Rebel Astronaut

Co-Founder

Featurespace

Principal Site Reliability Engineer

DOPS  DIGITAL

Consulting as the Director of the DXOne program for the London Stock Exchange Group.

- Delivered a Developer Platform (DXOne) that would provide a single experience across the whole Org (12k technologists).
- Ran a program with ~50 engineers, architects and BAs.
- DXOne was the first program to successfully deliver their transformation objectives on time, since the merger with Refinitiv.
- Reduced time from idea to market on average by 67% for Lines of Business.
- Delivered an analytics platform to ensure CIOs and their reports get visibility on their areas.
- Designed and Implemented a new operating model to break down the flow of work across teams.
- Designed a community engagement model that was elevated to become the standard for all developer focused comms.
- Liased with Regulators to ensure that changes were approved to the same level as nuclear power plants. 
- Presented and sold the vision of DXOne to numerous CIOs, Heads of Department and Developers.

Principal Transformation Consultant

- Won the company wide ‘Raising the Bar’ award for innovation. 
- Designed and implemented new operating model in a department of 150 employees, driving a more product focused approach.
- Implemented Agile processes in 5 teams to increase velocity by over 100%.
- Owned and implemented the roadmap for IG’s new platform, based on kubernetes.
- Increased resilience for platform by 50% through repeated testing and iteration.
- Designed engagement model for onboarding new teams to the platform.
- Evangelised new platform and created excitement and momentum around the initiative.

Technical Architect - Platform

Contino

- Provided security assurance for FTSE 250  enterprise.
- Enabled Transformation to go live with a goal to double profit within 2 years.
- Developed a “Security First” Culture within the org. 
- Built in-house security team and empowered them to set their own agenda.
- Compiled a report of recomendations for the C-Suite to empower their transformation.
- Developed the consultancy’s internal security practices.

Principal Consultant

Pearson

- Designed and built a platform to support 600+ developers
- Leading architectural decision making and being the voice of security within the team.
- Leading a team of 20 DevOps engineers, training where needed and ensuring the team’s
velocity steadily improved.
- Decreased application onboarding from 3 months to 1 week.
- Decreased overhead for application teams reducing or removing non business workloads to
enable them to decrease cycle time.
- Designed and deployed an automated detection and remediation system within all Pearson AWS
accounts (~200) reducing risks by up to 80%.
- Worked with stakeholders to define account strategy for whole of Pearson.
- Implemented regular vulnerability scanning and remediation for both containers and AMI’s.
- Spearheaded migration to improved CI infrastructure, reducing run times by over 50% and
increasing stability by 30%.
- Implemented Incident response and reporting precedure and ran weekly drills, resolving
incidents 50% faster than before implemented.
- Redesigned kubernetes control plane to support multi-master and regular deploys.
- Responsible for defining and creating a contract between DevOps teams and application teams
to be able to deliver 99.999% uptime to their applications and reduce friction between teams.
- Decreased cost by 200% within development environments, by utilising automated cleanup,
elastic scaling and simplifying the architecture.

DevSecOps Lead/Architect

UK Home Office

- Leading a team of 20 within to deliver a platform supporting 300+ developers.
- Working within highly secure environment empowering critical national infrastructure.
- Implement Vault/Consul workflow for secrets and certificate management.
- Design/Implement the ability update AMI’s without data loss or downtime.
- Standardise engineering practices to increase stability across the whole environment.
- Educate security teams around the differences between cloud infrastructure and on prem.
- Work with team leads to promote containerisation within the team.
- Built out splunk for security monitoring of environments.

Lead Devops/Security Consultant

PhotoBox

- Responsible for taking a dysfunctional team with no leader and low velocity, motivating them,
clarified working procedure and increased velocity by over 100%.
- Designed new kubernetes cluster based around kops for Photobox to migrate all legacy systems
onto.
- Began work on constructing full feature monitoring and security systems.
- Worked closely with the SOC team to manage the security risks and implementing fixes,
including basic secrets management system, and cloudformation creation pipeline.
- Worked with development teams to enable them to manage their own pipelines securely within
Jenkins framework.
- Took stability from 60% uptime in the first month, over all environments, to 100% uptime in the
last.
- Liased with development leads and managers, to ensure that all goals were aligned.
- Implemented agile, to ensure that the workload was measurable, and changes were data-
driven.
- Descreased cycle time by over 40% development teams, allowing features to get shipped faster
and more frequently.

