NICHOLAS J. COLLIER
Flat 5, 206 Sheen
Road, Richmond, TW10 5AN
Tel: 0208 332 0945 (Home)
07533 275 899 (Mobile)
Email: nick@polar-it.co.uk
Personal
Details
Date of Birth: 15th
July 1974
Nationality: British
/ United States
Marital Status: Single
Certifications
ITIL
Managers Certificate in IT Service Management (Red Badge)
ITIL
Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management (Green Badge)
Microsoft
Certified Systems Engineer, Windows 2000
Microsoft
Certified Systems Engineer, Windows NT4
Cisco
Certified Network Associate
CompTIA
A+ Certification
Profile
ITIL Manager
(Green & Red Badge) with Project Management, Infrastructure Management,
Service Management experience having worked in Information Technology for over
10 years and in both the public and private sectors.
Effective in
systems administration, running service support teams, applying service
delivery disciplines, gathering support requirements, toolset evaluation,
managing outsourcing agreements, service improvement recommendations, managing
departmental and process change to improve service, service portfolios,
supplier management, service level management, the effective management of the
service lifecycle and transition of services into the live environment. Commercially
competent in managing budgets and forecasts, leading supplier evaluations,
selection and the implementation of outsourced service solutions, managing
third party contracts to ensure the effective underpinning of service level
agreements. A large amount of exposure to finance having worked in accounting
and banking back office earlier in my career for 5 years.
Experienced
project manager effective in the implementation of both infrastructure and
service improvements involving the transition of services, support optimisation,
cost analysis and service management tools. As part of an outsource initiative
at IMG Media, designed and implemented a service solution including service
desk, incident, problem, change and release processes, assisting with the
evaluation and selection of third party suppliers, contract negotiation and
service level agreements and managed the transition of services with no impact
on availability.
Employment History
[Company name withheld for privacy
reasons] November 2009 – Present
IT Global Outsourcing
Service Delivery Manager
Responsible
for delivering services from the design stage and infrastructure project to BAU
Services.
·
Working
with the support teams to transition services into BAU operation
·
Agreeing
SLA’s and delivering against the contract
·
Producing
service description & service operating plans
·
Designing
provisioning processes
·
Integrating
the services with existing ITIL processes
·
Producing
Service Improvement Programmes
(This job
description is in draft stage.)
Credit Suisse November 2008 – September 2009
Integration Technologies
Application &
Infrastructure Manager
·
The
department manages applications, e.g. live data applications for the banks
dealing rooms, Human Resources systems, SharePoint systems for department
information bases. The department is based in 3 geographical regions and uses a
global support structure largely based in Singapore.
Service
Support
·
Managing
the 3rd line support and application integration team
·
Supervision
of changes to applications and the infrastructure
·
Acting
as the final point of escalation for incidents and to coordinate incident
management between various teams and regions and to own major incidents and
problems
·
Producing
technical reports, e.g. exception
reports
·
Writing
custom code, e.g. for reporting tasks, task automation and status notification
·
Maintenance
of the configuration database for the Windows infrastructure and web
application portfolio
·
Extensive
use of Excel including VBA macros to connect to data sources, collate data,
find exceptions, produce reports etc.
Service Delivery
·
Conducting
customer requirements exercises to determine the infrastructure requirements of
internal customers in order to design appropriate services
·
Working
with technical experts to define specific deliverables for each technology
solution
·
Ensuring
that the environment was operating within capacity requirements, highly
available, e.g. using fault tolerant, resilient systems
·
Managing
Service Continuity of applications and carried out a review of GWS Service
Continuity
IMG Media January 2007 – October 2008
Infrastructure Manager
Service
Support
·
Managing
a team of network/ server engineers that were provided by an outsource company
·
Development,
optimisation and maintenance of the relevant service support processes, e.g. incident
management, problem management, change management, release management
·
Providing
support to developers, webmasters and project managers for technical issues
(when an alternate resource is not available)
·
Escalation
management and to act as the final point of escalation for issues which cannot
be resolved by support personnel, developers, project managers or outsource
partners
·
Producing
technical reports, e.g. exception reports and review reports, e.g. incident
reports. Often the reports were generated by writing custom code
Service Delivery
·
Monitoring
service levels achieved in relation to the service levels that the business
agreed with customers
·
Defining
and maintaining process documentation with regards to availability, capacity
management, service continuity management.
