An experienced all-rounder with broad experience covering most aspects of information technology. Of particular value is the ability to apply appropriate real-world solutions to problems by leveraging diverse industry experience in combination with an excellent knowledge of the technology available. 

Particular strengths include:

	Good communication skills, including the ability to liaise effectively with end-users to establish business needs.
	The ability to apply advanced GUI design techniques to achieve high levels of user acceptance of new systems.
	A flexible and innovative approach to problem solving.
	The ability to lead effective teams.
	A highly structured approach to development using industry standard development conventions.

MS DOS 3.31-6.0
MS Windows 2.0-98
Windows NT 3.51, 4.0, 2000 (including server)
UNIX
Sun Solaris 5.6

Oracle 8
SQL Server 6.0/6.5
MS Access 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 7.0 (95), 8.0 (97), 2000
Visual Basic 5, 6
Access Basic/VBA
Access Developer's Toolkit
MS Office 4.3-2000
MS FrontPage
Windows SDK, API
DDE, OLE, ODBC
HTML

Laverock von Schoultz, Gibraltar

IT Manager - Client Site (Victor Chandler International)

In response to the needs of an established client, this role involved establishing on-site support and infrastructure teams against a background of extremely rapid growth on the part of the Client.

Merrill Lynch, Ropemaker Place, London

Analyst/Programmer (Contract) 

As part of Merrill Lynch’s $200m millennium initiative, this role centred upon the auditing and remediation of end-user applications (primarily various versions of Excel and Access), as part of the debt markets team.  A special area of responsibility included the co-ordination of audit processes and remediation solutions for the Frankfurt regional office.

A secondary role involved working with the EMU conversion team handling the XTAS Bond settlement system. As the primary technical resource this role involved creating a series of control checks using Access 97 that flagged conversion errors at defined stages of the settlement process. 

Analyst/Programmer (Contract)

The Global Distributed Infrastructure Project aims to move some 22,000 users world-wide to a unified platform based upon the MS Windows NT / MS Office solution. The Migration Development Group was established to ensure that Bank applications could be ported to the new build. As a member of this Group responsibilities included the detailed analysis of existing Bank applications to determine appropriate migration routes, as well as delivery of these packages in accordance to strictly defined design and performance criteria. Development was carried out in MS Access 7.0, and necessitated the creation of both conversion tools, standards and procedures to facilitate the porting of applications written in previous versions of MS Access, as well as in other languages.

The Development Group emerged as the leading competency behind the centralisation of roll-out tracking data, and provided all project departments with tools and interfaces to core data held in a SQL Server 6.5 database.

(4 months)

Analyst/Programmer (Contract)

Following a substantial business re-engineering exercise, NatWest required an interim reporting system to provide management information on branch product sales and profitability. Participation involved working closely with the C&L principle in a highly reactive role, producing reports using data-mining techniques to identify trends in data gathered from mainframe systems, and imported into MSAccess 2.0 because of the need for very fast analysis times. Typical data volumes regularly exceeded 1m records/100Mb. Compared feasibility study for sizing to MSAccess 7.0 SQL Server v6.0/NT running on a multi-processor system.

(11 months)

Analyst/Programmer (Contract)

The initial stage of this project involved the design and implementation of an MSAccess data entry interface capable of advanced data tracking and validation of Syndicate settlements and reserves, as well as providing comprehensive audit facilities. Development was carried out using Access Basic, with an emphasis on highly optimised SQL execution. Import and validation routines were also built to process data in Excel and 123 formats using the VBA and an OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) system was successfully integrated into the suite of MSAccess interfaces to allow automatic recognition and validation. Once data had been gathered a series of consolidation and cross-references routines were developed to ensure the accuracy and purity data before the final phase of data conversion saw this data being passed to client groups within the project for data modeling.

(7 months)

Development Team Leader (Contract)

Responsible for recruitment and supervision of a team of four Analyst/Programmers for the development of an MSAccess based GUI. Produced development standards documentation, as well as supervising QA and testing of development work. Assisted in evaluating ODBC drivers and producing briefing documents for both technical staff and management. All work was carried out in close coordination with Business Analysts or end-users and included both formal and informal prototyping sessions. Personal areas of achievement included the coding of financial analysis modules required for underwriting processes, and the development and implementation of a project-wide version control library database (MDA).

(3 months)

Analyst/Programmer (Contract)

The Kingswood processing centre in Bristol handles massive volumes of secure data on a series of mainframes. To date this has not been easily accessible to marketing analysts, who have had to rely upon a series of general purpose standard reports. As a tentative first step towards a distributed system, an automated batch-processing system was implemented to dump data onto a file-server. At this stage the volume of data involved meant that de-normalisation was necessary in order to achieve acceptable levels of network traffic. The eventual system delivered included the automated processing of data into multiple tables on the file-server, with a MSAccess 2.0 front end allowing dynamic SQL definition. This allowed users to define custom reports according to specific time periods, retail groups, or regions. Following the successful implementation this system the brief was extended to include a MIS GUI also written in MSAccess, allowing middle-management to carry out rapid performance analysis.

(1 month)

Analyst/Programmer (Contract)

Developed a one-off database management system (MSAccess v1.1) for the Canadian war memorial unveiling ceremony as part of the D-Day commemoration. This system included automatic data entry validation, and facilitated projections of numbers of attendees, as well as automated mail-shots.

(3 months)

Trainer (Contract)

Following their take over by Carpetland, all Allied branches installed the Carpetland Branch Invoicing System (BRAINS). This role involved visiting branches throughout Great Britain in order to familiarise staff with the new software and hardware. A secondary role included monitoring system performance, and reporting bugs or omissions.

(1 month)

Analyst/Programmer (Contract)

Touche Ross identified a need to establish their level of contact with the top 100 law firms in Britain. This role involved the design of an intelligent marketing database to identify relationships on a who-knows-who basis which would allow partners to maintain contact with potential clients, as well as identifying those firms where no penetration been achieved. A secondary function of this database was to allow the flagging of individual contacts to ensure that they received certain types of invitation or newsletter. This standalone system was written in MSAccess 1.1 with data being imported from DataEase and Excel tables.

(3 months)

Technical Analyst

Responsible for all aspects of PC hardware and software maintenance on a range of networked machines. Responsibilities included developing prototype forms-flow systems mainly using MSAccess v1.0/1.1, as well as the preparation of detailed business requirement specifications for major corporate clients. Duties included advising Directors on areas of new technology; hardware and software procurement, and training. Where required a comprehensive technical support service was provided for both internal and external clients.

The other half of my life is spent scuba diving, kite surfing, snowboarding, free climbing, alpine walking, endangering life and limb playing roller-hockey, eating out, nurturing my collection of malt whiskies, and playing football at half the speed that I used to.

For an irreverent view of the world visit Peter Strong's Home Page

Copyright Peter Strong 1997. Last revised: February 02, 2003