James Whittley

Experience

• 

  AT&T

  Apr 1995 - Jul 1995

  Database Developer (Student Placement)

  RDBMS design and development for Usability Labs (Human Factors)

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  JM Architects

  Sept 1996 - Mar 1998

  LAN Administrator / AutoCAD Technician

  Novell 3x and 4.1 LAN AdministrationWindows 3.11 Workgroups / NT 3.51/ 4.0 Desktop and Server supportAutoCAD (R13 & R14) support

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  Royal Bank of Scotland Group

  Apr 1998 - Sept 2010

  Redesigning 5 core processes in Managed Testing Services to include newly merged BUILD Centre Of Excellence function.Drive out new departmental operating structure and present solution to senior stakeholders.Developed Data Centre BAU repeatable processes.Process improvement of lower level environment delivery processes.Ensure appropriate levels of governance and audit compliance.Realise time/ cost savings through delivery of Lean Projects. Responsible for delivery of worldwide infrastructure project testing environments on Wintel, Telecoms and Firewall platforms.Line management and matrix management of technical teams in Edinburgh, London & India.Responsible for infrastructure component Asset Management.Ensuring environment/ platform SLA's delivered on target.Incident & Recovery Management.Running regular departmental Continuous Improvement workshops to improve service. Process improvement and Re-engineering of ...- Engagement with Change Management process- Midrange Storage Design- Midrange Storage Pre-Provisioning process- Technical Design Workshops- High Level Estimate / Project Estimation Workshops- RecruitmentMentoring technical (Midrange Storage) apprentices ITIL/CMMI/CobIT/SOX based internal process maturity programme deliveryAd hoc internal consultancy and workshop facilitation serviceInfluencing culture change for continuous improvement activityOngoing process continuous improvement analysis of ...- Capacity Planning and Forecasting- Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity- Data Backup & Data Recovery- Testing & Development Hyperion (Enterprise 4.5) Consolidation System AdministrationOnsite Hyperion client/server software installation throughout the UKMonthly/ Quarterly/ Year End software development delivery and Change Management cyclesOn call (24X7) worldwide user support MIS Querying and Administration of Financial Mainframe database using IBM FOCUS.Development of improved web based front-end for Oracle querying.Web development of online (UKBMIS) Data Dictionary user guide. Novell Netware 4.1 AdministratorNT 4.0 Desktop SupportRACF AdministrationMS VB 6.0 / VBA database development

  • Governance & Audit Manager (Technology Services)

    Dec 2008 - Sept 2010

  • Infrastructure Manager (Infrastructure Projects)

    May 2007 - Dec 2008

  • Continuous Improvement Manager (IT Operations)

    May 2006 - May 2007

  • Senior Strategic Design Analyst (IT Services)

    May 2004 - May 2006

  • Senior Analyst (Shared Services Finance)

    Aug 2002 - May 2004

  • Senior MIS Analyst (Group Finance Systems)

    Nov 2000 - Aug 2002

  • IT Analyst (Group Internal Audit)

    Apr 1998 - Nov 2000
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  Tetragon Consulting Ltd

  Oct 2010 - Feb 2020

  Managing Director/Owner

  Tetragon's mission statement is to provide the full end to end cycle of identifying and scoping out process improvements, with the ability to deliver real benefits in a structured and timely manner.

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  Tesco Bank

  Oct 2010 - May 2012

  Responsible for delivering the Service Assurance Framework across infrastructure and application delivery projects for Customer facing and Banking services within the Credit Cards programme.Developing E2E Support models for new technical services, incorporating 3rd party vendors and centrally managed infrastructure servicesCreating Lean synergies with existing Support teams to accommodate additional replicated servicesIdentifying resource and skills requirements for BAU support.Challenging existing support and maintenance agreements, highlighting risks, identifying solutions and delivering mitigating actionsDriving Knowledge Transfer and technical handover documentation from programme to BAU Support functions.Senior stakeholder management, audit compliance and vendor relationship building.Ensuring associated CI’s are delivered to Configuration Management and Incident Management functions.Validating SLA’s and ensuring that Service Level Reporting is in place.Running regular checkpoint ‘gate reviews’ with stakeholders and senior management. Show less Reporting directly into the Head of Application ManagementProcess mapped key 'Route To Live' delivery processes across Application Management, to Tesco Bank standardsProject Managed the delivery of Technical Operating Manuals for all A/M Production ServicesResolved a high visibilty business issue for Tesco Underwiters (TU) by identifying recurring wastes and non value add activity with external vendor interfacesLead Facilitated Continuous Improvement Workshops and delivered a number of effective outputs, including Current/ Future State VSM's and project plan milestonesBuilt and developed key relationships with Tesco Bank IT stakeholdersProduced and published the Service Capability Catalogue for the 'Application Management Community'Co-ordinated delivery of Scheduled Backup & Testing evidence (in line with CobIT v4.1) to meet external Audit requirementsDeveloped KPI's for the Application Management function Show less

