Content Experience

I'm currently a Senior Content Specialist, writing technical documentation for software.

In my past, I've designed and coded content systems that provide knowledge and technical resources to multi-channel/region/language businesses, and write content for them, covering areas like APIs, proprietary application help, media assets, training, project artefacts, compliance documentation, and best practice guides.

My features were highly successful in providing relevant searches and analytics, versatile structure, and enabling SMEs (not just one or two technical writers) to create consistently-formatted, semantic content.

I devised style guides, created standards, and mentored and assisted others with UX and presentation. I edit and review kindly.

This webite is an example wiki-like content system I wrote from scratch. Here's a style book for it.

Development Experience

I was a senior/lead software developer, working on large commercial software projects, Agile, ways of working, engineering, practice, capability, and recruitment. My last focus was ServiceNow.

Analysis and Modelling Experience

Example: I created a tool to produce bespoke quotes for manufacturing processes. It figured out how to make things, modelled the end-to-end process, and costed everything, including business models and margins.

It simplified bespoke quotes enough to save hours per estimate, and allowed executives (rather than managers) to create and approve quotes. After becoming established, it was used as a basis for pricing new standard products.

Sometimes, it made better decisions than process experts, and provided hints to assist with those decisions. It was trusted.

Its success depended on:

• Having all dependent data in one place.
• A broad coverage of base materials, processing, finishing options, and subsequent handling (everything we knew how to do, with that range of plant equipment).
• A computation engine that calculated the most efficient way to arrange shapes into material areas.
• Costings for all materials from the PO system, including usage and waste profiles for chosen combinations, QA overheads, and complexity-dependent subcontracted processes.
• Time costing for labour, depreciation-based costing of machine time, external processing and transport. Times were calculated from the variable processes and QA required to produce to the chosen specification.
• Reliable costing and recommendation of carriage charges (with production and environmental tolerances) and modes of transport, based on final weight, volume, and delivery time (using SLAs).
• Modelling of transfer pricing, market/channel-dependent margins, international currency conversion, and service level based on urgency and demand.
• Validation of limits, including hard limits, approval limits, and due care thresholds.
• Being able to generate ready-to-send quote documents.
• Providing enough information for a pipeline of exceptional work to be planned and resourced.
• Being simple enough for executives to use, providing a price in minutes (or live on a call), where clients in the sector were accustomed to waiting days.

Project Portfolio / Examples (pre-2016)