In my role as Business Systems Consultant at Telent Technology Ltd I was expected to cover a lot of ground, Business Analyst and Test Manager were the prime functions I was expected to cover. The business of Telent Technology Ltd is the installation and maintenance of telecommunications equipment for a customer list that includes the emergency services, rail operators and some of the London Underground line operators. The systems I worked on were back office systems in support of the business operation. These bespoke applications were all running on SQL Server and were a combination of VB.NET, VB6, and XHTML/Classic ASP and Access front-ends.

ONLINE DOCUMENTATION

Initially I was hired by Telent Technology Ltd with the dual purpose of filling the devising training and support documentation for their in-house systems. My first task was to provide a User Guide for their mainstay maintenance support application which had a user base of about 300-400 people with a high turn-over of staff in some particular areas. As the entire format of the documentation was left to me I felt that the best way of providing a User Guide that could be referred to as required rather than just leafed through to be discarded was to make this an interactive online document. Consequently I devised a DHTML document that had the look and feel of the application that the users were working on but none of the functionality. The document itself was accessible directly from the application, contained release notes and fast access to key sections. CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

By now our business users were beginning to properly appreciate the benefit of such online documentation but we were hampered from developing the idea further. As my team was developing and supporting database applications, one of which I had built an XHTML/ASP Classic thin client for, I realised that we had the potential for building our own CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM. The resultant product managed to speed up our document production many times over and, more importantly, meant that other team members could also create these documents without any HTML knowledge.

CHANGE MANAGEMENT AND RELEASE MANAGEMENT

Having extensive experience of such in the mainframe environment I brought the concept of change control to my team. As a consequence of this I was charged with the design and delivery of a bespoke change control package. This consisted of an SQL Server database, VB6 front-end for core users and an XHTML/ASP Classic thin client for the 400+ basic users. I was the developer for the thin client work. This allowed Telent to demonstrate to its customers that it was ISO20000 compliant and worked to PRINCE2 standards.

BUSINESS ANALYSIS

Throughout my tenure at Telent I acted as Business Analyst capturing change and new application requirements and turning these into Business Functional Requirements documents.

TEAM LEADER

At Marks and Spencer my role as Team Leader on the Customer Marketing Database I filled the roles of Technical Lead and Business Analyst as this was a small team of just 5, the other 4 all being developers. Whilst here I was responsible for considerable improvements in our batch processing, introducing data hygiene checks on imported data and data cleansing.

DEVELOPMENT LIFECYCLE

At Dixons Stores Group I was part of a team that delivered changes to our Supply Chain and Distribution business areas, principally installing and providing training on applications for the local distribution centres. These applications allowed branches to book delivery slots direct to customers for specific delivery dates and time periods. In my role here I worked primarily in application development, with involvement throughout the project lifecycle. I would be involved right from the System Design stage, through development, testing, implementation and support phases. For one system I provided out of hours support.

OTHER

I addition to the above, I would always volunteer to provide any user trainer that may be required for any of the application releases as I have always enjoyed the human interaction with the business users that can so often be missing from many developers working life. This was augmented by some part-time work as a support teacher in Thames Valley University where I supported Business Studies students learning to use spreadsheets and databases. As part of the training exercise I would be responsible for the creation and delivery of the training material. The delivery of the training would be done at the business user site under classroom conditions followed by a week of on-site support where required.