Objective

A system/project engineering or project quality assurance/quality management position.

Skill Areas And Experience

Summary

22 years postgraduate experience in a variety roles successfully developing complex telecommunications products that included both in-house and 3^rd party (s/w & h/w) components. Main areas of experience are:

Project Management And Project Control

• Managing and administering product change management processes across overlapping product releases for a development group producing a family of Intelligent Network products. The product family included service creation, service hosts (i.e. real time traffic handling), services, service management, fault handling and platform management products.
• Validating system designs for new product features against new and existing product requirements, other planned product changes, usability plans and applicable standards.
• Communicating technical material within a large multi-disciplinary development group, communicating with other development groups and with other internal suppliers/customers.
• Ensuring change documents identify all affected work areas.
• Gathering work areas estimates for changes, validating estimates against the requirements and collating estimates in the change documentation.
• Participating in Change Control Board, producing CCB, progressing actions and reporting results of CCB actions.
• Contributing to and reviewing project plans for consistency with product requirements, release requirements and per feature work breakdowns.
• Maintaining feature change records to record status of feature changes during evaluation cycle and through development.
• Participating in project engineering, planning and progress reviews.
• Producing customer specific versions of product changes and release definitions.
• Resolving technical issues raised by customers.

Product Requirements And Configuration Management

· Responsible for production of system documents (e.g. requirements, interface definitions, procurement guides etc.) and product configuration documentation describing complex telecommunication products. This included:

o Ensuring the documents and the product data in them complied with company wide and local standards.

o Ensuring documents were available for development work areas and that works areas could determine the status of the documents.

o Compiling customer deliverable versions of system and product documents.

· Managing updates to system and product documentation to cater for new and/or parallel product releases plus ensuring traceability to change documentation.

• Being first point of contact for requirements questions from within development group, from other groups in the company and questions resulting from customer enquiries.

Quality Management

· Responsible for production of product change management and product design procedures to obtain ISO9001 certification.

· Reviewing development quality processes, e.g. s/w development, integration and testing ones, to ensure they:

o Inter-worked with each other and the change management processes

o Produced and recorded the data required for project management reporting requirements and compliance with company development standards.

· Contributor to product quality management plans.

· Regular participant in quality gate reviews as part of product development processes to check that products complied with requirements and project plans.

· Using root causes and development statistics to improve development and quality management processes

· Assisting with quality audit preparation.

Customer Enquiry And Bid Management

· Validating outline system designs for new product features.

· 'Progress chasing' enquiries and bids through work area validation and estimation.

· Consolidation of estimates into bid and enquiry responses and producing outline plans with MS Project.

· Participating in bid review meetings.

· Assisting the production of compliance statements for contract negotiations.

Network/System/Subsystem Testing:

· Analysing the requirements of telecommunications products to produce test strategies and test sequence details e.g. for telephony switching subsystems, operator services networks.

· Executing and reporting the results of automated/manual tests on telecommunications subsystems, systems and networks that included s/w running on PCs, UNIX platforms and in house developed h/w.

· Reviewing tests and test strategies produced by others to ensure they complied with company standards, covered the product requirements and configurations.

· Acting as a mentor for other provers.

· Analysing test results and resolving problems found during testing.

· Testing user interfaces at s/w component level.

· Executing acceptance tests with customer and 3^rd party observers present.

System Design:

· Analysing new requirements for telecommunication products (e.g. Intelligent Networks platform features and the Operator Services System for System X0.

· Producing feature designs (partitioning between network elements & s/w components, interface changes, usability issues etc.) to meet new product requirements.

· Explaining designs to customers and users.

· Validating feature designs produced by others.

· Validating solutions to customer enquiries.

· Analysing new requirements and producing feature designs for operator services telecommunications products.

Usability:

• Producing and revising usability plans.
• Validating s/w component user interface designs and implementations against requirements.
• Using user interface knowledge plus other information (e.g. customer expectations) gained during development processes to provide/produce material for user guides, product online help features and training courses .

Problem Resolution

· Analysing problem reports from s/w component development, integration, system testing phases, project engineering reviews and problems reported with products in service.

· Determining the corrective action(s) required, informing the affected work areas and ensuring actions were taken.

· Analysing problems to identifying root causes for use in quality improvement activities.

Employment History

April 2003 to present: Logistics Assistant, Royal Bournemouth Hospital. Checking received medical goods are as ordered, booking in goods, ensuring goods are delivered promptly to the correct hospital area and resolving delivery /mail problems.

May 2002 To April 2003: Industrial Unit, Randstad Employment Agency, Bournemouth Office. Successfully completed various temporary postings in goods in, delivery and with NHS.

October 2001 to May 2002: Break then Job Hunting.

October 1979 To October 2001: Marconi Communications (previously GPT and Plessey Telecommunications).

Last Position: Systems/Project/Quality Engineer in Intelligent Networks platforms development group. Main responsibilities product change management processes (day to day running and ISO9001 compliance), system requirements & configuration, compliance with product requirements, resolution of requirements related problems and supporting Product/Project management. Achievements included:

· Changing an incomplete, un-managed and un-documented change control mechanism into one that catered for the complete development cycle and provided the baseline for other development team processes to comply with ISO9001.

· Contributing to timely delivery of product releases by providing technical support, configuration management and other services to project managers, development teams etc. working on parallel releases and customer specific projects.

· Championed the introduction of requirements tracability mechanisms and educating the development teams about them.

· Rationalised of system documents to reduce update costs and improve quality.

· Using the results from analysing product problems to identified improvements to quality and development processes.

Previous positions with GPT/Plessey.

Bid/Enquiry Engineer for IN (Intelligent Network) platform development group with responsibility for progressing enquiries (bids) for new work through the development work areas.

System Prover in the proving team for the operator services product for System X using in house automated test tools.

System Designer in the design team carrying out adaptive engineering of the operator services product for System X.

System Prover in the proving team for System X's ISDN interface.

Acceptance Tester in the team developing and running release acceptance tests for switching subsystem for System X exchanges.

Education

BSc Electronic Engineering, University of Essex (1979)

3 A levels, Chemistry (C), Physics (C) Maths (D) plus 6 O levels

Current Training:

Website Design Manager course intended to lead to CIW certification. The course includes Internet Fundamentals, Web Page Authoring (HTML), Networking, JavaScript, Perl, Server Administration, Design Methods and Tools/Technology.

Recent Training:

February 2004 ECDL based on MS Office 2000.

July 2003 ISO9000:2000 Quality Standard Series Auditor/Lead Lead Auditor, a IRCA certified course including a examination (see http://www.irca.org).

Previous Training:

IT/SW Tools: Lotus Notes, Quickplace, and HTML.

System Design: Real Time SASD, Introduction to Object Orientated Design.

Usability: A series of seminars and lectures covering product usability, usability planning, network usability and acceptability

Quality: Quality Improvement (Crosby), Introduction to CMM.

Project Management: Cost Estimation, Planning.

General Business: Intellectual Property Rights, Organised Manager, Basic Business Skills (Communications, Interviews, Appraisals, Meetings, Presentation, Basic Marketing, Finance) & Fagan Inspections.