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Profile & Key Skills

A Senior Consultant/Project Manager with substantial international experience of managing and delivering major projects and programmes of work primarily in the Telecoms Sector. Successfully working with management at all levels to determine appropriate business and technical strategies and manage the implementation.

Held senior roles as Programme Manager, Billing and Revenue Assurance Director and Project Manager/Consultant (contract and permanent). Over 20 years progressive experience, while still retaining a fresh and direct approach to new challenges. Able to quickly integrate into any organisation or sector and provide immediate value. Business focus is paramount and most projects have been sponsored by the Business other than IT or technical enablers. Effective Stakeholder management has been key factor in getting good results.

A significant contributor in establishing four separate start-up operations in Europe, USA and the Middle East .

Key competencies:

•  Programme Management (8 work streams),
•  Project Management (Prince 2, Agile, Scrum)
•  Billing and Revenue Assurance (Billing/Operations, Interconnect, Pricing, Payments, GL Reconciliation, Collections and Fraud). Kenan, BSCS, Amdocs Billing Systems
•  Stakeholder Management (complex situations)
•  Business Development (including pre-sales and bid responses)
•  Business Change and Configuration Management
•  GSM Mobile Telecommunications, VoIP
•  Fixed line and cable, BSS/OSS and Infrastructure
•  Post Pay and Prepay (IN) Billing
•  Customer Service (CRM), setting up and improving call centres, including back-office and trouble ticketing (Remedy). ACD and IVR
•  Migration of Data, Staff, Facilities, HW/SW
•  Due Diligence on Teleco companies seeking to merge or acquire other companies
•  Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) and (BPMN).
•  SLA Development and management, internally and externally third parties
•  Management of third party suppliers, including off-shore development BS and Managed Services •  Budget responsibility to £10 million GBP
•  Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery/Failover
•  Outsourcing, Billing, Logistics, software development and Managed Services
•  Bid Management/Preparation (creating and responding to RFIs and RFPs),
•  Supply Chain Management
•  eCommerce (B2C and B2B)
•  Interim Management to Director Level
•  Extensive international and multi-cultural experience
•  UAT Testing (end user testing and training)
•  User Experience Analysis (working with all users to ensure the best approach)

Employment History

Created a Programme of work to enable a fledgling Telecom to successfully launch their new VoIP product. This entailed working with all Business Worksteam leads as well as Marketing to get the right perspective on the programme content and to ensure that all relevant areas of the Business were properly engaged and resources committed.

Founded a start-up Internet Marketing Consultancy business (Cogient Internet Marketing) targeting Small to Medium size companies. The business focuses on working with small to medium size business to analysis their web presence, web, website rework, email marketing campaigns, lead generation and lead conversion strategies.

Developed marketing strategies increasing online business for a number of SME clients (e-Commerce B2C). Develop websites, marketing plans/campaigns utilising, Optin capture of prospective customer information, wire-frames and creation of front end, backend and downstream sales offers/products. Set up Auto responder (Aweber) to facilitate initial and follow-up email-marketing campaigns. Established Joint Ventures with other Product Sellers. Used SEO techniques (mainly Articles) to greatly improve traffic volume.

Conducted an independent Review of two BI tools (OlikView and Tableau) for a Boutique Consultancy seeking to Bid for a major Business Intelligence/Data warehouse programme. Review was to determine the best Desktop software application that would enable different segments of an organisation to connect to a data source and create analyses and summaries of large amounts of data through a drag-and-drop interface.

Directed a strategic PrePay Intelligent Network Trial Project, which involved developing a UK trial methodology, managing workshops in UK and Madrid to identify UK Operational Requirements. Project methodology was O2's version of Prince 2 with an AGILE approach for daily meetings and task settings. The actual trial was to deliver a working platform to be used by a limited number of pre-pay and post-pay consumers, with the intention being to demonstrate to the Business and Technical areas the benefits of the system.

Increased speed and accuracy of Pricing by developing a Pricing Tool, utilising re-engineered business processes to create the necessary coding via Business Process Modelling Notification (BPMN), which in turn, creates Business Process Executable Language (BPEL) to the OASIS standard. This required heavy involvement with the Business Users as it was necessary to validate all “as is” processes before re-engineering new processes.