·
Ensuring
that the IT infrastructure was highly available and identifying any
availability risks.
·
Studying
the capacity of the environment in terms of server utilisation, disk, network
utilisation, planning rackspace, etc.
·
Produced
and reviewed capacity reports and identified areas where increased capacity was
required, initiated changes to remediate capacity shortfalls. Provided input
into the technical architecture to plan for current capacity and capacity
growth and identified areas where the capacity could be scaled down.
·
Automated
the production technical reports, e.g. capacity reports, utilisation reports,
exception reports,
·
Maintenance
of disaster recovery strategies
·
Financial
reporting of infrastructure costs, investigation of infrastructure cost
reduction exercises and to increase value in the infrastructure.
·
Transitioning
in new services, e.g. outsource support contract through agreeing internal
requirements, working with legal to draft contacts, agreeing SLA’s,
facilitating technical migration and monitoring service quality.
·
Managing
the implementation of an incident and change, logging, tracking and reporting system
·
Managing
the implementation of a configuration database and collected configuration
items
Microsoft Server Team
·
The
team supported the Windows servers for SSE . The company has a Windows 2003
Active Directory domain (Exchange 2003 Mail servers/ Microsoft Operations
Manager 2005/ SQL 2000 Database servers/ Application servers/ File and print
servers etc.)
·
Performed
general maintenance tasks e.g. break fixes, patching, upgrades, monitoring etc.
·
Wrote/
modified Vbscripts to automate various tasks eg. To read data from an Excel
spreadsheet for AD user account creation, to move data via. FTP.
·
Rolled
out 4 E-commerce websites eg. http://www.thesouthernshop.co.uk
into test and live environments. The websites use an IIS6/ SQL 2000/ MS
Commerce Server 2005 infrastructure. The ASP .NET code development was
outsourced to a company in India.
·
Implemented
a monthly reboot script on all Windows servers subject to approval by the application
contacts/ teams.
Network Operations Centre
·
The
team supported the Window server and network infrastructure for Rolls Royce
Aircraft Monitoring division . The company has a Windows 2003 Active Directory
domain (Exchange 2003 Mail servers/ Microsoft Operations Manager 2005/ SQL 2000
Database servers/ Application servers/ File and print servers etc.) and Cisco
routers and switches.
·
Performed
general maintenance tasks e.g. break fixes, patching, upgrades, monitoring etc.
Troubleshooted problems with the Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005
infrastructure.
·
Built
servers which were handed over to application teams
·
Tested
various domain Anti-virus products in order to assist decision making.
·
Installed
Microsoft Live Communications Server (LCS) 2005.
·
Assisted
in building an HP Blade enclose and blade servers
·
Performed
this role as a contractor while the company was in the process of recruiting a
permanent Infrastructure Manager.
·
The
position involved managing the Infrastructure for Silverscreen. The company has
a head office with around 60 staff and around 70 stores.
·
The
computer infrastructure included a Windows 2000 Active Directory domain,
Windows XP workstations, non domain computers & network tills in stores
·
The
head office network was a 10/100/1Gb switched network with a Cisco 2600 series
router connected to a 2Mb serial line. ADSL links with VPN tunnels were used to
connect stores to head office by means of VPN tunnels. Troubleshooted layer 2 or 3
networking problems and set up routers for new stores. Created a Layer 2 access
list in head office on the main switch.
·
Administered
McAfee E-Policy Orchestrate (EPO) 3.6 and Wsus.
·
Implemented
a tape backup system using an HP Surestore Ultrium3 tape autoloader and
Arcserve.
