2009–2019 — The Craftsman

Refining the
art of delivery.

Enterprise architecture taught me to think big. Now I needed to learn how to deliver — to take messy, complex, real-world systems and turn them into something an organisation can actually rely on.

The consultant's craft

This was the decade where I became the person organisations call when a project needs to actually work. Not just architecturally elegant — but delivered, deployed, and relied upon. The shift from designing systems to seeing them through.

2012–2017

Licence Bureau

Consultant — 5 years

What began as a back-office redesign became a five-year engagement. When the original consultancy went into receivership, Licence Bureau asked me to take on the entire project — complete analysis, design, development, and technical project management. I replaced the consultancy team of 9 people.

The system provides automated employee checking and monitoring for major corporate clients. I led the transition from a legacy Access/VB6/Oracle stack to a modern C# solution, then towards then end I built up a permanent team around me to sustain it long-term.

The real achievement: Not just building the system, but on-boarding and technically managing the internal agile team that would eventually replace me. That's the mark of a good consultant — making yourself unnecessary.
2017–2018

Saga PLC

Systems Consultant

Three parallel projects: integrating a third-party publishing system with 500,000+ subscribers into the core data warehouse, creating a mail selection and sorting system optimised for Royal Mail delivery rates, and expanding the Marketing WebAPI for GDPR compliance.

The publishing and mail processing work was carried out solo. The GDPR work was a team effort integrating across client-facing web applications and internal telesales systems.

2019–2020

Directferries

Systems Consultant

The company's core commercial system was affectionately known as "the monolith" — a codebase that had grown from garage-developer Access/VB6 system to VB.NET over many years. I migrated it to C#, using a strangler fig pattern to gradually replace the legacy code with modern microservices using carefully designed new RESTful APIs for the quotation/booking system, and then built the Mobile API Gateway around the needs of the Android and iOS developers in London.

I was the last remaining developer-contractor on-site, working across four concurrent workstreams.

2009–2010

Cubic Transport

Consultant

Transport infrastructure systems — the invisible software that moves millions of people through cities every day — integration of the Oyster Card system. Plus a sideline project for the engineering manager to measure mobile network signal strength around London - a bit like a Google Street View car but for mobile coverage.

2010–2012

Bankers Acuity

Technical Project Manager / Consultant

Reed Business Information — financial data systems at scale. I was working on their Bankers Almanac and Sort Codes systems and a new CMS.

This was where, at RBI's request, I began transitioning from pure development into technical project management, balancing code with coordination.

The legacy moderniser

A recurring theme in this era — and a skill that defines much of my value. Three major legacy modernisation projects across this decade:

  • Licence Bureau: Access/VB6/Oracle → modern C# with full system redesign
  • Directferries: "The monolith" (Access/VB6/VB.NET) → C# microservices on AWS
  • Saga: RPC-style APIs → RESTful architecture with OpenAPI/Swagger

Every organisation has systems they've outgrown. I specialise in respecting what came before while building what comes next.

Key takeaway

Craft isn't about writing clever code — it's about understanding the entire lifecycle. Analysis to acceptance. Legacy to modern. Solo delivery to building teams that sustain what you've created after you leave.