Mike Evans - Curriculum Vitae

I head ten feature teams in the 'Protection' Platform, across four countries and three partner organisations.

I am responsible for maintaining the technical standards and the cultural values of an extended chapter spread across five countries.

I act as the technical guarantor for the lab - ensuring that the work of over sixty engineers is coordinated, manageable and maintainable.

I also offer our engineers the TLC that they deserve.

I play a driving role in setting technical strategy and pioneering better ways of working.

I was a senior engineer in the 'Engage Me' lab.

I acted as a 'first among equals' within the development engineers, responsible for much of the web UI and supporting middleware of Lloyd's Financial Planning and Retirement division.

I worked hard to share knowledge and to cultivate a collegiate, inclusive environment for technical work both within the lab and across the division. I was continuously active in technical guilds, training courses and mentoring apprentices.

I was hired as part of the new technology team in Tesco Bank to refresh their web presence and working practices

I lead one of the two core Javascript development teams, alongside involvement in other technical initiatives.

When I took time off my formal career to look after my pre-school kids, I decided to pivot my technical orientation from Java enterprise technologies to JavaScript and its burgeoning enterprise ecosystem.

I learnt all aspects of this including UI libraries, MVC frameworks, server middleware, databases, test frameworks and build tools.

I became active in the Open Source community, with nearly 30 million downloads, primarily for two plugins for the popular Webpack build tool.

I ran two of the eleven teams within a Sky’s ‘Lightweight Services’ initiative to replace legacy CRM systems with a modular, service-based infrastructure serving modern web front-ends.

The project used the latest agile tools and techniques, with individual teams given the flexibility to self-organise. Consequently, in response to a high and on-going support load, I ran one team using Kanban whilst the other, entirely development orientated team I ran using using traditional Scrum.

I was also invited into the CRM-replacement architectural group as a technical expert and as a formal facilitator for meetings and workshops. It was an interesting challenge to run contentious two-day workshops where I eas the most junior person in the room!

• content management
• direct customer communications and document production
• exposing mainframe data

Kraya Ltd. is a web design and support house that was expanding into full-scale development. They brought me in to help them escape ‘analysis paralysis’ on the architecture and redevelopment of the server-side of a consumer facing ticketing website for their primary customer.

We developed a web-service based approach and investigated appropriate technologies for a fully clustered, large scale deployment. I supported set-up of the project, both tooling and management methodologies, developed the middleware architecture, and maintained a watching brief through early development.

I was brought in to rescue development of the Marketing Approval Platform (MAP) project. This aimed to automate the workflow for generating new structured financial products, using a specialist technology, Eclipse RCP.

The existing code had been developed by an inexperienced offshore team. My role was to support them and their code base through to temporary deployment, and to establish an onshore technical team to produce a more maintainable and flexible successor. I designed a new application architecture and oversaw development. This new codebase is now rolled out globally.

Bright Grey sold financial protection products through web, telephone, fax and mail channels. This involved complex workflows with multiple interactions between telephony, IT and manual systems. I was employed to analyse the operations of the technical support team, and report on ways to improve these. I was also asked to investigate flaws and suggest fixes to the business processes.

The most beneficial of these investigations was the case of ‘lost proposals’ – where incoming applications were simply lost to the systems. This was suspected but neither proof nor cause was known. I discovered that approximately 2-3% of new business was being affected by this with severe impacts on service levels and customer perception. With director-level backing, I introduced procedural changes and technical fixes that guarantee that no proposals are now lost.

I started as a PowerBuilder programmer and learnt formal analysis and design skills. I received a thorough grounding in database modelling and design before moving into Java.

I worked my way up through programming to team leading to project management, settling into a regular pattern of 3-6 month engagements alternating between project management and team lead/analysis roles.

A two year, joint government/industry initiative to develop a dedicated management information system to run a ship repair yard.

I spent the first year alone analysing the business processes at the yard and the second year developing the system with a colleague.

The system ran the yard for 5 years after my departure.