Edinburgh Napier University

Colorado Cannabis Cultivation  -  Property Developer  -  Technology Analyst & Scrum Master  -  Highland Holiday Cottage Owner

I am responsible for strategy, due diligence and raising finance for our property investment company. We buy distressed property, particularly whole portfolios and turn them into beautiful warm dry homes for long term letting to families, student, social or professional tenants in the Dundee & Angus areas of Scotland. I offer sophisticated investors a consistent opportunity to safely & smoothly get involved in future property development projects.

Trinity Un Limited Property

Director

<a href="https://www.saltwindsskye.com/This">https://www.saltwindsskye.com/This</a> unique and thoughtfully designed luxury cottage has been recently made available for luxury self catering holidays in the perfect location on the Isle of Skye. The house is perfectly positioned to take full advantage of stunning views of the world famous Waternish sunsets, fine dining at the Lochbay Restaurant and the quaffing of award winning ales at the Stein Inn, the oldest Inn on Skye; both 5 minutes walk down the hill. It should be noted that Lochbay Restaurant has just been awarded a Michelín star by renowned chef Michael Smith.Prepare to be blown away by the enormous open plan living space which flows seamlessly outdoors to an equally spacious deck taking in the amazing views which overlook the bay, its islands and across the Minch to the Outer Hebrides strung like jewels along the horizon some 30 miles West. If you get bored of the spectacular sunsets or the storms and squalls dancing towards you across the Atlantic, we provide a full sound and video system for your entertainment.This makes it a perfect romantic get-away, for food lovers, adventurous types, also for families with small children, all rooms are on a single level with the most modern levels of accessibility and we even welcome very well behaved dogs.

Salt Winds Skye Holiday Let

Managing Owner

Due to a pivotal change in direction of the DC Exit Programme, I was re-tasked with setting up 7 distinct Scrum teams to facilitate flexible and rapid exit of a particular Data Hall in one data centre.This involved training all Product Owners and Scrum team members in the practices, rules, ethos and ceremonies of the Scrum framework, meanwhile training up another Scrum master to assist with the workload and take over the role upon my departure from the bank.Within very short timeframe all Sprints were successfully underway with all team members fully bought into the framework.

Scrum Master

The enormous programme that my project was part of will simplify & optimise RBS' core technology estate safely & deliver our programme commitments by remediating & closing two primary Data Centres within a demanding, tight time scale.I managed a Agile team of developers and analysts using the Scrum Framework to build a Technology Analytics Application that will represent the entire RBS UK technology estate and all inter-relations in order to provide powerful MI & reporting to programme teams. This information is being used for decisions across the breadth of the programme to make the technological changes needed to remove all dependencies from two of RBS' biggest data centres in the UK.The complex dependencies can be summarised: 12,000 servers. 1,000 apps. 82,000 users. 21Pb of data.My project's deliverables are as follows:•	Providing an overview of Global Technology estate showing inter-dependencies from User to Network•	Single Golden source, integrating over 100 dynamic source feeds •	Catering to bespoke delivery based requirements of all streams in the programme•	During the 4 years of change, the app will be able to show the previous, current and future state of the environment, dynamically from any angle•	Reducing HR overhead & increasing efficiency of analysis in all streams due to data and analysis being centrally available and customisable upon request•	Representing the division between Ring-Fence Bank & NatWest Markets using logic in the app•	Dealing with a living breathing environment, reporting on new apps/devices/people/data as they come and go over the years

DC Exit Tracking & Analysis Manager / Scrum Master

Working to resolve crisis of confidence in country due to lack of engagement between teams.Analysing root cause of collaborative problems and working to bring teams together.Ensuring that breakdown of communication outwith the programme had minimal effect to timelines and working to ensure planning for future timelines was correct.Integrating remote Polish platform teams into central Enterprise Platform Operations.In-depth negotiations and analysis to choose the correct path to migrate non-standard Polish applications into a highly regulated UK Bank.

Senior Technical Business Analyst, Poland Technology Transformation Programme

Took on the Scrum master role for a complex international application migration remotely assisting Polish PMs to remove impediments and quicken progress towards the ultimate closure of the global programme.Managing project to decommission all legacy applications, infrastructure and networks in Poland to fully realise RBS enormous cost savings.Analysed, negotiated and smoothly transitioned the service support & operating model of legacy ABN AMRO Polish sites into RBS standards.Managed project to deploy NetApp storage infrastructure into Polish and UK Data Centres.Provided full analyst support to all streams of the transformation programme including data, users, desktops, network, infrastructure and applicationsThe deliverance of milestones upon which all other programme streams are dependent, on time and on budget in an environment of extremely tight governance and change management has been a consistent theme of my tenure.

