Data Migration Specialisdt
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Highly experienced data specialist who bridges the gap between the user community and technical delivery, enabling successful project completion. Taking lead roles within a succession of teams as part of multi-national businesses has led to data, technical, functional, process & business knowledge in areas as diverse as government and regulatory, through insurance and trading to construction and utilities. Combining a lifetime of data knowledge and technical skills, with a passion for delivery excellence ensures that all projects are completed successfully and provide significant business improvement.
Elexon, London (contract) April 2024 – December 2024
Data Pipeline, Analysis & Reporting Specialist
Elexon are leading the government’s Market Wide Half-Hourly changes to permit more dynamic use of smart meters across the power industry. As the programme Data Specialist, the role has been to build Data Processing, Data Analysis & BI Reporting processes and technical artefacts to support the gathering and monitoring of the preparation for the change, during the transition itself and post-implementation to determine the success of the strategy.
Implementing a new ERP system (based on Microsoft Business Central, D365, with Azure & Databricks storage) and two major complementary systems (one built in MS Power Apps with Dataverse), across four UK businesses in the group created a challenging environment to move the data handling from a world in which everything happened on individual spreadsheets to a more coordinated centralised environment.
One of the key tasks was to bring together a team of business and data analysts to work on migrating different individual company’s data in parallel whilst maintaining a common approach and utilising an innovative cloud data processing platform for the collation, transformation, cleansing and delivery of the data. Utilising MS Power BI to monitor & escalate data cleanliness.
Responsible for the complete design of the automated cloud based ETL system to be used across all four companies which produced significant benefits over the previous manual migration methodology. This embraced the hierarchical nature of the data object model to effectively ensure only clean data was available for migration, whilst dirty data was reported to the business leads for cleansing.
Ecclesiastical Insurance, Gloucester (contract) March 2018 – March 2022
Ecclesiastical underwent a major programme for the replacement of its core insurance system. One of the key workstreams was Data Migration and as the Technical Lead the requirement was to architect, manage and deliver the complete four-year migration process and immediate ETL platform between the existing DB2 system and the new third party system. An additional requirement being the incorporation of a daily self-service reporting solution in both MS Excel & Power BI.
The ETL & reporting platform we created included a number of key innovations, both in the componentisation of data processing and the flexible extensibility to enable the system to cope with many diverse types of insurance products without requiring redesign. These innovations were then incorporated into other in-house developed IT systems.
Lead Business, System & Data Analyst – Business Intelligence In Summer 2017 Viridor established the Heritage programme to update a significant number of IT applications and their associated data & business processes to D365. Corporate BI was one of the largest projects in the programme.
As the lead data analyst, the responsibility was to architect, design & deliver the Corporate Data Platform (CDP), an Azure Data Lake & Data Warehouse, drawing data from the six biggest systems in the organisation, re-processing & aggregating this into usable information that provided the foundation for the BI implementation.
As the lead systems analyst, the role was to design the required Microsoft PowerBI dashboards and reformatted Excel workbooks, then manage the development team in their creation and implementation.
As the lead business analyst, the requirement was to manage & deliver a redesign of the processes around the delivery of the CDP and PowerBI dashboards to derive the greatest business benefit from the newly presented information.
Sabbatical June 2017 – August 2017
Arval BNP Paribas, Manchester (contract) January 2017 – June 2017
Data & Application Architect; Lead Systems Analyst
With the technical services agreement for a legacy system expiring in May 2017, Arval required a replacement data processing and reporting application that would require the minimum of support and work across multiple sites and teams.
As the application architect working within an agile development framework with two specialist Business Analysts and six SMEs, the system had to be designed & delivered within very tight time constraints to allow the in-house developers time to implement the designed solution.
One of the key aspects of the role was the prioritisation & planning of the requirements, to ensure that all use cases could be satisfied whilst keeping within scope, timescales and budget. Guiding the stakeholders through effective communication ensured the project stayed on track.
Despite numerous hurdles presented by the data & architecture of the legacy system, the replacement was presented within the necessary timeframe and provided a higher quality of data processing, reporting and user experience than the much more expensive system it replaced.
Senior Business Systems Analyst - Data
Arval required the integration of the systems of a former rival finance company after their recent acquisition. Part of this process was the removal of MS Access, resulting in the migration of over sixty MS Access databases into their existing enterprise system.
The role was to map & analyse the data structures, inputs, business processes and reporting requirements contained in the legacy applications, prioritising remedial work, ensuring all functionality is transferred where necessary, and mitigated where not. Redesign of data structures and realignment to provide the simplest migration path. As the applications had evolved over an extended period, a high degree of user interaction was required and a significant amount of parallel design to identify the relevance and currency of data and functionality.
Investigating & proposing alternative solutions where business continuity was a requirement and presenting clear evidence-based rationales to senior stakeholders for the decommission of applications that were no longer required.
OVO Energy, Bristol (contract) March 2016 – September 2016
Senior Business & Data Analyst
Working alongside the permanent Lead Process Analyst, taking a key role in the change management & planning team of a fast-growing business. The company operates in an extremely agile and fast-paced manner to achieve ambitious growth targets while strengthening business processes to provide more assurance to regulatory authorities, management, investors and customers.
The core project was the migration of Pay-As-You-Go customers onto a new purpose-built platform for Smart Metering. Agile development was fully embraced to provide custom components. A significant part of the role was to deliver a new data model of the large, complex and uniquely structured backend database platform. This aspect grew significantly as the specialist supplier’s technical staff were transitioned off.
As part of the government’s Transforming Rehabilitation strategy for reforming probation services, RRP secured the contract for delivering these services in the Midlands. As part of this, the entire IT infrastructure and software was being replaced. The main ERP system covered nearly all aspects of the business and was a greenfield development.
The ERP Design Team comprised two business process analysts, two business data analysts and four business information specialists. Despite the job title, the role was architecting the definition of the new system specification. This meant running workshops at over ten locations across the Midlands and coordinating requirements spanning multiple management and workforce tiers.
The distilled analysis, design & data specifications were then presented to the daily scrum meetings followed by the management of the development teams to ensure the sprint deliverables met the specifications.
As a data specialist, the role included a position on the Ministry of Justice data steering group consisting of representatives of all supply companies and government data architects to define common data standards, data governance and exchange methodologies.
As the senior member of the design team, working alongside the Business Integration Manager, responsibilities included –
RWE Generation UK, Swindon (contract) May 2012 – December 2014
Senior Business Systems Analyst and Applications Architect
RWE Generation UK, Swindon (contract) August 2009 – May 2012
Senior Business Systems Analyst, Information Engineering Team
RWE IT UK, Swindon (contract) February 2008 – August 2009
Business Systems Analyst, MS Solutions Team
RWE Npower Cogen, Solihull (contract) March 2006 – February 2008
Applications & Data Analyst, Information Processing Team
RWE Npower, Swindon (contract) December 2003 – March 2006
Lead Analyst Developer, Projects Npower Team
RWE Innogy, Swindon (contract) March 2003 – December 2003
Senior Analyst Programmer, Business Systems Team
Innogy, Swindon (contract) June 2002 – March 2003
Team Leader, Application Migration Team
Innogy, Swindon (contract) September 2000 – May 2002
Senior Analyst Programmer, Application Development Team
Stitch Stuff, Redditch (contract) March 2000 – September 2000
Web Analyst & Designer
Ecctis 2000, Cheltenham (contract) September 1999 – March 2000
Database Application Analyst & Developer
Xerox Languages Services, Slough (contract) March 1999 – September 1999
Translation Application Analyst & Developer
BSc Computer Science, Reading University
