Chris Collins

Freelance IT consultant specialising in service management and technical leadership.

Providing consultancy to the Department for Education in the UK; delivering process improvements and managing the readiness for the technical move from Azure IaaS to PaaS.

Assurance of end to end service delivery. Overarching accountability for service performance. Coordination of operational risks. Central point of coordination for IT Service. Management roles and processes. Coordination of ITIL processes;including incident, problem, configuration management, change, release, service level management, availability management, capacity management, service continuity management.

Leading large teams of Oracle Database Administrators based across multiple sites in the UK. Operationally accountable for over 1,700 databases (over 90 production and over 1,600 non-production). Supporting, enhancing and implementing database platforms across Europe. Experienced collaborating with outsource partners. Accomplished at provisioning infrastructure delivery streams by building and maintaining high performing teams for a multitude of project delivery models.

Management of a team providing; support for multiple complex pre-production environments comprising upwards of 600 Oracle databases sitting on Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and Linux platforms, .net middle tier, with various in-house and third party add application front-ends; CMS functions for multiple parallel development and testing streams; a managed Release process for the multiple development streams delivering upwards of 7 releases into the production environments on a daily basis.

Leading a large team of technical support analysts providing 24x7 support for 10,000 plus batch jobs and client support enabling continuous usage for up to 7,000 client users. Managed teams responsible for the technical aspects of credit management, finance, transfers and metering. Working closely with the business, and teams of business analysts, prioritising, understanding new requirements and delivering change.

Working across a variety of teams over several years, providing operational support, small change, enhancements and working within project teams. Mainly developing and supporting PL/SQL in-house solutions on Unix OS.

Oracle developer specialising in Oracle Forms and Reports. The majority of the work was delivering new requirements for the Home Office.

Working in a small IT department, nominally in development, performing all roles associated with the end-to-end delivery of software from the business analysis / requirements gathering, design, developing, testing, implementation, support etc. Technical skills: SQL, PL/SQL, database / schema design, Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports, Shell Scripting, supporting front of shop and back office EPOS software.