ADDRESS 5 Lambton House, Longbourn, Imperial Road, Windsor, SL4 3TR

Simon Firth

PERSONAL

CONTACT Home: 01753 850979. Mobile: 07808 290693

Email:

Web: www.redseamanagement.co.uk

NATIONALITY British

OVERVIEW

· A versatile Project Manager, skilled in a variety of industries; Telco, Media, Gaming, Utilities, Travel, Retail.

· Full Project life cycle projects in: Product Launch, Infrastructure, e-Commerce, CRM, Digital, Integration, and Marketing.

· Equally at home managing projects subject to infinite change as those that are fixed and have a date to be achieved “without excuse”.

· Skill set including, Project scoping and planning, Risk & issue management, Change control procedures, Microsoft Office / Project, Full financial forecasting, Concurrent projects, accountability and reporting.

· Existed within PRINCE2, PMI, PPM, Agile and localised methodologies with budgets ranging from £100,000 to £6m including P&L and resource work package responsibility.

· Strong Stakeholder Management.

· Agile Scrum Master – certified no.0100747

EMPLOYMENT

Products Project Manager / Sky / Feb 17 – Sep 17

Project management of the brand new Soundbox™ hardware product for Sky. In partnership with the Parisian-based high end audio engineering specialists, Devialet, Sky will have launched, in October 2017, a top of the market TV sound bar product called Soundbox™. Aside from Sky’s set top boxes, this hardware product represents a first for Sky’s offering to its customer base.

· Project team including Sky software developers and suppliers in France, China, Hong Kong, Netherlands and USA. These to include Devialet, Dolby, Analogue Devices, Elements, Zinwell, UEI.

· £4.5m budget.

· Chief Executive and Director level of stakeholder and reporting.

· Product designed to integrate with Sky set top box technology offering Dolby and various audio modes for sports and cinema.

· Budget accountability for both suppliers’ costs and Clarity time booking.

· Project team comprised eight integral workstreams.

· Complete design of project structure, governance and planning.

· Required full suite of tests, including Compliance testing for Declaration of Conformity certificate.

Products Project Manager / Telefonica O2 / May 16 – Jan 17

Marketing products to Businesses, managed and delivered multiple concurrent projects numbering, at any one time, up to four. Products included a conference calling facility called, Just Call Me, automated provisioning of Blackberry phone and Mobile Voice Recording.

· Project team primarily made up of On and Off shore resource, including suppliers, Accenture and IBM.

· A mix of projects that both followed and didn’t follow the O2 In House methodology, leading to its own challenges when dealing with a large company that knows only its in-house methodology.

· Average budgets of £200k.

· Full lifecycle, from Analysis and requirement gathering to Project Closure.

· Multiple stakeholder management.

Data Cleanse Project Manager / Virgin Media / June 15 – May 16

A Data Cleanse of Virgin Media Business’ entire customer records across all 10 business systems. Working in partnership with Accenture, a transformation project divided into one pilot and 12 distinct sprints to qualify, cleanse, correct, migrate and, incorporating CRM, to add a unique DUNS (Dun and Bradstreet unique identifier) number for all their Business Customers.

· Project team primarily made up of Accenture Business Partner work stream leads, developers and testers

· £6.5m Project between Capex and Opex.

· Sponsors, Stakeholders and customer Heads of Department numbering 26.

· Cleansed CRM systems included SalesForce, Remedy, Payplan, Oracle, ICOMS

· A project which learns as it progresses, redressing expectations and targets as it delivers. Subject to continual analysis of what is, and is not possible.

· Capex and Opex budget reductions enforced upon the project mid-delivery, leading to constant re-scoping and de-scoping. Continual Change Requests coming into the project from the Programme. SOW rewrites required.

· On and Off-shore teams.

Digital Project Manager / Rank / Jan 15 – March 15

Working in the gaming and casino industry, concurrent digital projects to update and introduce online gaming for both Grosvenor Casinos and Mecca Bingo. These involved e-commerce, website, tablet and mobile apps.

· Complete end to end, full life-cycle projects.

· Business Case construction and subsequent presentation to the board.

· Project team construction from both internal and external staff.

· 3rd Party digital development suppliers and vendors. Contract and SLA construction in partnership with Product Managers. SLAs dependent on plan creation.

· 3rd Party Testing function based off-shore in India (SIT, UAT, Performance).

