James Brabyn – Project Manager

Experience Summary

Prior to starting Delicious Webdesign, James has had a wide and varied IT Career, the following details his working life.

Lead Consultant with Capgemini I have been involved with IT since 1989, experience of Operations, Application Development, Project Management and Team Leading involving a large variety of machines, systems and languages both high and low level with geographically distributed teams. My career has included both technical and managerial roles and I have experience ranging from systems software development to commercial applications.

James is a hands-on, hard working and complete team player. Flexible regarding travel and work hours. Thrives in difficult and stressful situations getting great sense of achievement after successful implementations and completed projects.

Investment Banking

James was recently placed within the high profile PWM group within Morgan Stanley to devise and implement a Release and Configuration strategy which included the design and selection of their QA Environments, working as a SCM / Environment Lead as part of a large distributed team that featured SCM, Environment and Testing groups. Directly responsible for the process design, tool selection, Migration from previous SCM tool, training and support.

Insurance (Personal Lines)

James was previously with the IT consultancy group CGI as their Software Configuration Manager placed within the IT Department of an Insurance Company (Equity / Insure) with responsibilities to design and implement formal Configuration Management processes and techniques, SCM tool selection and implementation. Proven expertise in training, analysis, design, implementation, testing and deployment of  software configuration management process and systems.

Achievements

Planned and implemented the new PWM QM Environment and related SCM tools and processes into a high profile department of investment bank Morgan Stanley. Conducted SCCM proof of concept investigations then implemented our customized process and use the SCCM tools JIRA / Perforce as the SCCM solution. Management of our Release / Environment group which included coordinating the training, planning and migrating from the previous Version Management system requiring customized scripting to capture the versioning history.

Previously while engaged in complete review of SCCM / Testing Processes, while at CGI, I was involved with the proof of concept of various SCCM tools. This lead myself to leading the rollout of the chosen SCCM / testing tools, I have built up considerable knowledge on Prince Project Methodology, SDLC, ITIL Change / Release Management, Application Development Process Management and Configuration Management strategy and implementation of SCCM tools (Requirements gathering, Version history migration, Tool customization, Client / Server Software Installation, Licensing requirements and management, Client / Server architecture) Identified requirements, defined, implemented, tested and deployed customized features and additional process management. Developed and presented customized, training courses in Various SCCM / SCM tools including Perforce, Jira, Serena Dimensions their concepts, usage and administration.

Analyzed, designed, implemented and documented best-practice end-to-end Application Development processes using Serena Dimensions for requirements, version, issue, change, system build, baseline, test and release control throughout the entire development lifecycle.

Specified, designed, tested and maintained custom features of Serena Dimensions using embedded Oracle Reports, PL/SQL & HTML,

Career Experience

Investment Bank (Role Environment / SCM – Release Manager)

Lead within the QM team for the Private Wealth Management (PWM) group for its initiation and responsible for the specification and allocation of servers throughout our new Quality Management Environment. Was responsible for the specification, selection and implementation of SCM tools to support the code development process within PWM supported by a new project release schedule.

As the Environment / SCM – Release Manager I was responsible for the coordination and verification of all system and software changes to the QA environment.  This role managed and maintained the code repository and configuration settings and facilitates the requests and approvals for all code migrations.  Duties also included specification of environment setup software and hardware components, maintenance of environment schedule, facilitation of environment conflicts, and management/execution of data refresh cycles.

Goals Attained

• Director level Concept Presentations
• Conducted SCM (Jira / Perforce) training for over 40 Developers in London, New York, Budapest and Pune (India)
• Perforce build batch (code extraction, compile. Report)
• Migration Planning /  RCS code migration batch (Perl)
• SCM tool evaluations (Jira / Perforce)
• SCM Proof of Concept Trials, Demonstrations, Presentations
• Management of Release Process /.Release Scheduling (Consolidated Major / Minor Releases)
• Perforce Training Documentation / Quick Reference Cards
• Performance Tests for offshore Development using Perforce
• Experience working with remote project colleagues spanning multiple time zones
• Management Progress reporting

Software Configuration and Testing Management

CGI (Europe) Ltd / client – Insure / Cox Insurance

Analyzed, designed, implemented and documented best-practice end-to-end Application Development processes using Merant / Serena Dimensions for version, requirements issue, change, system build, baseline, test and release control throughout the entire development lifecycle. Performed Configuration Management for a multi-Platform, multi-location distributed system Personal Lines Insurance Company. Heterogeneous networks including Windows NT and UNIX platforms.

I was the solely responsible for the implementation of Serena Changeman / Merant Dimensions (a sophisticated SCCM tool) within the organization, responsible for installation configuration I set up training for the users, configured the central and client systems, organized the development projects and supported the users. My responsibilities included building the various components of the system and delivering them to the integration test team, for which a delivery mechanism was designed and built. Responsible for SCM analysts in the Build Management / Change Management processes for which I had given them authority.

A significant amount of effort was spent on documentation, including procedures for development, testing, delivery, and capturing the environments required for each component. Release notes for the software infrastructure delivery were produced, and a formal change management process was implemented. Took responsibility for the maintenance of the code repository, baselines and building releases. Additionally utilities were created to deal with loading databases and manipulating and building code. The chosen SCCM tool was used to control 100% of code systems in place for Clients systems which included J2EE, Polaris / Ratabase, RTM, Oracle, Java, C, Web Technologies.

December 1999 – July 2001: Oracle Developer

Cox Insurance Services

Developed and tested Oracle forms, packages and reports for internal CCS system (Motor Insurance rating system)

Oct 1994 – Dec 1999:Ratabase / RTM Developer

Cox Insurance Services

Produced rating engine for various insurers within Ratabase. Maintained these rating products with updates received directly from insurers, changes requested and progressed from within company.

RTM programmer developing and testing code forming part of the Claims Maintenance and Development Team before being advanced to a Software Development team.

July 1994 – Oct 1994:Computer Op / System Manager

Hoopoe Finance – London

Verifying BACS payments / Management Reports / Credit ratings (CCN/Infolink)

Technical

Functional