·
Wrote
Vbscripts to perform maintenance and monitoring tasks e.g. Checking disk space,
copying databases, checking database copy, bulk copying files to stores, ping
testing, checking pst file sizes etc.
·
Server
room reorganisation; migrated fileserver, EPO server, Wsus server and Backup
server from a domain controller which was performing all of these roles to
separate servers.
·
Produced
documentation on most aspects of the infrastructure
·
Assisted
with processing data in Excel spreadsheets, importing and exporting through CSV
files, writing Excel macros.
·
The
team supported the SAIC Europe Windows 2003 Active Directory domain (Domain
Controllers/ Mail servers/ Database servers/ Application servers/ File and
print servers etc.)
·
The
main focus of my role was to architect and project manage the implementation of
a server monitoring system using Microsoft Operations Manager 2005. This
included the full life cycle of the project from planning, design,
implementation to customising the monitoring requirements eg. alert filtering.
The monitoring system Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 used multiple MOM
servers across multiple sites.
·
Designed
and implemented an automated desktop patching system using Windows Software
Update Services (Wsus) with multiple Wsus servers across multiple sites.
Policies were controlled by means of Active Directory GPO’s. Worked with the
client to establish their desktop patching needs/ desired policies and
configured Wsus accordingly.
·
Implemented
NTP Quota & File Sentinel software to control the use of fileserver disk
space/ permissible file types of desktop users.
·
Produced
documentation of Infrastructure servers on Physical, Network, Application
layers as well as Support and Backup information.
·
The
team supported the Audit Commission LAN/ WAN Infrastructure and about 170
Servers (Windows Server 2003 Domain Controllers/ Exchange 2003 Mail servers/
Database servers/ Application servers/ File servers)
·
Performed
various audits e.g. Breakdown of all server SCSI drives, Breakdown of Veritas
BackupExec/ agent installations versus licenses. Wrote scripts to collect the
data.
·
Produced
documentation of systems e.g. Messaging infrastructure, HP Insight Manager
·
Assisted
in file permissions restructure after a migration to new domain
·
The
team supported application servers for the bank's cash, equities, derivatives
and warrants businesses.
·
Provided
server support for around 1,000 NT4/ Windows 2000 application servers.
·
Worked
in the Quality Circle team which was an initiative to reduce the support ticket
count by analysis of reoccurring problems and unnecessary alerts.
·
Project
Managed the rolling out of applications and patches. Wrote deployment scripts
using Vbscript which worked alongside Citibank's SOE (Standard Operating
Environment, an in house add on to the operating system to centrally inventory
application deployment status.)
·
Writing
Continuity of Business Plans and Cob tests (Service Continuity)
Contract work prior to May 2004
In 1992
started working as a purchase ledger clerk in accounts departments as a
contractor. In 1996 moved to the banking sector performing purchase ledger,
share issue and trade reconciliation work. This led to contracts in trade
settlements departments with Deutsche Bank, Barings Bank, Lombard Odier, Dresdner
Kleinwort Benson and Tokyo Mitsubishi. The work included:
·
Maintaining
client portfolios which composed of equities, bonds and cash & correcting
problems
·
Maintaining
in house databases with securities and trade data, maintaining price data
feeds. Liaison with other institutions which hold securities data e.g. Crest,
London Stock Exchange in order to resolve conflicting information
·
Resolving
‘failed trades’ through an understanding of the front office/ back office trade
life cycle
·
Used
systems such as Reuters, Bloomberg, Crest, Euroclear, Swift, London Stock
Exchange daily updates
·
Using Excel to macro level to manage and process trade
data, convert to other formats or for reporting
·
An understanding of the instruments traded e.g.
equities, bonds, options, swaps, futures.
In 1999 I
decided to move into information technology and I acquired the Microsoft
Certified Systems Engineer qualification. Worked for 18 months as a systems
administrator for a small internet company in Manchester called Wax Digital..After
this I then carried out a wide range of contracts in internet technologies,
Wintel engineering, and network infrastructure in the public sector, banking
and commerce.