· Small niche projects of values £50k to £200k.

· Agile environment.

Infrastructure Project Manager / Telefonica O2 / March 14 – Dec 14

Data Centre Migration – Following Telefonica’s purchase of O2, the current strategy is to consolidate Telefonica Data Centres for the UK, Germany and the Czech Republic into Madrid. IBM was the contracted 3rd Party Supplier to effect these migrations. O2 UK wish to close London based Data Centres and migrate the majority of Services, Applications and servers to Madrid. This will effect considerable cost savings in terms of site rentals.

· A programme of 13 IT projects where similar services are consolidated into Affinity Groups. An Affinity Group equates to a project. IBM owned the design of each Affinity Group migration.

· Concurrent ownership of one outsized project and three smaller ones.

· Eight O2 UK work steams work-shopped to validate the As Is prior to design for migration.

· Decommissioning work stream also created to tidy up redundant servers and racks.

· Management of IBM SLAs at Programme level.

· Programme later managed from Spain as moved to full development phase.

Digital Project Manager / BSkyB / June 12 – March 14

Buy and Keep – Working in the Satellite TV and new media space, Buy and Keep was an e-commerce project that offers customers the ability to buy films through their Set Top Box. The unique selling point is that the customer receives a digital copy of the film to their Set Top Box and a hard copy DVD through the post. A multi-phased project, this phase launched the concept through individual films in direct competition to Netflix and Amazon Lovefilm propositions.

· A project that entailed 15 separate work streams and reported into a wider programme of works.

· Customer engagement enabled through mobile phone apps, web, TV, new media.

· Mutli Channel offering – seamless functionality between the Sky Store purchasing platforms.

· Involved CRM and Billing development.

· Full Software Development Lifecycle – Android, iOS, Web, mWeb

· Management of multiple change requests.

· Management of fulfilment house.

· Weekly project reviews to manage risks, issues and programme dependencies.

· Stakeholder and Programme weekly reporting of Milestones.

· Delivery through to End to End testing and handover to the Staff and Customer Trials.

· Involved in UAT and Trial before launch to Live.

· £2m budget.

Number SubPorting – Working in the IT Telephony space, SubPorting was a medium sized project to allow the Porting and Subsequent porting of home telephone numbers from one Communication Provider to another to allow consumers to retain their incumbent number. A project split into three distinct parts; one part in partnership with Talk Talk was Ofcom Regulatory lead and another part was Business Case lead. The third part was Change related to automate Call Centre Functionality and reduce staff.

· Project environment involved both Waterfall and Agile project methodologies.

· Management and co-ordination of multiple Business Analysts.

· Project was initially just the one project with one go live date – decided to divide to into three distinct work streams to allow clearer sight of motivations between Regulatory and Business Case needs.

· Integration with other CPs; Virgin Media, Openreach and Talk Talk.

· Multiple stakeholders across Product and Regulatory required weekly reporting.

· Weekly Project meetings to manage the Deliverables internal to project, and Integration for other Call Providers.

· £1m budget

Integration Project Manager / Tesco.com / Sep 11 – June 12

Tesco Direct (online selling) created a new e-commerce platform on to which all their market place suppliers were integrated. A two year programme involving a complete redesign of Tesco.com's offering for non-grocery goods. The migration and integration of all the suppliers on to the new platform constituted for them a project of substantial technical change.

· Project planning for integration of 100+ existing suppliers.

· Multiple teams involving skill levels from differing sizes of suppliers.

· Off shore Test Team management - India.

· Owned relationship with 3rd party integrator for all suppliers requiring external development – development team in Russia.

· Managed relationship from initial Tesco presentation to fully Live integration.

· Trained incoming Integration Managers.

Infrastructure Project Manager / TUI (Thomson/First Choice) / July 11 – Sep 11

Technology Enablers – The programme Phoenix, was made up of four stages, each containing multiple projects to completely replace the online ticketing and reservations infrastructure for TUI’s brands. Technology Enablers was the first project of Stage 1 to provide the platform upon which subsequent projects would be delivered.

This was an interim planning role to manage the flow and creation of documentation across multiple work streams, followed by handover to an external consultancy to implement and deliver.

· Planning for how design and cost analysis documents would be delivered.

· Concurrent projects covering each of the platforms.

· Project Scope formation.

· Project work stream formation.

