Andrew John Todd

Professional Objective

Andrew is an experienced IT professional who specialises in architecting, designing and delivering technology solution to address business needs.

He is an accomplished development manager and project manager. His key strengths are his detailed understanding of technology, knowledge of the full software project lifecycle and extensive management experience.

I am looking for a challenging role in an organisation that knows the value of technology and has an appreciation of where it should be applied. I want to work with a team of people who are passionate about the change they can bring about through writing and implementing great software.

Employment History

IT Project Manager
Axis Specialty Australia (Sydney, NSW, Australia)
January 2010-Present

Andrew acts as the primary liaison between the Australian business units of this multi-national property and casualty insurer and the IT organisation that is spread between the USA, Europe and Asia. He is responsible for managing and delivering the portfolio of IT projects selected by the Australian management team to support the growth of the company.

Consultant
SMS Management and Technology (Sydney, NSW, Australia)
February 2009-December 2010

Andrew is a principal consultant responsible for delivering major projects to key clients

Achievements:

Andrew led a team that developed an IT strategy roadmap for Choice. As a result of the successful delivery of a complex technical solution for the GROCERYchoice project Choice asked SMS to review their technology delivery capability, technical architecture and project roadmap. Reporting to the CEO Andrew and his team determined a new, pragmatic and business focused approach to allow Choice to mature their technology capability to better serve the organisational strategy. Andrew went on to establish and lead the team to deliver this new IT strategy in a programme lasting approximately 18 months.
Andrew managed a project to define the information management requirements, processes, organisational structure, technology roadmap and governance for a state government department.
Andrew managed the delivery of the GROCERYchoice project for Choice. The system had to accept, store and present prices for up to 20,000 different grocery products in 2,500 stores across Australia. This required a complex public e-commerce web site and an associated data warehouse. The system was hosted using Amazon's cloud computing services and was developed by teams in two continents.

Practice Manager
SMS Management and Technology (Sydney, NSW, Australia)
November 2007-February 2009

As the Practice Manager for Information Management, Andrew was responsible for the definition and delivery of consulting services in Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Data Management and Data Quality.

His role was to establish this capability in the NSW region based on success in other parts of Australia, recruit the consulting team, sell solutions to customers and then ensure the quality of the delivery of those services. As an expert in the field Andrew also directly contributed to projects where necessary.

Achievements:

Andrew designed, planned and architected the complex data migration and quality improvement component of a large agile business change programme for a major Insurance company. He selected and managed the team of consultants that developed the solution using Data Stage targeting an Oracle database.
Andrew led a team that implemented Oracle Warehouse Builder and then defined the best practice architecture and standards for the Extraction, Transformation and Load (ETL) of data between operational systems for an Energy generator and retailer.
Designed a technical solution architecture and incremental project approach to introduce structured data storage and reporting to an internal reporting team at a major investment bank.

Software Services Manager
CommSecure (Sydney, NSW, Australia)
March 2007-October 2007

Software engineering manager for the company's core Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment systems which were delivered as Software as a Service. This role encompassed product management, product development, support and implementation.

As well as managing the team of software engineers Andrew co-ordinated the development programme and project managed significant packages of work. Due to market conditions and the cancellation of a key contract the company was force to reduce operations and seek a new supplier to take over its service and products.

Achievements:

Managed the implementation of the company's EBPP systems for a major media company.
Initiated a programme of producing structured product and functional documentation.
Reviewed and revised development procedures and standards
Carried out a comprehensive employee review and appraisal process for the Software Services team.
Introduced a product management lifecycle process.

Principal Consultant
Oakton Services (Sydney, NSW, Australia)
October 2004-March 2007

Andrew was the principal technical consultant in the Packaged Services practice. This position required Andrew to deliver services to clients as well as managing the careers of a team of consultants and contributing to service definition and development.

Projects:

Programme Manager: Andrew managed a programme of hardware, operating system, database and application system software upgrades for a number of applications used throughout the Asia Pacific region. The project was complicated by key hardware components being shared by business units in Europe and being hosted in the United States.
Oracle Technical Manager: Andrew was engaged to manage the Oracle technology team in the IT division of a major Australian company. This was a long term role whilst the full time employee was away on extended sick leave. It involved the day to day management of a team of programmers as well as managing their schedules and maintaining a high level of quality in the team's deliverables.
Oracle Applications implementation: Andrew managed the team that delivered complex management reporting from an Oracle Applications implementation for a major construction company using Hyperion running off a data mart populated using Oracle Warehouse Builder.

Consultant
Javelin Group (London, United Kingdom)
October 2002-March 2004

Technical Design Authority on a number of projects for clients in the retail sector.

Projects:

Query Handling and Web Self Service: Andrew worked with a team who built new customer query handling and self service web application for a catalogue retailer.
Customer Activity Analysis: Andrew managed the team that analysed customer activity, profiles and segmentation for a multi channel retailer.
Data Model and Migration: Andrew designed a corporate customer data model for a multi channel DIY retailer. This involved defining a migration strategy from their in house developed system to a packaged e-Commerce system.

