View my professional page PerformIT and my LinkedIn profile for an overview of my career history and skill-set.

Education

9 GCSE’s (biology, chemistry, English language, English literature, French, history, Latin, mathematics, physics) at Bury Lawn School in Milton Keynes.

BTEC National Diploma in Computer Studies at Bedford College in Bedford.

BSc (Hons) in Computer and Information Systems at De Montfort University in Milton Keynes.

Work

An SAP BASIS Administrator since 1999.

Roles have included being a team leader, core BASIS team member and a consultant.

Barclays Bank PLC

During my placement year (3rd year) of University I worked for Barclays Bank PLC in Northampton. The first few months of the placement year involved me travelling around the country, installing the SAP GUI software onto PC’s in various offices. Soon I proved myself more than capable in Windows LAN administration, so I took that over from the two part-time 3rd party staff that did that. I also took on more work, including developing the departments Intranet site from scratch, implementing the SAP ITS (Internet Transaction Servers), etc. It was a busy 12 months, which then ended up being a very busy 15 months (I extended my placement to work there during the holiday period)! Having proven myself to the SAP Centre director 6 months into the placement, he offered me a full-time job once I had completed my final (4th) year of University. So I completed Uni and went back.

When I started full-time, I was made a team leader of the SAP Technical Infrastructure team. This was a new team – which was great! I loved being a team leader. Initially I had 1 person working for me, but at times, I had 4 people, plus a Java programmer (based in London – I remote-managed him). I was also responsible for 3rd party contractors, such as staff from SAP-AG.

My team was an extension of the SAP BASIS team – we worked on the newer parts of SAP (e.g. SAP ITS, SAP BC, SAP Enterprise Portal), as well as the ‘extended’ parts of the SAP system (such as the SAProuter), secured the transport layers between systems, worked on 3rd party systems, such as BACS and Esker Deliveryware fax gateways, etc. I got involved with a lot of projects (both large and small), travelled around the country, met various people within Barclays and 3rd party companies, etc. I spent most of my time designing new solutions to tricky business and technical requirements with tight deadlines. The best bit though was that I got to play about with not just ‘leading edge’ technology, but usually ‘bleeding edge’ technology! It was all good fun and meant I didn’t have time to get bored  I really enjoyed my time at Barclays.

Check out this Barclays case study from Esker about their Devliveryware product and how Barclays use it. It has my name in it!

The structure of the Barclays SAP Centre department was changing in late 2005 and there was debate (and confusion) as to whether or not the department was moving to Coventry, so I saw that as a good time to move on.  So I went out and got job offers from Capita and Deloitte. I decided to join Deloitte in November 2005 as they were located just 3.5 miles away from my house in Milton Keynes – Capita was a better job (SAP Technical Architect), but was based in London (a 10 minute commute vs 1.5 hours commute – is a no brainer).

After I left Barclays, a number of other people left very soon after me – then around a year later, most people were made redundant as they outsourced most of the work to India and Singapore.

I am still good friends with several people from Barclays. I have met up with several of them many times, have been on holiday with some and have even competed in sports events with some.

Deloitte LLP

I joined Deloitte in 2005 as an SAP BASIS Administrator. They took me on primarily for my knowledge and experience of the SAP Enterprise Portal and SAP Business Connector (I later went on to install SAP PI). I was in a team with 2 other people, looking after a user base of around 14,500.

Unfortunately, working there could be summed up in one word – ‘boring’. I was there until 2013 and I really didn’t enjoy it at all. I liked most of the staff I worked with and for the most part, everyone was helpful, friendly and professional, but there were some serious issues:

• There was very little work to do (lots of interesting projects kept getting cancelled because of lack of funding)
• It wasn’t a fun place to work
• People didn’t talk much socially in the office
• People rarely went out socially
• The management didn’t discipline or fire people
• Little or no training was given
• Staff morale was low

When I joined, I was working with two truly great SAP BASIS people; then one left and was replaced with the worst BASIS person that I have ever worked with. There were many people in the department (primarily BASIS, development and helpdesk) who should have been disciplined for a poor work ethic e.g.:

• Lots of time off for various reasons
• Coming into the office late, long lunch breaks and leaving early
• Personal phone calls all day (including calls to India and other countries from the company phone – expensive!)
• Not being around when other members of the team are doing scheduled work

I mentioned this to the management because it wasn’t fair that one member of our three member team was doing a lot less work and getting additional benefits (e.g. home broadband paid for), but nothing was done about it. This unfair treatment is one of the main reasons why I left.

My highlights of working at Deloitte were:

• Creating a High Availability SAP system across 2 data centres
• Setting up secure connectivity (HTTPS) across all SAP systems
• Designing a secure, mobile; public Internet access solution to the Deloitte internal, private SAP system
• Helping the Russian, South African and Japanese divisions build SAP systems from scratch
• Working at the Johannesburg office for 2 weeks with Alex Leigh (hard work, but an amazing experience – with great results and excellent feedback)

Capgemini UK

I joined Capgemini in October 2013 as a Senior Applications Consultant (SAP BASIS Administrator).

So far I have really enjoyed the work because:

• I have worked on some projects solo, in small teams and in larger teams
• I have led teams of up to 12 people, across 3 countries
• I have been luck enough to work from home for long periods of time. I am a big advocate of remote working. I get so much more work done with fewer interruptions and I’m able to work around my own timescale – it benefits both my client and I
• The work has varied enormously from patching SAP systems, creating new (complex) SAP system landscapes, working on Cloud based environments (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and SAP HANA), bid work (for SAP and non-SAP systems) and managing large BASIS teams
• The atmosphere on projects has been good – fun environments, collaborative working, good teamwork and good evenings out

You can view a full list of clients that I’ve worked with on my professional site PerformIT.