Head of Technical Delivery

Case studies: Proactive problem management across a managed customer base, Ransomware recovery for a national distribution business

I lead a function created in 2022 when managed services was split in two, covering second and third line Cloud, Data, Connectivity, Unified Comms and Workplace support. The team spans onshore and offshore locations, with one layer of team leads.

• Led Converged separate technical teams into one blended operating model while holding live SLAs
• Led Designed and embedded a proactive problem management framework, applied across a large managed customer base, with an engineer kept in the loop where automation cannot decide
• Co-led Worked with Professional Services leadership to formalise how customer requests move between support and projects, writing the principles and building an AI-assisted triage workflow with decisions kept with people
• Led Proof of concept, piloted, not rolled out Designed and built a knowledge-base pipeline using Python and AI-assisted coding against Cosmos DB and Azure AI Search
• Led Out-of-hours major incident manager and senior escalation point, and technical lead for zero-day assessments on the vulnerability management committee
• Contributed Championed proactive automation that contributed to a steady run of improvements and a reduction in major outages
• Led Mentored engineers across complex hybrid platforms and built a culture of psychological safety, so people feel able to learn, ask and try things without fear
• Contributed Contributed to bid responses and service design, aligning technical architecture proposals with commercial strategy
• Led Recognised with Above and Beyond awards and company all-hands mentions for leadership in vulnerability management and incident response
• Contributed Helping drive a sustained improvement in customer satisfaction scores

• 💡Lesson: People can accept a hard decision they understand. Broken promises and shifting direction are what lose them.
• 🌱Skill: The value of disagree and commit. Most people can disagree with a decision and still get behind it if they can see where it leads, so establishing the bigger picture early is key. Without it, decisions get reopened, direction keeps changing and trust goes fast.
• 💡Lesson: Successful backups and successful recovery are not the same thing
• 💡Lesson: I naturally look for the best in people and try to help them improve. I've also learnt that when someone is in the wrong role, or the organisation has moved on and they haven't, you have to move quickly. Form has to follow function.
• 🌱Skill: Get the data somewhere trustworthy first, then automate on top of it
• 💡Lesson: Governing AI is less about restricting people than giving them safe tools that are easier to use than the alternatives

Nothing from this role falls under that theme. Try All.

• AI with oversight
• Automation
• Commercial strategy
• Cyber recovery
• Leadership
• Major incident management
• Operating model
• People and mentoring
• Problem management
• Security
• Service delivery
• Service design

Head of Managed Services

I brought legacy technical teams together into one proactive managed services operating model, moving towards ITIL-aligned governance and modern monitoring and cross-skilling engineers for hybrid infrastructure.

• Co-led Provided technical leadership through the consolidation of multiple monitoring tools onto LogicMonitor, driving migration completion and the retirement of legacy platforms
• Led Kept hands-on accountability for tier-three major incident escalations through a team realignment to protect live SLAs
• Contributed Provided technical evidence supporting the company's Microsoft Azure Expert MSP status (2021)
• Led Harmonised the morning stand-ups across teams around common goals, and refreshed objectives so they linked to wider organisational goals

• 🌱Skill: Moving to managing managers meant delegating more and coaching each person differently. Some were strongest on the people side and others on delivery, so I brought those strengths together and encouraged people to learn from each other across teams.
• 💡Lesson: Teams can keep their own routines as long as they share the same goals
• 💡Lesson: Data and objectives have to line up, with dashboards to work from. Not having them was what made the case for transforming our monitoring.
• 💡Lesson: Accurate monitoring can make a service look worse before it gets better, because it exposes what the old tools were hiding

Nothing from this role falls under that theme. Try All.

• Cloud
• Leadership
• Major incident management
• Monitoring
• Operating model
• Platform transformation
• Service delivery

Centre of Excellence Manager, Secure and Public Sector

I ran technical escalations and support for secure public sector cloud environments under UK OFFICIAL and NCSC guidance, including secure VDI on VMware Horizon, VMware vCloud and PSN networks, bridging platform build and live service.

• Led Built 24x7 hypercare monitoring for critical national public sector platforms through peak periods
• Led Owned technical remediation for penetration testing, ITHC, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 for central government and secure clients
• Led Hardened Linux and Solaris base images against CIS benchmarks, and designed secure bridging and proxy architecture later signed off through external accreditation
• Co-led Rebuilt load-balancer configuration and helped restore service during a prolonged hosting outage on end-of-life infrastructure

• 💡Lesson: We had built our internal platforms close to zero trust before 2020, so moving to remote working was the easy part. Managing people remotely was the hardest.
• 💡Lesson: A workaround under pressure has to be checked against every tenant on shared infrastructure
• 🌱Skill: Working to external accreditation, from ISO 27001 and SOC 2 to ITHC and NCSC guidance

Nothing from this role falls under that theme. Try All.

• Engineering
• Major incident management
• Regulated environments
• Security
• Service transition