A progressive series of engagements with Aareal Bank AG — a €14bn regulated commercial real estate finance bank — spanning three distinct phases of strategic transformation.

Engaged to lead a major three-year programme to consolidate and relocate all services from legacy datacentres into two new Group Datacentres located in another country, concurrent with a transition to a new managed services operating model covering infrastructure, networks and security — while retaining local management of operating system and application layers. Responsible for programme roadmap and governance, C-level stakeholder management, budget control and coordination of all internal and external resources across Infrastructure, Database, Engineering, Delivery and Test. Ensured clean and timely closure of legacy datacentres including cancellation of all related contracts and licensing.

Engaged within the Personal Finance group of BNP Paribas to supervise a key transformation programme centred around the merger of two existing banking entities — Von Essen Bank and Consors Finance — into a single BNP Paribas German Branch. Together with the Chief Transformation Officer, established, governed and delivered the legal merger into a combined Personal Finance business with a single common IT platform and new Digital Banking foundation. Budget: €36M. Team: ~200 across multiple organisations, sites and countries.

Engaged by ERGO — one of Germany's leading insurance companies — to manage the start-up and delivery of a major programme to introduce a completely new commissions and incentives system across all sales channels. Technical solution based around four key SAP components: ICM (Incentive and Commission Management), OM, BP and FS-CD. Programme resourcing ~200. Budget: €120M.

Engaged by EY to deliver key elements of Programme Mercury — a core component of the firm's "Vision 2020" corporate business plan, transforming the business towards a single Global SAP ERP platform across Finance, Procurement and CRM. Responsible for the EMEIA and APAC deployment roadmap. Reduced global IT landscape by more than 1,400 applications. Reduced cost of back-office finance function. Introduced KPIs to improve control and transparency.

Appointed to the largest Swiss bank specialising in online Forex and CFDs trading for private and institutional clients in 120+ countries. Tasked with reshaping IT Operations and improving the overall quality of service. Reduced IT costs by 50% within the first 6 months whilst simultaneously delivering a 20%+ improvement in service quality. Implemented ITSM/ITIL service management framework. Developed the IT transformational roadmap including cost-effective outsourcing.

Appointed by the President of epay France to undertake an urgent and comprehensive review of the organisation's technology and business capabilities. Initiated a 7-S assessment of the organisation (which had processed 1.1bn payment transactions across 293,000 retailers and 615,000 terminals in 29 countries). Created strategic plans for both technology and business services, gaining Board sign-off and embedding a 2-year transition programme.

Engaged initially to set up the PMO and manage the full European project portfolio (286 projects across 27 separate profit centres). Reporting to the Board of Directors. Rapidly promoted to IT Director for Germany and European Portfolio Manager. Built a shared vision and common goals, developed a Target Operating Model and 3-year roadmap. Aligned 27 European regional companies to a common Operating Model. Designed and launched a pan-European Healthcare Informatics capability enabling improved patient care delivery.

Brought into the Business Change Division to provide strategic direction for controlling the large project portfolio and assisting with integration of recent mergers and acquisitions. Worked closely with Heads of all Business Divisions and IT Divisions. Instrumental in the strategic restructuring of both IT and Business Change divisions to enable outsourcing of the IT division to India, completing within 6 months. Key member of the team merging Clerical Medical's mainland Europe business into Heidelberger.

Project Lead and Analyst for migrating three separate operating companies within Man Group — RFM, Man Global Strategies and Man Glenwood — onto a single global operating platform. Work undertaken across London, Chicago and Pfaffikon.

Practice (Enterprise) Architect within the Customer Service Division (FCSD) of Ford. 11-month project focused on improving business processes and efficiencies and reducing operating costs across the division.

Technical Project Lead on a large-scale legacy system replacement programme for Man Investments — one of the world's leading alternative investment companies with $64 billion under management. Scope included replacing the organisation's key legacy system with a new COTS product (HedgeSphere from Infonic), migrating 22 dependent systems to the new landscape, rewriting several hundred reports, migrating numerous Excel spreadsheets, and performing full ETL of existing data. Integration was achieved through a data-bus architecture allowing systems to obtain data without explicitly knowing its source. Technologies: Microsoft C#, .NET 2, SQL Server, Analysis Services. Also initiated the introduction of a Data Warehouse providing a single view of information for the business (Microsoft Reporting Services on SQL Server).

