Profile

I live in Ilminster, Somerset with my wife and our pet cat, called Clawdpuss, on account of its large feet, and a small orange and tan colored terrier called Fox. As history has always been a passion of mine, in my spare time I enjoy researching the second world war, which when combined with my electronics abilities, enabled me to build a replica Enigma Machine. I am also a lay minister in our local church, so I get to help and support people in the local community as well as being a STEM Ambassador, closely working on science and technology projects in our two local schools. Finally, I play piano/keyboards in a couple of local bands but, for relaxation, like nothing better than to relax on an evening with a good movie, especially Harry Potter, that my wife and I love, or comedy TV series.

ForgeRock, the company for which I work, specialize in creating software to support businesses and governments in controlling access to sensitive data so that only the correct people can access it in the right way. For example, i you use social media, you would want your account to be private to you and to be able to control who can see which of your posts. Likewise, if you have a bank account, then, obviously, you’d want to be able to control who can access your money.

I currently work as a program director, which means I am responsible for looking at our internal engineering processes that deliver our products to our customers and look at ways to improve them, increasing our responsiveness to customer needs, efficiency and product quality. Once the requirements or needed changes have been identified to process or product, it is my job to manage the delivery teams to enable successful project completion. I also oversee large scale customer deployment projects, coordinating teams from around the planet.

As a program director, no two days are the same for me. One day I might be carrying out product research, another writing plans, another chasing up and resolving risks and issues.

I normally work from home, generally between 7 in the morning and 4 in the afternoon, with an hour for lunch, which I will usually use to brush up on my skills, learn new techniques or attend a training webinar. That said, as my project teams are world wide, I will often be on video calls or be attending meetings later into the evening or earlier in the morning. Being a home worker makes this easier, but I do head into our main UK offices, typically, once a week.

My key role is to ensure successful delivery of the projects that I am managing and so I am always on the look out for issues and risks, before they arise and become a problem. Likewise I need to be effective at managing and accommodating changes and exploiting opportunities that may arise. To aide me with this, I do spend a lot of time talking with people, writing plans, analyzing progress, resolving blockers and reporting status and forecasts as well as handling budgets.

In addition to this, I am also a mentor for some of our more junior staff, so I help them with their career development as software engineers and team leads, as that was my previous role before moving into project management.