Australian Maritime College

Wingham High School

Senior Digital Consultant at HCL Australia Services Pty Limited

Sydney, Australia

Employed by HCL to work as a Strategic Program Manager at Commonwealth Bank.

HCL Australia Services Pty Limited

Senior Digital Consultant

Engaged by Fastlane Solutions as a Project Management Consultant on a short-term engagement with a Government client to develop specifications for a data visualisation platform and other ancillary systems for their PMO to help manage & develop insights on their capital works projects. Provided recommendations on technology enablers, tooling, and associated governance to ensure long term sustainability and integration with the broader enterprise data-warehousing strategy.

Fastlane Solutions

Information Technology Consultant

Using my knowledge of on-premise and cloud-based Data Centres and enterprise environment configuration, I performed an IT assurance review of a hybrid cloud solution for a Virtual Data Centre on AWS and Azure and the associated CI/CD and Infrastructure-as-Code migration strategy utilised for a State Government entity’s entire application portfolio move to the hybrid cloud solution. Required meeting with over 30 project members to gather insights and identify key issues and challenges. Provided the State Government IT management team with a list of identified risks and issues on their proposed strategy, delivery approach and implementation for prioritised remediation.

Frazer Walker

Senior Consultant

Engaged on a contract basis to apply my subject matter expertise around Securitisation and successfully completed a Project Business Case and engaged a 3rd party software vendor for Toyota Finance Australia’s Treasury Department to expand their ABS issuance capabilities as part of their funding strategy. Managed to reduce initial project estimates by 60% through contract negotiation,  removal of unnecessary contract inclusions, and rewriting vendors support SLAs to reflect internal ITIL standards & TFA requirements.

Toyota Finance Australia

Project Manager

Engaged on a contract basis to deliver a salesforce based Legal Management System using MuleSoft to interface with various 3rd party CRM and ERP systems. Remotely managed the project from Sydney with a distributed project team of 10 people across 3 states with IT staff and software vendors in Melbourne, Subject Matter Experts in Adelaide and Project Sponsor in Brisbane.  Maintained project expenses across multiple 3rd party vendors within budget, and delivered functionality iteratively (using SCRUM) within a larger digital transformation using CI/CD into a multi-tenanted Salesforce container and zero integration/code-clash incidents.

AHPRA (Australia Health Practitioner Regulation Agency)

Responsible as Service Owner for all aspects of Service Management, maintenance, and support of over 400 IT solutions used across the Group Operations division including PEGA Case Management, BLUE PRISM Robotic Process Automation and many other legacy User Developed Tools, macros and enterprise solutions. As a Service Owner, I was also accountable for implementing appropriate ITIL governance over the Service Management and Delivery of change and managed technology risk according to Group policy. I led a team of Portfolio Managers who performed service management on the Group Ops systems as well as preparing and maintaining security, capacity and availability plans for their systems and assisting in the delivery of change.A strong risk focus is required to ensure all applications have appropriate risk controls in place and to ensure the required annual ITIL governance activities are completed.Vendor management is required to ensure we engage our partners appropriately for additional support via managed service and fixed price maintenance agreements.Approving invoices for ad hoc engagements, Special elevated access (SAR) requests and software installations are also required in this role to ensure everyone in the team and the service accounts for the systems have what is required to perform their function.I also have a strong focus on simplifying our systems landscape such that it dovetails with Group Operations IT strategic systems activities.

Commonwealth Bank

Executive Manager Group Operations IT

Responsible for managing the development, maintenance and support of multiple applications across Securitisation, Hedge Accounting and Group Funding in the Treasury division of Group Enterprise Services. This responsiblility includes Project Managing and involvement across a variety of group-wide projects. Also required to undertake due diligence with contracted 3rd parties and Vendors. Since taking on this role I have successfully delivered regulatory reporting functionality to the securitisation platform and on boarded the Hedge Accounting business to the ES operating model.

IT Portfolio Manager

Responsible for managing the development, maintenance and support of the Groups securitisation applications that manage Retail Backed Mortgage Securities (RMBS) and Covered Bonds products. This includes Project Managing related securitisation projects using agile (SCRUM) techniques. Also required to undertake due diligence with contracted 3rd parties and Vendors. Since taking on this role I have introduced the Bank's Standard SDLC process to the related securitisation system enhancements and projects. Frequently consult with Bank Architects and Software providers on remediation and refactoring solutions for product scalability and longevity. Maintaining Service Management levels, with frequent audits to ensure SLAs are maintained, and preparing and maintain security, capacity and availability plans for the related applications and systems are also requirements of this role.

IT Application Manager

In this senior consulting role in the High Availability Service Management team within the Information Technology Service Management & Operations division of CBA, I am responsible for reviewing the performance, capacity and availability of various major projects impacting the banks primary customer platforms. In this role as "Guardian of Stability", I evaluate application and infrastructure architecture (High Level Solution Designs) and assist with the creation of adequate Non Functional Requirements, and raise and manage the associated Non Functional Risks to ensure any changes do not impact system stability. I also assist by reviewing associated performance test plans and performance test results to ensure solutions and release processes will not create a negative impact on capacity, performance and availability of the major bank applications including NetBank, CommBiz, CommSee, ComSec and the Core Banking Modernisation program utilising SAP. This role consults primarily with architects, Solution Delivery Managers and Product Managers to ensure new projects are delivered smoothly and current systems remain stable. I have also been engaged as a technical SME on Enterprise wide infrastructure projects to map critical Tier 1 flows and the related infrastructure and escalate any operational risks identified(e.g. end of life device, single point of failure, scalability, application isolation)  associated with any of the 9000+ hardware devices spanning over 200 IT Services.Recent team movements have resulted in the additional responsibility of becoming Team Leader to govern the day to day operation of the team and ensure all deliverables are provided on time and with the utmost quality that has become the expected norm from the HASM team.