  • Service Introduction Manager (Contract)

    Aug 2011 - May 2012

  • Consultant - Application Management, Service Establishment & Service Stabilisation Team (Contract)

    Oct 2010 - Jul 2011
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  Tesco Bank

  Oct 2012 - Apr 2014

  Service Assurance Manager (Contract)

  Service Assurance Workstream Lead, facing off to the IT Banking Programme Director for the new Current Account product and associated Mobile Banking App that was launched this year by Tesco Bank.Ensuring that these (and other) high profile services adhered to internal Tesco Bank standards and ITIL principles that provided the stability within the Live Production environment when they were publicly launched. Authoring the redesign of the existing Service Assurance framework and processes to accommodate large scale programmes and facilitate the change management conflicts of Agile project delivery within tightly controlled Banking environments. Including revising the existing RACI, centralising the review of a number of shared activities e.g. SLA creation, Incident Classifications and Support Model development, whilst achieving senior stakeholder buy-in for the overall improved ITIL based governance framework.Task-managing colleagues within the Service Assurance team to engage with Heads of Service and project managers, facilitate issue resolution and regularly report progress. Show less

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  Sainsbury's Bank

  Oct 2014 - Jun 2015

  IT Service Design/ Transition Manager (Contract)

  Initially I was brought in to design, establish and oversee a new IT Service Transition process until permanent staff could be hired to operate the process in BAU. This role quickly developed and I also became involved with gathering requirements and providing process designs to the Sainsbury’s Bank ITSM function for nearly 40 core and ancillary processes required to run a BAU IT Service (including 3rd Party Supplier and Managed Supplier responsibilities). These processes were designed, mapped and documented to ITIL V3 standards and include risk and control activity. • Delivered the initial IT Service Transition Governance Framework, Operating Instructions and associated core process documentation.• Worked with Sainsbury’s Bank Process Owners to design and implement prioritised core ITSM processes e.g. Change Management, Incident Management, Major Incident Management and IT Service Continuity.• Temporarily took a lead role to recover and ensure the successful service transition of the new Oracle General Ledger service.• Collaborated with 3rd party and Managed IT Suppliers to establish process gaps and highlighted and developed interfaces with Sainsbury’s Bank ITSM processes.• Interlocked and formalised stakeholders sign off for acceptance of nearly 40 additional ITSM processes with all 3rd party and Managed IT suppliers. Show less

• 

  Royal Bank of Scotland

  Sept 2015 - Apr 2016

  Project Manager, IP Digital (Contract)

  During this contract I worked as part of a team of 4 Project Mangers within the newly formed ‘Digital Innovations’ programme. I initially embarked upon a stakeholder management exercise to ascertain senior management sponsorship for a Lean workshop which I planned, organised and was the Lead Facilitator. The workshop delivered the requirements and subsequent design for the upscaling and rollout of an End to End ‘Agile’ Infrastructure Delivery methodology/ process known as ‘iDelivery’ which has since been incorporated into the core organisational IT infrastructure delivery framework. The workshop attendees comprised of the various heads of Testing, Technical Resourcing, Technical Design, Change Management and Service Transition, in order to rapidly agree and support the outputs.• Defining requirements and developing sub-processes to accommodate smaller/ faster/ packaged changes in line with Agile sprints and iterative releases, whilst adhering to regulatory governance requirements.• Collaborating with Infrastructure Architects and key senior Technical Designers to baseline a rapid ‘proof of concept’ process (‘iDelivery’) to enable earlier engagement by PM’s with technical resourcing teams.• Producing the End To End swim-lane design for the ‘iDelivery’ Agile infrastructure provisioning methodology. Show less

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  Lloyds Banking Group

  May 2016 - May 2017

  Infrastructure Delivery Manager (Contract)