Lead Devops Consultant

- Built and Managed multiple kubernetes clusters as PAAS’ for all Home Office Digital Projects, ie.
- Consulted on the migration of highly sensitive projects onto kubernetes.
- Audited projects on security and worked with apps that were deemed vulnerable to remediate
those threats.
- Built and managed monitoring platform based on Sysdig running on premise on kubernetes and
monitoring over 200 nodes across 3 different cloud providers.
- Built and extended multiple tools to allow teams to avoid reuse of work and ensure time to
production was as low as possible.
- Worked with Neo4j to spearhead their approach to kubernetes and ensure they were able to
support it.
- Worked to ensure all users of the PAAS were able to utilise its self service offering.
- Built relationships within numerous areas within the Home Office to ensure that getting things
done was as easy as possible.
- Supported teams with running kubernetess on bare metal using PXE-boot technology.
- Interviewed and hired multiple other DevOps engineers to build the team from 5 to 15.
- Main point of contact for developers, evangelising best practices and training, both on and
individual and team level.
- Reduced onboarding time from 1 month to 1 day, through automation.
- Increased the number of development teams utilising the platform from ~10, to ~50 over a 6
month period.
- Implemented chargeback system to ensure that all costs were being allocated to respective
development teams, and ensured they still saw at least a 40% reduction in cost.

Senior Devops Engineer

Style.com

- Designed and built Kubernetes platform on AWS
- Adapted scala application to run in a scalable manner, broke application into microservices.
- Designed ci pipeline to deploy code within 5 mins of git commit.
- Dockerised and redesigned application to run on docker, be fault tolerant and scale limitlessly.
- Worked to design a tolerant solution for running Datomic on kubernetes without losing state on pod restart.

Giles is a co-founder of Rebel Astronaut, a startup that aims to make companies more dynamic, flexible, and profitable by speeding up the time from idea to product release. He is also a principal site reliability engineer at Featurespace, a leading provider of adaptive behavioral analytics and fraud detection solutions. 

With over 8 years of experience in DevOps, security, and cloud computing, he has successfully delivered and implemented multiple transformation projects for various organizations, such as the London Stock Exchange Group, Pearson, and the UK Home Office. He has extensive knowledge and skills in infrastructure as code, Amazon Web Services, and DevSecOps methodologies. He is passionate about helping companies achieve their goals by increasing their security, efficiency, and agility.

Giles Hinchcliff

Signalroad

www.unlockingchange.com.au

Unlocking Change the BookCast uses the Integral Map for Organisations to map out the advice and ideas from Business and Academic Books. It has a particular focus on the management structure required to be able to deliver sustainable change in organisations.

Producer at Unlocking Change a BookCast

SignalRoad Pty Ltd

SignalRoad is a Think Tank that studies Organizational Effectiveness. Additional information can be found at the website www.signalroad.com

Director

FAQs for Organizations

The idea for creating FAQs for Organizations came from coffee meetings I had with colleagues and friends. It didn’t matter if the café was in America, Singapore, India, England, Russia, China, Japan, Germany or Australia, we were asking ourselves the same questions;

“Why am I always in meetings?”, 

“Why can’t we make decisions?”, 

“Why do we have vertical silos?”. 

I set out to find the answers. Along the way I learnt Six Sigma, TQM, Lean Thinking, The Lean Startup, Agile Software Development, Theory of Constraints, Myers Briggs Type Indicator, Belbein Team Roles, Hermann Brain Dominance, Social Styles and more. I completed a Masters of Strategic Foresight. This covered the academic world of everything from personal development, cultural development, cybernetics, viable systems model, stratified systems theory, big history, causal layered analysis, scenario planning, systems thinking and especially Ken Wilber's Integral Theory.

It was Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory which provided the map to pull the jigsaw puzzle pieces together. The completed picture is called the Integral Organization Model. The Integral Organization Model provides the diagnostic tool across the physiology (structure and systems), psychology (thinking and behavior) and sociology (culture) of an organization to determine the root causes and therefore the answers to these FAQs.

The website faqsfororgs.com has been created to share this work. It allows us to interact as a community where we can comment on the FAQs and answers, ask more questions and debate the solutions. The FAQs are in no particular order, read whatever you relate to the most. At the bottom are topics in Blue Boxes which cover solutions for organizations. I am sure this will spark strong debate over whether they are right, wrong or somewhere in between. I look forward to the discussion. 

My hope is that together we can improve all of our working lives, in all aspects. 

