Experience

In this section I just wanted to give a better idea of my experience gained in my career to date.

Since 1999 I have been working in QinetiQ, an organisation that is specialised in science and technology development and research. Formerly, we were a government agency (DERA - Defence Evaluation and Research Agency).

Below is a snapshot of some of the more prominent tasks that I have worked on since my graduation from university. I have summarised each year starting with the latest. There has been quite a lot of other work, however I felt that what I listed below covered what I would consider to be part of my core skill set.

If you have any questions relating to any of this please feel free to drop me a line on the e-mail address posted at the bottom of this page... thanks!

From the beach in Portugal. A sailing ship can be seen in the distance, cruising around the bay.

2003 - Healthcare

This year has been completed dedicated to work in the healthcare arena. The key has been helping to develop products that ensures QinetiQ's place in this rapidly changing market place. I have been involved in several roles:

Architect - This has been the chief role and has mainly seen me helping to define the architecture (as per the Rational Unified Process). The main deliverables has been the Software Architecture Document (4+1 views) which acts as an aid to the designers when the implementation begins.

Customer Engineer - This role has been important to me and crucial to supporting partners in the development of a unified solution. My main tasks have been to spend time at customer and partner sites understanding our product fit and better defining our solution. An element of this has also been to prepare and attend the pre hospital conference, AMBEX, in Harrogate to meet with many of our potential customers.

Designer - Taking the architecture and implementing classes, this has been a less prominent role this year, but it has still been a significant use of time for me. (UML)

Deployment Designer - This has also been a significant role which has seen me understanding the full deployment (in terms of hardware and software) out to varying sizes of fleets, where mobile units are used, data rates, load balancing and ruggedness of units have all been prominent issues.

2002 - Healthcare - Customer Engineering

This year has mostly been dedicated to work in healthcare, seeing the definition and understanding of new products. But it has seen my introduction to the healthcare arena early this year as a team leader leading a prototype project (developed in Java) through the trials, testing and continued development. The product was developed to aid paramedics in best practice on scene through the use of accepted protocols.

I came into another project that was basically finishing, but my role was to aid (from a technical perspective) the customer relationship. There had been problems earlier in the project over certain deliverables (and the process for delivery) were in disagreement on both sides. My role was to ensure an agreed delivery route and to ensure that both sides were meeting their requirements. This was a challenging, yet in the end, a very rewarding role.

2001 - Web Database- Graduate Network - Consultancy

This was a particularly busy year for me, I was now the team leader on our long term integration project. Much of the work involved continued development and looking to the future for further developments and upgrades. The highlight of this year was the attendance at an international conference in Florida where I took the product carried out a sales role to begin selling licenses.

The Graduate Network - One of the most rewarding achievements of my career was being involved in the creation of a graduate network in the organisation. With a small budget, my role was market the network throughout the organisation and help define the future for new graduates as they entered into the working world at QinetiQ.

My first full team leadership role (following a project from the outset through to delivery and support) came this year as I lead a team of 8 developers in a web based project cataloguing defects in ships. This was my first major web development and so a lot was learnt in a short space of time (ASP, JavaScript, HTML and SQL Server were all learnt here). A significant part of this role was customer interaction, gathering requirements, discussing solutions, demonstrating prototypes etc.

One of my favourite roles to date came this year. DERA took part in a part government funded project which saw us carrying out subsidised consultancy into SME's in the local area. I was one of the consultants and as a result visited many small businesses and discussed how we might be able to use technology and IT to improve and reengineer the business to improve offerings and efficiency. This was a particularly rewarding job.

2000 - Product Integration - Fast Track

This year was mostly concerned with the development of our product integration tool. During this project we needed to employ C and Java skills as well as learning the API's for the two major applications we were integrating. This project was an excellent challenge and was my first major product based project.

1999 - Technology Recommendations - Product Integration

I started at DERA in July, my first major assignment was to look into, and learn the new J2EE technologies and advise the rest of the team on the best products to use to provide legacy integration with a number of data sources. This was a great project to start on as it had a good learning curve into some fantastic new technologies.

This year saw the start of our major product integration tool, bringing a requirements tool and a product knowledge management tool together to exchange and integrate data between them. The remainder of this year was spent training and learning the two products and how to develop for them.

Pre Graduation- Trials (DERA) - McDonalds

Before I graduated, I worked at DERA (1997 onwards) in the holidays, most of the work involved helping the team with their communication trials. This involved developing small elements of software that could help to organise and analyse the collected data. There were a number of other tasks such as writing interfaces to lab equipment and tools for mapping radio coverage.

Before working here, I worked part time at McDonalds as a customer services rep., my main job (and still the best job ever) was coordinating children's parties! (1993-1997)