The Business was losing a considerable amount of money each month (only 45% of the billing was done automatically…the rest manually and late). Solutions were derived by conducting an internal audit and analysis all existing systems and KPIs. The “root causes” were further analysed and the Revenue Leakage problems further identified. Solutions were developed to stop the majority of the revenue leakage. Project Managed 8 Business Workstreams, embracing Billing, Collection and Payment problems Over 100 Change Requests were created as part of the solution. Implementation via normal project methodologies (a Prince ll variant) and AGILE using MS Project.

Audited an ISP's internal IT operation to provide Bid information for C&W Bid Team. Engaged the ISP to identify all the relevant areas and prepares financials to support work needed. Prepared joint venture SLAs between the two companies. A Successful bid.

Provided Consultancy service to the Partners to launch a new Network/Service Platform, (IN, HLR/VLR/IVR/ACD). The eCommerce system utilised a call-back facility with “least cost” routing to enable customers to reduce their mobile telephony costs when roaming internationally. Identified the IN configuration required to provide the required service, such as Account Card Calling, Toll Free Calls, prefix dialling from mobile phones abroad, Reverse Charging, Call Queuing and Call transfer.

Managed the specification, development and implementation of a new e-Commerce web-based Service Platform (self help, front office and back office). Managed the third party software developers. Set up and outsourced 1st line Customer Care Services and internal 2nd line back office. This role was in effect a programme with a multitude of smaller work streams. Each work stream was integrated into the overall programme for Change Control, Release and reporting. Utilised a RAID log to manage the risks and issues associated with the work streams.

All effort was geared towards getting the company in a strong position to list with AIM stock exchange to become more attractive for purchase. Company was purchased 18 months later.

Improved AOL's Customer Service Operation (Broadband) in Waterford by analysing their existing service categories and levels, organisational structure and recommending changes. Majority of recommendations accepted.

Established a new National Field Operations Centre in Edinburgh as part of the NTL/Telewest merger programme. Combine the two Sales Support functions countrywide for NTL and Telewest and rebranded as Virgin Media. Implement new structure.

Delivered a Small Business Web-based Self Service Portal eCommerce project. Project managed 2 other separate projects in parallel and in various SDLC lifecycle stages: Telemarketing system upgrade and Device Management (smart phones) project.

Prioritised and Coordinated all of AOL's, UK business and technical projects/products (65) with European counterparts (France/Germany) and USA parent company.

Managed a Content Billing/Active Mediation project, which entailed implementing a separate Mediation hardware platform using Openet/Fusionworks software, interfacing with Watercove and Portal Infranet (a technical enabler project). Prince II methodology used.

•  Evaluated existing Business Change strategy and made recommendations to a Systems Integrator bidding for a major UK Telecom programme of work.
•  Provided Billing Vendor selection consultation by working with the Business to develop Business Requirements then compared against Billing Functionality and performed a GAP Analysis.
•  Audited “as is” IT environment and develop a Business Continuity plan for Telco operator in the USA.
•  Conducted preliminary audit and Due Diligence in Holland for an American company (Callaghan Group) seeking to purchase a Dutch Cable Operator.
•  Conducted a BPR (Business Process Re-engineering) assignment for a UK ISP.
•  Assist a UK Teleco to obtain Ofcom accreditation for Total-Metering and Billing

Responsible for Wholesale Billing in 13 European countries all using the same instance (kernel) of Kenan Arbor Billing system. Directly responsible for, Billing, Payments, and Collections (the entire Revenue Assurance stream). The UK was used as the base for accepting core changes from Kenan into the Test Platform and testing prior to release. Managed and coordinated the core-change and subsequent releases as well as configuration changes and patches. Conducted all UAT in the UK before releasing changes to the other countries. This required considerable interaction (technical and managerial) with the receiving countries and third party vendors as they had their own IT Billing support teams, which sometimes operated differently than the UK . Worked directly with some key customers to resolve billing accuracy and in some cases rebilling as reconciliation was a major problem. Reported to the VP of Finance.

Education, Qualifications & Professional Training

•  Bachelors Degree, Business/Economics, University of Puget Sound , Tacoma , Washington , USA (1974).  Various Post Graduate courses, leading to Masters Degree.
•  Associate Degree, Business Management, Edmonds College , Lynnwood , Washington , USA
•  Diploma, Business Systems and Procedures, North American Institute of Systems and Procedures, Newport Beach, California, USA
•  Diploma – The Foundation for Administrative Research (Forms/Records Management)
•  Member of Project Management Institute (PMI), UK branch

Personal

Nationality American - UK permanent resident for over 20 years
Marital Status Married

References & Testimonials
Available upon request