Clive Williams - Curriculum Vitae

Clive Richard Williams
Location: Milton Keynes, UK
Telephone: 07713 164110
Email: clive.williams@rectanglered.com

CAREER SUMMARY

Experienced and innovative IT consultant, project manager, architect and developer with nineteen years experience with service, commercial, technical and internet companies, including over four years in the client server CRM sector, and six years with advanced portal technologies and email technologies. Wide, varied, hands-on skills, a "can do" attitude, the ability to learn quickly, and a delivery-orientated mindset. Highly innovative and creative systems architect. Excellent man manager and team leader with a proven track record building and leading teams, working as part of a team, and on own initiative. Experienced and Prince2 qualified project manager.

QUALIFICATIONS

Clive holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Bristol University, in the field of Natural Language Processing and Deduction Engine technologies. He studied under Professor D.H.D.Warren, well known in the Logic Programming field and world authority on Prolog compiler technology.

Clive holds the Prince2 Practioner qualification in project management, and has the breadth of experience to understand how to tailor Prince2 successfully and appropriately to large or small projects, while ensuring time, budget and quality constraints are met.

Clive has extensive experience in a wide range of technologies in various commercial sectors, including state of the art web portal technologies and customer relationship management applications and systems. During his career he has implemented systems in many household name companies in the UK and Europe. He holds a Microsoft Certified Application Developer certification, with specialisations in databases, operating system and .NET technology.

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE

September 2006 - Present: Director and Principal Consultant, Rectangle Red Limited

Clive has founded an innovative IT consultancy, specialising in web and email technologies, and IT project and supplier management. The company already has an established, referenceable customer base, with a track record of successful delivery and satisfied customers.

Jul 2003 - Present: Associate Consultant, DBI Consulting Ltd

As part of his continuing role with Accessible Technologies, Clive works part time (approximately 50%) as an associate consultant with DBI Consulting Ltd, providing requirement analysis and capture skills and technical input into web portal procurement processes. ESRC Information Centre -Clive performed the requirements analysis and wrote the requirement specification for the ESRC Information Centre project - a very complex, comprehensive web portal and multi-million pound project. This involved:

Interviewing users and stakeholders within ESRC
Attending and contributing to user focus groups representing the main stakeholder groups of the Information Centre.
Researching the capabilities and weaknesses of existing bespoke systems, and the relevance of government guidelines, equal opportunities and accessibility legislation to the project
Ensuring that any new or changed business processes needed by the new Information Centre were flagged for business analysis.
Resolving different user requirements that conflicted with each other.
Writing a full requirement specification document, suitable for dispatch to potential bidders as part of a OJEC procurement process.

This work was delivered on time and to budget despite extremely tight time and budgetary constraints to great acclaim from the project board and the OGC gateway review team.

Clive was then engaged to provide technical input into the supplier selection process of the Information Centre procurement and technical advice to ESRC and the supplier during the build, testing and deployment of the system.

Clive devised and implemented the test management regime for the Information Centre - a highly complex and comprehensive test regime, covering system testing, user testing, security penetration, failover and backup strategy, integrity of migrated data, and load and performance testing.

Following successful implementation, Clive has continued to provide consultancy and advice to ESRC as and when needed.

Feb 2000 - Aug 2006: Head of Technology, Accessible Technologies Ltd, London

Joined Accessible Technologies as manager of the development centre and rapidly promoted to the board. Responsibilities cover:

Ensuring successful completion and delivery of Accessible Technologies' core web portal product.
Architecture and delivery of successive following generations, including selection of appropriate partners and technologies.
Recruitment and man management of the development and delivery team.

Recent projects include:

Migration and upgrade of live Microsoft Exchange mailboxes to new servers, including full planning and execution of dry-run test scenarios, and successful migration according to plan.
Migration of large (over 150,000 users) mail system from Windows based solution to Linux server, including modifying Mbox format mailbox data to Maildir format, and migrating user logon data from Microsoft SQL Server to LDAP under Linux. Full planning, and execution of dry-run test scenarios, and successful migration according to plan.
Development of Linux-based webservices in PHP, integrated with LDAP.
Design and development of bespoke data warehouse and customer information system, including integration to proprietary financial systems and the customer management system, Goldmine.

Technical Development and Architecture - He is an extremely capable hands-on developer and systems architect. As Head of Development with Accessible Technologies, he has current active exposure to the following technical skills and techniques:

Microsoft .NET - The Accessible Technologies core product is written to use Microsoft's .NET platform to maximise performance and scalability.
Microsoft IIS, including Active Server Pages - He has used IIS 4.0 and 5.0 extensively. Earlier versions of the product were developed with Microsoft Active Server Pages code.
Microsoft's SQL Server 2000 database product is used heavily - strong SQL skills are used in data access from the main product, providing housekeeping maintenance of the databases, and providing a foolproof method of ensuring data schema compatibility between various releases of the product, which could co-exist on the same installation.
Web Services - Clive has designed Accessible Technologies' architecture around the latest .NET Web Services standards - with separate services handling licence management, SMS text messaging, provision of email accounts, and document storage via webfolders. He has also developed web services in PHP which run under Linux, and are integrated with .NET clients.
Data Cleansing - Clive has developed systems to do intricate data processing on 1.4 million business records using a combination of a specially written Microsoft Access application, and Unix Shell Scripting to sort and collate data into a form suitable for data import. This is used to implement a Yellow-Pages style business finder application.
Technical Troubleshooting - Clive has been brought in to successfully solve seemingly unsolvable performance and reliability issues in large email and web portal environments. His breadth of knowledge, methodical process to identify and diagnose issues, and ability to think laterally give him unique skills in solving such issues.