  Initially I was brought in to hold a series of workshops to identify and gather requirements for automation opportunities utilising a proof of concept self-service dev ops cloud solution.The first workshop I delivered identified and gathered the requirements for an automated process to reduce the time and effort required to provide Linux Service Transition artefacts (there were previously 90 artefacts which had to be manually transferred).I was then transferred to the ‘Aurora’ outsourcing programme which was tasked with the negotiation and transfer of LBG resources, data centre assets and Service Management processes to a 3rd party Cloud solution supplier (IBM). Initially I was tasked with assisting the Programme Delivery Director with the contract negotiation workshops in London, to deliver the largest legal schedule (out of 20 schedules) which encompassed UNIX; Linux; Database; X86; Oracle; existing cloud services and all Service Management/ Delivery processes. As the programme dynamics changed I ended up in charge of facilitating these workshops, which included senior Lloyds IT Management stakeholders, the IBM negotiation team and the corporate lawyers representing both sides. The workshops successfully contributed to the delivery of the signature of a large scale outsourcing/ supplier management model agreement between LBG and IBM in June of this year.Towards the end of this (3 times extended) contract I was also engaged to design and implement an Enterprise ‘PMO As A Service’ process to support the fluidity of Agile project delivery within the retained organisation, using the concept of a resource pool of specialised activities, artefacts and skills. Show less

• 

  Royal Bank of Scotland Business

  Sept 2017 - Sept 2018

  Lean Process Specialist

  The primary objective of the WoW Programme is to enable the organisational Agile/ Digital transformation journey for RBS by removing blockers, developing processes and instilling culture change.While the team was still forming, I initially led daily scrums until the headcount and team cadence had built up enough to enable this responsibility to be shared throughout the team.During this role I planned and led a series of (senior stakeholder) workshops to drive out automation opportunities for the Infrastructure Design, Test & Build processes. The outputs from these workshops were the identification of waste (unnecessary validations and excessive SLA’s) as well as a set of automation requirements to be developed by ServiceNow Architects.As part of the delivery I also utilised UX techniques such as User Stories and Personas and incorporated these into the process designs in their various states, to ensure the user journey was at the forefront of all changes.I followed this work up by producing an interim Infrastructure Design/ Test process to take RBS to Cloud, and a future state E2E process that could be transferred across and adopted to support the established cloud solution. In order to realise this solution, I collated all the actions and outputs from the workshops and converted them into backlog items which were subsequently prioritised, sized and distributed around the various scrum teams within the programme. I have also collaborated with a colleague to visually map out the existing three Service Transition governance tools to highlight overlap, duplication and redundancy. Once this combined overview had been baselined, I engaged with users to find out the pain points when operating with these tools on the Service Transition journey. The purpose of this exercise was to challenge process owners to consider the impact on the user when operating these tools, and propose improvements without reducing the effectiveness of the associated controls. Show less

• 

  Royal London

  Jul 2019 - now

  I currently have a portfolio of over 30 projects requiring varying levels of engagement to guide them through the SI Framework, and ensure delivery of fit for purpose Non Functional Requirements, Test Plans and the design of End to End Support Models. I am also responsible for ensuring projects experience a swift journey through to Warranty Exit, whilst ensuring SLA’s are met and service reporting isn’t impacted.In order to reduce the risk of managing such a large portfolio I have proactively designed and presented Service Integration process automation opportunities utilising ServiceNow and existing services provided by MS Azure. I have also engaged with the Change Enablement function to deliver ServiceNow add-ons to MS ADO pipelines to facilitate agreed Standard Changes and faster low risk Normal Change to accommodate Agile delivery to Production Cloud environments.With the ever increasing adoption of 3rd party SaaS solutions, I am engaged with Suppliers and Supplier Relationship Managers to ensure that the appropriate Service Standards are fed into contract negotiations. Show less The original remit of this contract was to assist with clearing the backlog of IT projects caused by increased demand across the business portfolios. Within the first week I was adding value by backfilling for an existing SI Manager as well as dealing with this additional work.During my tenure as a contractor I was responsible for implementing additional governance and rigour to the Service Integration process. I achieved this by designing and launching a recurring 'SI Governance Board' which facilitated collaboration between the Project Management community and senior service stakeholders from all areas (including Infrastructure Management ; IT Security, Service Desk and Application Management) Show less

  • Service Manager/ Service Integration Manager

    Feb 2020 - now

  • Service Integration Manager

    Jul 2019 - Feb 2020