Scrum Master / Project Manager, Poland Technology Transformation Programme

I have built my own 155 sq/m eco dream house on the Isle of Skye. It has spectacular views to the Outer Hebrides strung along the horizon and infamous sunsets to die for. It took my brother and I only 7 months to build from the dirt to completion and is one of the most challenging projects I have undertaken. We used the most advanced building techniques to create a warm haven in one of the most inhospitable climates in Europe. By employing extraordinary levels of insulation & air tightness; a heat recovery system; triple glazed windows and ensuring no cold bridging, the small amounts of energy used by the Air Source Heatpump and wood burning stove will never be wasted.This will be used as a family holiday home and for short term holiday lets when we are not using it.

Salt Winds

Property Developer & Builder

The client was a global logistics enterprise with 14 sites in 7 countries who had a requirement to correctly organise their logical IT infrastructure, their desktop user experience and the VMware ThinClient user experience.I was the sole operative, and SME for this complex project, which I managed and successfully implemented in only 6 months.Before beginning, I carried out 1 month of in-depth analysis, and then sold an all-encompassing solution to the board of directors. The solution aligned the IT structure in terms of how the enterprise was actually supported, moving away from obsolete methods & hierarchies.I used a low risk rollout schedule with ‘test’ then ‘pilot’ user groups to optimise the deployment process before rolling out a safe, low impact, and adequately supported solution to the entire enterprise.This primarily involved freshly deployed Group Policy effective to all users and computer objects, and a completely restructured Organisational Unit hierarchy.The benefits to the user experience included faster logon times, trouble free user profiles, and granular control of folder redirection.The numerous DNS, DHCP, replication, NTFS security and DFS targetting problems I discovered during this time were also safely resolved before my contract ended.After correcting the wide-ranging structural problems I safely virtualised all of the domain controllers using VMware and upgraded the domain level to 2012R2.Furthermore I tightened up various levels of security and IT management policy to ensure that the environment remains under control.

Krome Technologies Ltd

Active Directory Architect

Creating and nurturing a dedicated trustworthy team of 12 bilingual people from incredibly diverse backgrounds to assist in the complex logistical operations required to run multi-activity adventure tours up the highest coastal mountain on EarthGaining international recognition for uniquely crafted community & eco adventure tours in what is known as “The Temple of Bio-diversity”Propelling the company to #1 spot in TripAdvisor in the state of Magdalena (most visited state in Colombia)Visiting tourism fairs, exhibitions and meeting with representatives from similar local businesses, associated community groups and relevant government bodies to promote our offeringsRevamping the company website to increase SEO ranking, sales focus and social integration with the aim of being able to generate 30 sales leads a week purely through website enquiries

Elemento Outdoor Adventure

Owner/Expedition Leader

Managed a team of five people in the implementation of an enterprise wide migration project involving the integration of ABN AMRO data, systems and people into the RBS CIB modelManaging & closely liaising with stakeholders in all levels of the banking business to gain ownership, win approval and plan migrations according to intricate business requirements was one of my most important responsibilities. Task and goal setting for the team to meet strict monthly progress targets meant that the project smashed every target with weeks to spare month on monthDesigning a safe low risk process to make large high impact changes to business data, identity access management, drive mappings, and application linkageWorking with expert developers to ensure that the process was as automated and risk averse as possibleDealing with complex and wide ranging application interdependencies, including live feeds of trading data, to ensure no business impact at migration time

RBS Global Banking & Markets

Project Team Lead

Monitoring global server Estate and dealing with all logical and physical problems in the various global data centres. Inventing, refining and delegating process to offshore support teams, then overseeing their performance and daily incident resolution to maximise benefit & cost reduction to the business. Presenting and gaining agreement on new ideas by video conference and powerpoint for progressive common sense change to colleagues in Tokyo and New York. Chairing the weekly CAB meetings and engineering improvements in Global Change Management. Leading a successful Data Centre Disaster Recovery test. Using DFS-R, consolidating 6 legacy file servers onto one tightly managed, highly available platform reducing risk to business and provisioning flexible infrastructure to cope with rapid future growth. Managing enormous global server firmware and MS patch update projects involving close liaison with all service owners to schedule patch/reboot cycle according to complex interdependencies and granular time restraints to more than 500 global servers in 50 countries. Managing Domain Controller migration project, encompassing 4 forests and 11 domains onto a resilient virtual platform. Building vmWare ESX farms & ESXi servers, provisioning for virtualisation of many physical machines to realise the company handsome financial savings.