Consultant
MPower Systems (Sydney, NSW, Australia)
January 2000-June 2002

Lead consultant in the custom development and data warehousing team.

Projects:

Oracle Applications 11i Migration: Andrew managed the team of consultants and IT team members who migrated over 100 customisations from Oracle 10.7 to 11i. The focus was on replacing custom code with standard functionality wherever possible whilst working to an aggressive project schedule.
Telecoms Data Warehouse: Andrew developed the customer service component of the data warehouse for a mobile telephony start up in Australia. They recognised the value of business intelligence and built it into the corporate infrastructure from the first day of operation.

Research and Development Manager
OzEmail Interline (Sydney, NSW, Australia)
September 1998-December 1999

OzEmail Interline was the first commercial provider of voice over the internet (VoIP) telephony. They had a worldwide IP network providing calls to customers in approximately seventy countries and termination in many more.

Andrew managed the team that developed and maintained the systems that ran the business. Andrew was responsible for setting objectives and defining project plans according to management, client and team priorities, as well as monitoring progress and co-ordinating development processes.

Projects:

Business Intelligence: Andrew lead the data warehousing initiatives within OzEmail Interline. He defined the strategy of the project and led the implementation.

Consultant
Oracle Corporation (Sydney, NSW, Australia)
June 1996-August 1998

Andrew was the service leader for Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence for Australia and New Zealand. In this role he was responsible for overseeing the delivery of all Data Warehousing and OLAP projects undertaken by Oracle in the region. He also contributed his expertise as a designer and systems architect.

Projects:

University Data Warehouse: Project manager developing a university data warehouse. The project was developed in a consortium for a number of institutions across Australia. It provided for analysis of student, staff and financial information. The data was sourced from a variety of different source systems which the different universities were using.
Telecom Data Warehouse: Designed the data warehouse technical architecture for a tier one telecom company.
Insurance Data Warehouse: Designed the infrastructure and data model for an insurance data warehouse. The initial focus was underwriting data with subsequent phases looking at claims and pricing information.
Financial Data Transformation:
Leader of a team, new to Oracle technology, that developed a clearing house for financial data. This accepted data feeds from more than twenty source systems, normalised the data and posted it to the general ledger.
The source systems were a variety of mainframe, midrange and PC based applications, the clearing house was implemented in Oracle and the target system was the general ledger module of Oracle Applications.

Consultant
Oracle Corporation (London, United Kingdom)
March 1993-May 1996

Senior Consultant in the Finance practice of Oracle UK. In this role I helped clients to develop systems using the Oracle database and tools, acting as a developer, team leader and mentor.

Projects:

Project manager for a global risk analysis project for an insurance company. The project delivered a risk index to the global commercial section of a tier one insurance company. This project used agile methodologies to deliver the maximum appropriate functionality in an aggressive timescale.
Insurance policy administration for a high street bank.
Re-possessed property administration system for a leading building society.

Consultant
Hoskyns Group (London, United Kingdom)
January 1992-March 1993

Andrew joined Hoskyns after university as a graduate trainee in the Oracle group.

Projects:

Chemical Formulations. Lead developer on a system to record and manage recipes for industrial chemicals.
Maintenance and support of the project management application for an agricultural chemical company.

Junior Analyst/Programmer
3i PLC (Solihull, United Kingdom)
June 1989-September 1990

Industrial placement as part of my degree. I was a member of the team that developed and maintained the company's core portfolio management system.

Open Source Projects

Since 2000

I have contributed to various open source projects. I see this as a way of contributing to the commons of high quality software that is available to all.

Projects:

OSDC: Andrew was on the organising committee for the 2008 Open Source Developer's Conference. He also presented papers at this conference in 2005, 2006 and 2009. http://www.osdc.com.au/
Gerald: A database schema comparison tool. I wrote this in my own time for use at work. I have released it under an open source license for other people to use. http://halfcooked.com/code/gerald/

Information Technology

Oracle Database and Tools: Oracle Database, Oracle Designer, Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports, Oracle Warehouse Builder, PL/SQL, SQL, Development DBA.

Other Databases: Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, DB2 UDB, Alterian.

Programming Languages: Python, PHP, Java, XML, XSLT, XPath, Shell scripts (bsh, ksh, bash).

Applications and Software Suites: Oracle E-Business Applications Suite, IBM Websphere, Hyperion Intelligence, Business Objects, Cognos.

Methodologies: Prince2, PMBOK, Structured Systems Analysis and Design, Agile Methods including DSDM, Oracle Method (including CDM, AIM, DWM and Project Management), Extreme Programming.

Miscellaneous: Unix/Linux, Shell scripting including sed, grep, awk, etc., Apple Macintosh OSX.

Education

B Sc (Joint Honours) in Management and Computer Science, October 1987-June 1991. 2:1
Aston University

Professional Societies

Association for Computing Machinery

Miscellany

I took a break from work for six months in 2004 to take care of my son.

I write a weblog covering technology issues at http://halfcooked.com/blog

Hobbies

Sailing
Cooking

Last modified September 2010.