Thanks and I hope you find this useful,

Sincerely,

Rob

Producer

OneTrust

OneTrust is the global leader in privacy management and marketing compliance software. More than 10,000 customers, including 200 of the Global 2,000, use OneTrust to comply with data privacy regulations across sectors and jurisdictions, including the EU GDPR and ePrivacy (Cookie Law). An additional 7,000 organizations use OneTrust’s technology through a partnership with the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP), the world’s largest global information privacy community.

The software, available in 100+ languages, is backed by over 150+ awarded patents and can be deployed form the OneTrust cloud or on-premise environment. The comprehensive platform is based on a combination of intelligent scanning, regulator guidance-based questionnaires, automated workflows and developer plugins used together to automatically generate the record keeping required for an organisation to demonstrate compliance to regulators and auditors. The platform is enriched with content from hundreds of templates based on the world-class privacy research conducted by our over 100 in-house certified privacy professionals.

OneTrust helps organisations implement GDPR, Australian Privacy Act and New Zealand Privacy Bill requirements, including Data Protection by Design (PbD), Data Protection Impact Assessments (PIA/DPIA), Vendor Risk Management, Incident and Breach Management, Records of Processing (Data Mapping), Universal Consent and Preference Management, ePrivacy Cookie Consent, Data Subject Access Rights, Portability and Right to Be Forgotten.

PrivacyConnect, OneTrust’s global user community, hosts in-person workshops in over 40 international cities, and is attended by thousands of privacy professionals to share best practices.

OneTrust is co-headquartered in Atlanta, GA and in London, UK, with additional offices in Munich, Bangalore, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo and Melbourne. The fast-growing team of privacy and technology experts surpasses 400 employees worldwide.

Managing Director

FlexRule

FlexRule enables intelligent, integrated, Business Processes
 
FlexRule’s common Business and IT language, covering business, decision and data logic, means that nothing is lost in translation. Business People get what they need and IT can deliver this fast in a robust, tested and secure environment.

What sets FlexRule apart is:
•	A three layered approach of Business Logic, Decision Logic (DMN and Decision Flow) and Data logic.
•	Spreadsheet style Decision Table which business people quickly grasp.
•	Natural Language and Tree & Sub-Tree Logic
•	Advanced Data Handling Capabilities, Monadic View, in memory data operations, join, filter, project, etc
•	Dynamic Platform that doesn’t require compiling and re-compiling of code.
•	Single click deployment of logic, decisions and rules as REST API Service
•	.NET Integration
•	Regression and Unit Testing with automated Test Data File creation
•	Role Based permission management
•	Version control and management

FlexRule’s global customers are leveraging these capabilities to achieve outstanding value at a much lower total cost.

On Sabbatical

Air Watch by VMware

Rob was employee number 1 for AirWatch Australia, New Zealand and had the task to establish its presence in ANZ.

Starting from scratch AirWatch ANZ went from 0% marketshare to 50% in three years. Analyst firm Frost & Sullivan awarded AirWatch ANZ the leading MDM software provider in Australia in 2013, 2014 & 2015.

And we had some fun along the way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FUbXbKtJwQ

AirWatch globally was acquired by VMware in February 2014 for $USD1.54billion.

Air Watch provides a mobile device management software platform for Apple (iOS), Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Symbian devices including iPhones, iPads, Smart Phones and Tablets.

Vice President and Managing Director AirWatch by VMware Australia and New Zealand

Telstra

Director of Product and Services Marketing

General Manager Infrastructure as a Service

KAZ Technology Services

Telstra acquired Kaz Technology Services to accelerate its move into the IT and Managed Services industry. Rob transferred to KAZ to lead the State Managers and was responsible for the sales and delivery of services into all States in Australia. This also included managing the four major outsourced customers. During the first year of the acquisition KAZ Services increased revenue, profitability and market share.

Rob managed the Sales Executive Teams across some of the largest Telstra customers achieving their annual targets consistently over a number of years. As part of his role Rob lead the team that won the largest Telstra outsourcing deal of a major Australian bank which generated $1billion dollars of revenue over 5 years. 

Rob later take over managing the operations of delivering desktop and network services signed under this outsourcing contract. This required managing sales, technical and operational teams totalling 250 people.

Sales Manager - Finance, Entertainment, Government Industries

Rob has the unusual mix of Real World Executive Experience while using Academic Research to understand the Why, What and How in building Effective Organisations. From these learnings he has built and led highly successful teams in both established Global Organisations and Unicorn Start-Ups.

Rob is now sharing this Thought Leadership in his BookCast, Unlocking Change, www.unlockingchange.com.au

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Giles Hinchcliff

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