Team Leader / Senior Solution Performance Engineer

Project Managed over 50 developers and associated testers, business analysts, change managers and IT partners across multiple concurrent projects in the Retail Banking and Financial Services (BFS) Division delivering upgrades to Macquarie Bank’s retail broking site EDGE and creating new credit card product offerings, and Macquarie’s first consolidated retail banking portal for customers to have a single view of all their accounts. Conducted over 100 interviews to recruit and build multiple high performing scrum teams, hiring ~20 specialist JAVA developers familiar with web-based technologies such as JBOSS, SEAM, JSF, EJB 3.0, Hibernate & Spring and delivered projects utilising agile techniques to improve stakeholder engagement via time-boxed incremental delivery using CI/CD processes. Worked within divisional PMO to establish working groups to manage project resources and environments to reduce contention and delivery risks.

Macquarie Bank

Information Technology Program Project Manager

At DST International - a global financial software development and consulting company - famed for one of the worlds’ leading funds and portfolio management software products – HiPort, I worked as a Prince 2TM certified technical project manager working closely with Solution Architects and Technical Designers to deliver high value financial solutions. One major project was managing the global design & development of a new multi-million dollar OTC derivative trading & management system for Third Party Administrators, large Hedge Funds and Asset Managers. The design for this product called for FPML to model the various instruments (CDS, IRS, etc) with 3rd party APIs for affirmation/confirmation, validation & pricing - enabling a fully scalable solution for any instrument & any 3rd party. This client-facing role required weekly conference calls and frequent travel to and from London & Bangkok to communicate the solution, resolve issues and building better client relationships. Working alongside Architects and Technical Designers, technical documentation was presented using UML and wireframe screen drawings that effectively communicated designs, use cases, and component architecture across countries and time zones. Projects were run using an iterative Agile or SCRUM-like approach utilising daily stand-up meetings, burn-down charts, and fortnightly sprints. My last initiative was to improve quality throughout the SDLC by implementing a lightweight QMS work product review procedure utilising a customised JIRA implementation.

DST International

Technical Project Manager (Prince 2 certified)

Soon after starting I began rewriting the entire site in .NET using a n-tiered based architecture.  Following the successful upgrade, in May 06, was appointed Tech Lead focusing on white-label web customization and successfully delivered a white-labeled trading platform called “directshares” to St George Bank inside only 2 months.In January 07, I was appointed IT Project Manager as part of a $14 million development project to provide a custom platform to one of Australia’s top Financial Platform providers & was responsible for providing all development estimates, managing team of 10+ & scheduling all development work until the projects delivery in May 08.Whilst not official, Solutions Architect describes the majority of my tasks over the past 18 months - being the major contributor of ALL development estimates and software design solutions - most of which have been purposefully designed to consider future scalability, stability and performance for the years to come.

E*Trade Australia

Solution Architect (unofficial) / Senior .NET Developer

This company required a full-time developer to maintain their website and keep it up-to-date as well as develop new projects. The IDRO website was redeveloped and hosted internally. Received comprehensive training in JAVA and J2EE programming and built several sites using JSP/Servlet technology with STRUTS.  A much deeper understanding of open-source programming and Linux was a result of working at ICA where many systems were built for the Linux platform using open-source tools such as Apache and Tomcat.Other development tools such as Ant, Struts, OJB/JDO and DTO’s were implemented on projects while working at ICA.

Insurance Council of Australia

Senior JAVA Developer

<a href="http://Shareanalysis.com">Shareanalysis.com</a> is a stock market research company responsible for providing research papers via the Web to public subscribers, while Aegis was designed for fund managers, brokers and private institutional investors.The initial position was as primary web developer when the IT team was one person and the original site had not yet been created. Four months later, after interviewing and employing several more developers, the role changed to Web Development Manager leading a team of inexperienced web developers (university trainees) in the development of web pages using ASP (Active Server Pages) and SQL server and other applications in VBA (Excel & Word) for seamless office/web integration. The sites, both built and managed, grew to include sites custom built for E*trade Australia, Charles Schwab Australia and St George’s Quicktrade, and as web development manager, I was ultimately responsible for the management of these major projects.

Aegis Equities Research

Head of Technical Services

After starting out as a Marine Underwriter, I moved to the IT Dept. working as a Business Analyst applying expert knowledge of Insurance Products for the development of a Nationwide insurance software package (HUON).  I was invited to move full time to the IT Dept. and continued to work as Software Analyst/Tester - testing mainframe COBOL apps with a Windows C++ GUI. This position followed the full life cycle development of software including developing test procedures, recording test scripts (automatic & manual), documentation of use cases, tracking of bugs & bug fixes, and providing on-site product support for the retail network after implementation. Soon after, began training in mainframe programming and entered role of System Developer in the production support team, now responsible for fixing the reported bugs that were found in the previous role. Apart from programming, this also required a keen ability to seek out the source of errors, both user related and code related.

Michael Hall

Michael Hall