Resolution Life Group from Abbey. National.
  • Turbine Surface Technologies Limited (TSTL) is a 50% Rolls Royce owned organisation whose primary business operation involves the application of coatings to aerospace components, with approximately 250 employees and 70 IT users. Since the loss of their own IT resource earlier this year, IT support has been provided by Simon Cope from Ross Ceramics on a scheduled weekly site visit basis. User support requirements have therefore been grouped together for resolution during the scheduled onsite visit. Active monitoring and management of systems and currently not undertaken with only scheduled essential maintenance undertaken of current systems. A number of routine maintenance activities will need to be re-established e.g. sever patch management is out of date, no central policy server for anti-virus management especially to user devices.
  • CHKS – Capita Health acquired CHKS in the first quarter of 2009. The company provides data services and consultancy in the health sector.  Capita Health and Capita ITS have recognised that there could be significant benefits in moving the IT elements of the business into Capita ITS. There are three distinct parts to the proposed solution for the provision of IT Services to CHKS. The first being the management of the existing service, the second a move to a new hardware and software platform and the third the transition of the CHKS technical staff into BI team, application Services. Moving the development and support of IT deliverables into ITS will allow CHKS to focus on the consultancy service for which it is renown across the health sector.
  • Hardshead – The driver for Hartshead is to house their applications on new servers as the old servers are reaching end of life and support for both hardware and software becomes an issue in 2011. The Capita Hartshead systems are currently hosted on physical Tru64 servers by Enterprise Services at West Malling and Laindon and will be migrated to the Capita MSI New World at West Malling, where it will run virtual AIX servers. The New World solution will consist of nine AIX Logical Partitions.  There will also be four Windows Virtual servers; one an SFTP server, one Sonic MQ server, one Hartlink exchange server and the other a Web Server (CHHVPWMWEB01, already in existence). Capita Hartshead would like to use the Hot Dr Solution with all the DR servers also being actively used for the development, test and QA systems that relate to the live applications running on the corresponding server in West Malling and will utilise the Raid 5 SAN configuration.
  • Malard Move
  • Refopipe – Business Support has rebranded “Refopipe” to “the Resource Scheduler” and the product will be road tested during a pilot phase. The pilot was first rolled out to the project managers to assess its usability. With the feedback from the pilot users the Resource Scheduler was later enhanced and will be migrated from the current DR server at Railtrack NCCA to a dedicated virtual server in MSI at West Malling.

EDS United Kingdom – August 2004 – August 2006 (permanent position)
Role – Senior Project Manager

Detailed overview
Control of budgets up to £4.3million, reporting to the senior programme manager for EDS; using standard PM2 methodology and tools to control budget, risks, issues and workload; proactive lead in identifying customer requirements and analysis of key deliverables and success factors; delivered training and mentoring to customer’s staff to enable future self-sufficiency.

Department for Work and Pensions – Working on software upgrades and migrations in Newcastle and Lytham St Annes

EDS Netherlands – September 1998 – August 204
Role: Project Manager/ Commercial Manager

Detailed overview
General Motors – SAP software release for Germany and the UK

Dow Chemicals – Implementation of workflow management software and Voice Over IP software implementation

Outsourcing of the Ericsson IT department to EDS to lead the bid for successfully transform the IT department to a managed service including staff

The Greenery in Zoetermeer – managing the network related projects from design through to implementation and installation. A challenging environment of that is relying on a 24/7 network infrastructure consisting of Cisco hardware.

Vodaphone in Maastricht – device rollout of new desktops 5000. Full project lifecycle from design to handing over to support

Koninklijke Marine (Royal Navy) – September 1995 – Augustus 1998
Rank: Luitenant ter Zee

HNLMS Van Amstel (F831) PAME – July 1995 – 1997

August 1995 assisted in the response after Hurricane Luis at the island of Sint Maarten in the Netherlands Antilles.

Zr.Ms. Van Speijk (F828) PAMB – September 1997-1998

Honourable discharge

Education

Koninkijk Instituut voor de Marine KIM in 1995 BSc degree

Qualifications

  • APM PRINCE2 Foundation
  • APM PRINCE2 Practitioner in 2015
  • APM Managing Successful Programmes Practitioner in 2010
  • Microsoft Certified Professional 2000 in 1994
  • ITIL Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management in 2002
  • ITIL Expert
  • PMI Agile Certified Practitioner 2011
  • PMI Project Management Professional 2011
  • Languages spoken, English, Dutch and German

Appointments
Magistrate at Sheffield Magistrate Court

Curriculum Vitae in English as PDF