EMI Music

Senior Global Infrastructure Analyst

Played a pivotal role in the enterprise-wide rollout of the global environment desktop OSPreparing UAT testing and validation of all unsigned apps using VMwareStreamlining and automating processesIssues management, post and pre upgradeThis was the number 1 performing Global IT project out of 300 that year at RBSAfter the success above, my contract was extended and I was moved onto the equally high profile Data Cleansing projectThis was a file security lockdown project which affected all areas of the bankI determined data owners in the business, and then closely liaised with them to ascertain user entitlement requirements for secure new areas. After meticulous preparation of file security, drive mappings, request mechanisms and copy scripts, I would safely perform migrations onto new infrastructure, communicating all stages of the process efficiently to impacted parties. This has now resulted in almost 100% of the banks data being in secure new owned data areas, complying with FSA audit pointsI changed and improved many aspects of this project, making it safer and more efficientI have also been involved in several large integration projects bringing acquisitions such as Ulster Bank or Cheltenham & Gloucester fully onto completely new environments. I have become something of a specialist for the bank in such matters and can safely say I am an expert in the large scale manipulation of AD.During this contract over weekends I would often help out with physical server and rack moves at the banks highly secure data centre

RBS Markets and International Banking

Systems Engineer / Controls Analyst

I worked in the Desktop engineering department of the enormous Canary Wharf site in London. We looked after the needs of 8000 users on one site which meant that incident management queues were huge, complex and requiring extremely fast and organised resolution.

HSBC Investments

Systems Engineer

IT Support & Infrastructure ManagerOrigin Pacific is New Zealand’s second biggest airline. On an initial 1 month contract which was extended until my work visa ran out 3 and a half months later, I looked after all aspects of IT Support and Infrastructure for the entire company and all 9 airportsAlong with the huge backlog of support tasks to work through due to previous absence of local IT support, I installed two new airports onto the airlines’ Departure Control System and brought an entire subsidiary office onto the network, joining the Origin domain for the first time. After success of new airport deployment, I then deployed all remote sites onto Citrix sessions using ThinClientsDaily duties involved 2000 & 2003 server maintenance, all other XP & 2000 desktop and hardware support, BackupExec servicing and battling security threats.I worked to a very tight budget and managed my time impeccably as the company could not afford to pay superfluous hours.After only a couple of months here, I helped bring the company off its knees. The IT was vastly improved and should provide a stable foundation to enable the airline to return to its previous success.

Origin Pacific Airways

IT Support & Infrastructure Manager

Infinity is one of the main professional IT solutions providers in NZ. On an initial 2 month contract, extended for a further 3 months, my role as field engineer involved visiting or remotely accessing over 20 different companies to provide IT assistance. Every site was completely new to me and differed greatly. A fair amount of intuition and/or initiative was required to ascertain the environment and determine a suitable solution.All systems from NT server to .Net 2003 and Lotus Notes were in use. All issues from LAN and server infrastructure to laptop remote access and security/virus defence had to be solved.As part of the job, I had to document my visits and provide guides to future solutions.I kept to strict SLA schedules, which differed from client to client and had to work with call monitors. Every minute had to be accounted for and was charged out at a high hourly rate to the clients.

Infinity Solutions

Infrastructure Field Engineer

I was in charge of all support and infrastructure in the Edinburgh office and Data centre, also providing full services for the Aberdeen, Inverness, York, Leeds and Manchester offices remotely.I installed numerous DELL servers, NT, 2000 and Netware 5.1, often involving migrations. I completely installed new networking infrastructure in Glasgow, Edinburgh & Inverness. I documented the entire network and colour coded to company standard.I documented many areas of the IT, including various procedural documents, full and up-to-date hardware & network records and user guides for various different systems.I instigated a sweep of desktop upgrades in two offices using Norton Ghost and various other large-scale deployment technologies, migrating from a mixed 95/98/NT desktop environ. This resulted in every capable PC in both offices being on an identical high-quality company standard build Windows & Office 2000 platform in a very short time. Consequently, I noticed the volume of support calls drop dramatically. My formula for rollouts was subsequently adopted across the national enterprise.Things I played with were automatic Outlook profile creation, advanced rapid OS deployment, automatic software updating, video tunneling and streaming, web caching, and some other time saving ideas.By setting up VPN’s and implementing remote control tools, I was able to start offering field engineers and remote workers almost the same level of assistance they would have received on-site.I was highly involved in the rollout of the Video Conferencing network and helped the developers test it to get the system up and running for use by the rest of the company.By the end of my time here I was 2nd in command in Scotland at the age of only 23. I was latterly used by the Global IT Director as a crisis resolution specialist,  being deployed to Northern English sites to resolve long standing structural problems and alleviate the suffering userbase.

Halcrow

Systems Analyst

As a junior member of the IT department of 5, I was the person tasked with most of the actual hands-on technical support of the 140-user Investment House. The environment was UNIX and Netware 4.11, with ZEN works, clients were Windows NT and email was cc:mail. On top of dealing with most network support and administration, I also carried out all hardware repairs and any local desktop problems.Over my time there I was instrumental in the “Common Operating NT Environment” design and rollout, migrating from a mixed 3.11, 95, NT environ. This was efficiently performed using extensive pre-rollout image testing and Norton Ghost to actually implement. I rolled every NT4 workstation out pretty much on my own in less than a month, way ahead of deadline. I was part of the Y2K and the Euro currency testing teams. I helped convert whole network from BNC to RJ45/CAT5 cabling.I was responsible for all virus updating and defence measures.

Tom Wilkinson

Tom Wilkinson