Products Project Manager / Vodafone / Feb 11 – July 11

Multiple concurrent projects crossing two internal Delivery methodologies: Prince and Agile

Child Bar – Implementation of online tool to manage Broadband access via Smartphone and Mobile Dongle. A self management tool accessed via the portal to allow account holders to restrict access based on adult content (18), social networks (13) and free access.

· Implementation of outsourced black box solution provided by supplier.

· Requirements gathering via series of workshops with supplier.

· Project managed across differing methodologies: IT delivery (Prince) and Transformation & Online (Agile).

· Project commenced from Shaping document and Requirements gathering.

· Full matrix/virtual project team creation from both sides of Delivery business.

Vodafone Bill Manager – Delivery of Business Change portion of Online Bill Analysis for corporate customers.

· Business Change team included Billing Operations, Customer Service, Go to Market, Process Creation, User Experience.

· Delivered into IT owned project. Outsourced vendor, CTI.

· Weekly stakeholder management and sponsor reporting via Steering Group Meetings.

· Creation of PID and Project plan which then fed into IT plan.

Project Manager / Centrica (British Gas) / Oct 10 – Jan 11

Customer Rewards – Employed by Centrica, this was a project to integrate utility company British Gas as a tier one partner with the Nectar loyalty card. Project managed the Business, Marketing and Operational Readiness aspects of the programme; liaised and fed into the IS project. Designed in three distinct phases, the pilot went live in November, full launch in January with TV ATL advertising and BTL direct marketing, and a phase three to offer further requirements, customer journeys and Redemptions in March. While managing these phases, was also responsible for scoping out a fourth phase from early requirements, benefits, Shaping document to Business Case.

· £6.5m project.

· Handed project that had until then been without project management resource.

· Strong 3rd party marketing and agency based team.

· Managed London agencies for all marketing drive print requirements to include numerous versions of Welcome Packs, Letters, Bills. These included the e-versions for email and internet.

· Weekly face to face project meetings with agency supplier.

Project Manager / Telefonica O2 / April 08 – July 10

Multiple concurrent projects of which the four largest are below.

Our Space – As part of a programme of property / infrastructure based projects dedicated to the consolidation of O2 UK Slough based operations on to a single campus facility comprising an existing building and a new adjacent building, Our Space was devoted to the installation of state of the art audio visual and conferencing equipment. This covered the following functionalities and requirements;

- Smartboard and video conferencing meeting room facility

- Meeting Room booking system

- Information Display System

- Desktop booking facility

- Boardroom, Lecture Theatre and Training Rooms

· £2.3m Project.

· 17 3rd party equipment suppliers.

· Many subsidiary job requirements; Directors’ TV installations, Devices Testing room creation.

· Concurrent Smartboard and video conferencing project to ‘connect’ outlying O2 UK offices to Slough.

Office Zone - This CRM product delivered preferential mobile rates for calls made from registered business locations referred to as zones. The zone is defined by the office postcode based on the triangulation of key mobile cell sites covering the address. Using the office post code address as the Office Zone definition will result in the customer receiving office zone rates outside their actual physical office/s and anywhere within their office postcode (likely radius of 1.5km).

Office Zone rates are comparable to BT fixed line call rates and so there is no cost penalty for using mobile phones when in the office.

· Was handed this project in a state suffering from lengthy delays and overspending. The project required a complete audit for design, quality, tasking and costs.

· As expectations were very high across the business and clients were already being sold to, this required constant stakeholder management.

· 3rd Party Suppliers included Oracle, HP and off shored vendor, ITS in the US.

· £2m project.

· Was asked to remain in situ past contract end date during company-wide redundancies to complete.

· Customer facing due to rollout to Tesco as first customer.

· Virtual / Matrix project team

SIM Only - This CRM e-commerce initiative was aimed at providing a SIM card mass distribution model for Postpay Simplicity in line with what was the current Prepay model that proved so successful.

Mass distribution followed the pay as you go sales model of receiving 4 free SIMs when ordering via online web-marketing drive. The customers order four free SIM cards during exclusive online promotion periods and activate those SIMs online to one of three SIM Only Tariffs. These tariffs receive one additional promotional benefit that is deemed as ‘exclusive’ to mass distribution. A set of tariffs are available for ‘Mass Distribution’ which have ‘unlimited O2 to O2 calls and SMS’ as the additional promotion benefit.