Concepts to completion.
Gavin is an Engineering Consultant with over 25 year’s experience delivering Projects across Telecommunications, transport and revenue control domains within Public, Private and Defence sectors.
Services
Over 8 years of experience leading Project teams; most recently a £1M discovery Project for a major System Refresh.
Over 20 years experience in Business Analysis accross Private, Public and Defence Sectors
Experienced in creating and managing an entire Portfolio test function from inception to £9M programme scale over an 11 year period.
Key Stats
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Project Management
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Leading Teams
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Business Analysis
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Test Management
Project Management
case study: Working with Central Government and the Public Sector
Key Facts:
Created more than 20 Successful Funding Requests totalling over £15M over 5 Years
Many of the projects that I have been involved with have been driven by requirements from senior stakeholders within Central Government and the Public sector. As anyone who has worked in this environment will know, the internal workings of government can be very rigid and proscriptive. It can be especially difficult to bring forward new ideas and ways of working, even when those involved are themselves open to and motivated for change due to complex and constrained funding mechanisms.
It can often be easy to dismiss the scale of the process to apply for and reach approval of funding for projects, even when working in a fully cost recoverable environment. Working in this environment for many years, I have become accustomed to the scope of the task, and of working with colleagues in government departments as well as Law Enforcement Agencies to achieve successful outcomes.
Test Management
case study: Vodafone UK Government Security Team
Key Facts:
Over 15 Projects Managed over an 11Year timescale, from £50k to £9M
Prior to my initial engagement, there was no defined process, and no consistent document set for each project. Assurance was conducted ad-hoc basis by Technical Architects.
From my first engagement, I defined a Test Approach that provided an overall framework for process definition, deliverable artefact definition such as a documentation structure, traceability requirements, use of test management tooling, the approach to test data, the test environment and dedicated bespoke test tooling.
Multiple subsequent engagements with Vodafone saw me manage the Test function for over 15 different projects, ranging from small (~£50k) near DevOps scale updates up to full scale transformation projects (~£9M scale) where my responsibilities included management of test teams (on shore third party and in house), budgets, test programme and associated formal assurance witness events with central government and law enforcement agency clients.
Business Analysis
case study: Crossrail
Highlight:
Discovering that Crossrail was using a Requirements Management Process I had designed 2 years previously for the Heathrow Terminal 5 Project.
Whilst working with Atkins Advantage, I undertook a review of the overall Crossrail Project requirements documentation set. At that stage, Crossrail had been through a number of early funding stages and iterations, and the requirements documentation had evolved along with the project.
My Analysis showed that this had resulted in fragmentation; some high level requirements had Project wide scope, but in many places information had been supplied bottom up from contracted parties and was at a far lower level of detail and of variable quality.
The culmination of my work was a proposal to initially split the requirements into tiers, to better categorise functional and Non-functional needs and impose some formality to the Requirement model. Subsequent phases would use the resultant structure to asses where requirements were becoming proscriptive and straying into solutions, and where requirements only existed at a very high level with inadequate exploration of detail. This revised requirement model could be used going forward to address gaps, identify missed requirements and remove ‘solutions’.
case study: Vodafone UK
Key Facts:
More than 20 Business Requirements Specifications authored, over a 13 Year period, of multiple separate Project engagements
Throughout a 13 year period I was repeatedly engaged by Vodafone UK to provide Business Analysis consulting to approximately 20 Projects throughout the business, but frequently within the Corporate Security function.
Artefacts created included Requirements Documents, Business Process models and Use Case models (extending to Sequence Diagramming on occasion where merited).
This function frequently included liaison at all levels with both internal and external stakeholders, including senior stakeholders within Central Government and Law Enforcement Agencies.