Senior Project Manager within the Service Programme of Europe's largest IT project — the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT) / NHS Spine. Responsible for shaping Spine Service delivery to all NHS users. Led the Service Authority group. Subsequently appointed to lead the London Cluster programme.

Joined the Interactive E-Services team — part of the Government's Modernising Government initiative — as Business Analyst, tasked with researching and defining the business requirements for e-enabling the Invalid Care Allowance (ICA) benefit. Responsible for reviewing existing claims procedures, analysing back-office workflows, proposing an e-enabled system with cost savings analysis, and specifying both the web-based customer interface and the back-office workflow management system. Organised and conducted requirements gathering workshops, and mentored the ICA team's analysts in requirements writing and Use Case definition.

Engaged initially in December 2002 to audit the failing EuroAIS project — a pan-European core system for BCA's 55 auction sites across 10 countries (UK, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, France, Austria, Portugal and Spain). The 64-page management report and board presentation recommended the existing project be stopped. Peter was subsequently engaged to re-initialise and lead the project as Project Manager, Chief Architect and Senior Business Analyst, reporting directly to the Group IT Director. The product — an n-tier application built on Microsoft .NET and SQL Server — had to be multilingual, coping with dramatically different business processes and legal regulations across Europe. A team of 17 delivered the project using a bespoke combination of XP, RAD and DSDM. The core architecture Peter developed became the foundation for all future BCA projects.

Joined the Union Investment WFS project to supply expert knowledge in Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and VDPS. The WFS project was the first step to integrating all of Union Investment's ~120 systems into a coherent architecture built around a publish-and-subscribe backbone using the Vitria EAI product, with all data transferred as XML. Also heavily involved in supporting integration and acceptance testing, loading securities data, performing daily data loads and reporting results to management.

Invited back by FDS to provide consultancy and technical sales support for the Wertpapier-Management-System (WMS) product he had designed and developed in 1998–1999. With high demand from German financial institutions, Peter provided sales presentations, captured user requirements, wrote system specifications and continued development of the WMS Import/Mapper subsystem — an ETL system (written in C++ and Java) that transformed securities data from WM VF2 format into the system's object-oriented environment. Also appointed as Project Manager for the WMS installation at Union Investment, using Prince2 methodology.

Engaged by IBM as prime contractor to provide project management, analysis and technical expertise for the development of a B2B e-commerce platform for Zurich Financial Services — providing web-based facilities for brokers selling insurance products, funds and mortgages, with integration of numerous legacy systems across four countries (Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Belgium). Acted initially as Technical Project Manager for the Netherlands implementation (team of ~20, PRINCE2/IBM methodology), then moved into the pan-European Systems Architect role responsible for the overall architecture across all four countries. Multi-language support, centralised production environment at Zurich's data centre, and coordination of country-specific legacy back-end systems throughout.

Engaged by Censio — a B2C insurance start-up — to provide project management and technical expertise for their web portal enabling customers to compare and purchase all types of insurance in real time from multiple providers. Introduced QA and version management procedures and proper PRINCE2-based planning into a project that was rapidly losing control. Led the Architecture and Design Team to consolidate and stabilise the existing development. The system comprised a 400-seat Customer Service Centre (Siebel-based), a Websphere web platform communicating via IBM's Virtual Marketplace to insurance quoting engines, with CORBA (Orbix/Visibroker) and RMI integration.

Project Manager and Systems Architect for the development of a brand new multinational online bank capable of trading funds and securities alongside full retail banking functions, with two multilingual Customer Service Centres (Edinburgh and Maastricht) and high-availability data centres in London. Responsible for managing the integration of more than 30 external interfaces to third parties supporting the bank's e-services operations — covering fulfilment, credit cards, external banks, securities data providers, SWIFT, FIX and regulatory reporting. Also heavily involved in obtaining FSA approval for the banking licence. The project employed ~450 people at peak, using a RAD cycle of two weeks with 15 vertical workgroups and a Matrix Management structure.

