Neil Chalk

Reporting to the Production Services Manager:

• Plan and manage client system upgrades, including analysis and QA.
• Establish, evolve and document formal upgrade and deployment processes.
• Act as a technical consultant to 15below, supporting all areas of the business.
• Build and maintain a catalogue of services and configuration information related to those services (Configuration Management Database).
• Building knowledge of product and configuration to assist with establishing baselines and feeding into customer’s SLAs and KPIs
• Act as part of Change Advisory Board.
• Own Technical Debt Register.
• Feed customer specific scenarios into QA processes / automated testing

• Secondment to the support team bringing technical and process experience as well as being an escalation point when the team leader is unavailable. I have helped automate some support tasks, improving team efficiency and reducing the support overhead. Another enjoyable aspect of my role has been in recruiting placement students and a permanent developer to the support team. Then mentoring them as they begin their careers.
• I also provided technical input on existing business functionality to both the design review committee and production change control board. In these responsibilities I aim to maximize the technical debt that can be repaid in new enhancements and to minimize the risk to production in roll out and project go live. This was where I started loving the process of Product Management.

Both roles allow me to look beyond an immediate task at hand to the wider business and then how we can increase business value. Highlights include:

• Co-ordinating with the Client Support Team Leader the update of the reservation system interface for a US client when their NewSkies system was upgraded to 3.2.
• Helping to deliver and co-ordinate the roll out of an enhanced voice solution, which supported processing through Sabre Reaccommodation Manager, for another US client.

Help Desk Agent/Service Support

• As Help Desk Agent my duties included; first line support, configuring and installing new PCs, logging calls and preparing templates for company standard correspondence such as faxes, memos and minutes. Also developing a website for the department’s asset management. As part of the Service Support team I was involved in a project that identified any Y2K related problems and prepared the companies financial systems for a successful rollover from 1999 to 2000.

Developer

• Responsibility for planning, implementing and improving various small projects involving an online collaborative system, which included giving a presentation to the client’s project managers.

On site at Mitsubishi Finance, Broadgate, London.

Duties included creating Microsoft Excel 5 spreadsheets with VBA code for data entry and asset management.

Duties included helping new students familiarise themselves with the Unix terminals and system demonstrations.

• Development of market leading notification solutions for the travel industry.
• Porting a core component from VB6 to VB.NET including some key enhancements to dynamic content functionality.
• Deliverability Consultancy - using a variety of content, software, white list and DNS methods to improve the rate of emails to reach the inbox.
• Technical leadership on the design and implementation of solutions for new clients.
• Technical leadership and project management during the implementation and rollout of functionality, e.g. to increase automation allowing the reduction of call centre staff and reduction of costs or to increase of revenue via targeted cross selling.

Wanting to cut through the hype about blockchain and learn how it can be applied beyond cryptocurrencies I took a couple of hands-on IBM courses. IBM Blockchain Essentials

I have also applied this to my day job, with a guest post on the 15below Tech Take blog taking a look at how the Travel Industry could benefit from this technology.

HBX CORe (Credential of Readiness) is a 120-150 hour certificate program on the fundamentals of business from Harvard Business School. CORe is comprised of three courses - Business Analytics, Economics for Managers, and Financial Accounting – developed by leading Harvard Business School faculty and delivered in an active learning environment based on the HBS signature case-based learning model.

Read more on my HBX blog post

What I learned:

• Foundational abilities in applying ethical and legal frameworks for the data profession
• Practical approaches to data and analytics problems, including Big Data and Data Science and AI
• Applied data methods for ethical and legal work in Analytics and AI

View certificate

Three courses that gave me a solid foundation into the business side of managing software development processes.

• M882 Managing the software enterprise (2008)
• T848 Managing technological innovation (2013)
• M883 Software requirements for business systems (2014)

An overview course on using impact mapping to drive changes in behaviour that have business benefit, run by Gojko Adzic and Dave Evans.

My main takeaways

Building on my existing PGCert in Technology Management, starting with the module T849 - Strategic capabilities for technological innovation

A track of courses that combines statistical and machine learning techniques with R programming to analyze and interpret complex data.I have taken this to help my project “R for Product Management” and enhance my skills as a data guided Product Manager.

View profile and progress

A film course that covered screen writing, editing, shooting with 8mm, 16mm, and 35mm film as well as HD digital.

IMDB profile

• City and Guilds Information Technology 7261/01 205 Visual Basic 1
• A-levels in Physics, Mathematics, and Chemistry

Postgraduate courses in Computing and ICT, 2001 - 2004

Postgraduate Modules passed:

• M877 Advanced database technology (2004)
• M878 Object-oriented software development (2002)
• M879 Distributed applications and ecommerce (2001)

Book version of my blog with extra content, updates based on more recent experience, and professional editing. This is focused around my journey becoming a technical product manager with anecdotes and tips to help others - especially developers! - on the same journey.

As p art of a team of four took on the Gurkhas in the Trailwalker. The Trailwalker is an unforgettable endurance challenge to get your team of four 100km across the South Downs in under 30 hours. Is it tough? Of course. Is it worth it? Absolutely.

We raised over £1,500 for charities in Nepal.

Not only the first Brighton Marathon but also my first marathon. This was really the start of my love of running. Learned a lot about arbitrary goals, motivation, and managing performance. In 2017 I did my second and, building on experience since the first one, learned about linking arbitrary goals to deliberate training and practice. A skill that I have also applied to my work life - and inspired this blog post.

I raised over £250 for Cancer research.

A side project that allowed me to practice my skills using Perl and Subversion. CosMoS was a simple content management system that had a user permission model, image gallery, and HMTL content that could be moved around in the site hierarchy.