Team Management and Leadership - Clive built a tight, hard-working team in a fun and challenging work environment. For three years, despite not being able to give any pay increases in that period, he retained and developed his team members, losing only one person due to personal relocation. He has overseen the growth and development of his team members by encouraging innovation, mentoring where appropriate, and ensuring training needs are appropriately addressed.

Company Leadership - He has been a member of the Accessible Technologies board for two years, and is fully conversant in the responsibilities of directorship. In March 2003, he took part in a management buyout of the company.

Troubleshooting and Innovative Solutions - Clive was initially hired to troubleshoot a project to deliver the initial Accessible Technologies web portal and business database - this had been outsourced to an external company that did not have the skills to deliver. Within 2 months he had taken the project in-house, hired a small team of 3 people to develop it, and turned the project round, established a firm architecture on which to run it, and delivered a working system that went live April 17th 2000, on schedule. He has since driven the development of this initial system into a world-class portal technology, developed with a small, tightly run and extremely cost-effective team. It is designed to be supremely flexible - becoming a hosted portal solution for resellers and Communities of Interest, providing their members and customers with their own intranet/extranet featuring email, diary, document storage, content management, and many other plug-in applications.

It is designed for the SME market, allowing resellers to offer an online intranet/extranet to their customers at mass-market prices - a hosted solution featuring fully automatic signup and activation of an end-users portal. The most recent innovation allows the reseller to up sell upgrades and their own products through their customers intranets - again, fully automatically - turning the portal offering into a unique sales channel for resellers. The product has been very favourably reviewed by Butler Group, who stated "Butler Group believes that this is the first portal offering in the UK to seriously address the needs of smaller businesses and Accessible Technologies has a significant lead over other vendors of hosted portal solutions in this market." A full copy of the Butler Group review is available on request. BT Wholesale resold the product as "Office Anywhere", and has since been sold into several well known ISPs who rebrand it as their own online office and email environment for their customers.

Apr 1995 - Feb 2000: Managing Consultant, The Customer Engagement Company, Harrow

Team Management and Leadership: In four and a half years, Clive proved himself and rose from joining the company as a software engineer, quickly becoming a consultant, and for the last 18 months managed a growing team of professional services consultants. The team comprised 7 members, and delivered just under £1m a year of revenue to the business. This work used the following skills:

A lead-by-example style of leadership, showing commitment and a delivery culture, while being responsive to the needs of the team.
Team building through buddying and mentoring strategies, building skills and experience in individuals and the team. He was responsible for adding to the team by interviewing and hiring new members, and ensuring that they received the coaching and advice they needed as they learned their new roles.
Planning and scheduling project work, matching available resource to projects and ensuring commitments to customers were kept, and that each customer was delighted with the resulting delivery.
Monitoring and achieving revenue targets and providing progress reports to board-level management.

Client/Server CRM Application Consultancy: Clive performed consultancy work for retail, technical and financial clients, developing, supporting and integrating customer service applications with other systems and applications. This took both advisory and hands-on form, and involved the entire project life-cycle, from requirements capture, through design, implementation, testing, installation and finally support of the delivered solution. Clive has been personally responsible for delivering customer service focused CRM solutions to customers such as Tesco, BT, Canon, Somerfield and Boots the Chemist. This used the following skills:

Interpersonal skills with customers, especially during the requirements capture and analysis phases and when maintaining an ongoing communication with clients throughout the full life-cycle of the project.
Project planning skills in providing effort quotations for customers. Clive was responsible for ensuring that estimates and delivery dates are met, that the work met customer requirements and expectations, and was of high quality.
Knowledge of CRM application architecture and construction techniques, often using the Quintus toolset to build new database schemas specific to a customer's requirements, designing Windows PC and Web Browser front ends and using report writers to provide specialized reports for the customer.
Integrating applications with various third party products such as telephony switches, Lotus Notes, Java, WordPerfect, GB Mail postcoding software, Infoman, and e-mail import mechanisms, using Visual Basic, C, Prolog and UNIX shell script as appropriate. These integrations frequently require quick learning of how to use and interface with a previously unknown application, and often involve working closely with the customer's technical staff or those of the third party product vendors.
RDBMS and SQL skills and in particular a knowledge of MS SQL Server 6.5 and Oracle 7 and 8. Although Quintus utilities will frequently perform most of the database creation and import process, it can be necessary to use SQL to complete the process.

Post Sales Support: Responsible for provision of front-line support of our customer's applications. Clive's team used a pro-active philosophy with support calls - calling a customer first, if they knew that a customer has an issue that would need discussing, and helping the customer to avoid potential problems that they knew were likely to become important issues later.

Consultancy Pipeline Generation and Pre-Sales Support: Identified opportunities and needs within the existing customer-base, produced proposals for consultancy work, and