Initially engaged by Deutsche Börse AG, then by Finanz-Daten-Systeme GmbH (a joint venture between WM and DBAG formed specifically to develop and market the product), as Lead Architect for the Wertpapier-Management-System (WMS) — a new securities master data management system intended to replace the existing systems used within WM and DBAG. Responsible for co-authoring the User Requirements Document, specifying and procuring all hardware and software for the development environment (Sun Sparc/Solaris and Windows NT), and performing all system installation and administration. Later appointed as Joint Technical Manager with sole responsibility for the Database, Test & Integration, Modelling and System Support Teams. System built using CORBA (Orbix), Java, C++, Oracle 8 and OOAD/UML methodologies.

Invited back by Logica to provide consultancy during the development phase of the XMM Mission Control and Data Centre systems — building on the architectural design he had completed in the previous engagement. Also provided valuable input on business proposals being prepared by Logica, including being bid as Project Manager for a 5,000,000 ECU project to design and build the Control Centre for the Integral satellite.

Business Requirements Definition and Functional Specification for the Opel Bank Call Centre on behalf of Sitel Corporation. Responsible for full analysis of business requirements, specification of system functional requirements and design of all graphical user interfaces, working across both business and IT teams. The centre used a Sitel Meritel system linked to a large Oracle 7 database holding 650,000 customer accounts, with an Omnis7 front end and PL/SQL back-end procedures. Also designed and delivered monitoring and reporting facilities using Business Objects, Access and Excel, and proposed and initiated the introduction of an Internet and Intranet system to improve productivity and reduce operating costs.

Returned to ESOC as a Logica consultant. His opinion was well respected by the ESOC/ESTEC/SSC client from his prior work on Cluster and Ulysses. Converted the Cluster MCS for use with the Meteosat MTP mission — producing a working system within 3 elapsed months. Also adapted the Cluster Database System into a fully generic multi-mission product.

Designed and built the complete Command and Control System for the Cluster mission — four ESA spacecraft studying Earth's magnetosphere. Large client/server architecture distributed across 16 VAXstations using DECnet and TCP/IP. Led a team of three in production of the Database subsystem: approximately 350,000 lines of C, Pro*C and UIL code against an Oracle database holding full configuration data for all four spacecraft. Delivered on schedule and to cost. The entire architecture was subsequently adopted for Cluster II following the loss of the original spacecraft in the Ariane 5 inaugural launch failure (June 1996).

Assigned to ESOC as Senior Systems Analyst, converting the Ulysses Command and Monitoring System (UCMS) from a MODCOMP-based to a VAX-based system. Promoted to Project Manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California (March 1990 – June 1991), overseeing the final development phase of mission control for Ulysses — the joint ESA/NASA solar probe and the first spacecraft to fly over the poles of the Sun.

Solely responsible for the design, development, maintenance and user support of the Meteosat MOP1 and MOP2 satellite simulators — used across ESA for operations personnel training, command procedure verification and ground segment software validation. Written in Fortran-77 on Gould SEL computers using ESOC's General Purpose Satellite Simulator Package.

Developed satellite checkout software for SKYNET-IV, Britain's military communications satellite, and the Olympus experimental satellite. Responsible for satellite-specific functions, user training and operational support.

Developed the complex sonar subsystem for the Spearfish torpedo simulator (Ministry of Defence). Established and led the newly formed User Support Group. Subsequently joined the team responsible for the complete architectural redesign of the simulator. System written in Fortran-77 with hardware interface routines in Macro-32 assembler.

Started as a Technician Apprentice (1977–1979), progressing into software engineering. Programmed a DEC PDP-based Airbus flight simulator in Fortran and Macro-32, used to test and verify cockpit equipment. Developed conversion software for the BAe NMG CAD system — translating engineering drawings into precision instructions for 6-axis CNC machine tools used in aircraft wing machining and nuclear pressure vessel manufacture. First-year project patented by the company.