He was a member of the Associate Programme operated by Hewlett-Packard's Professional Services Organisation, their consultancy service aimed at meeting the needs of their largest customers.

Assessment

To join the Associate Programme, he had to pass a day-long assessment by HP, including taking technical and initiative tests, participating in a group exercise and writing and delivering a business-level presentation. He was subsequently asked to conduct the technical tests for a group of candidates in March 1995, and in June 1995 successfully ran the whole course for a further group.

GlaxoWellcome

Frank spent most of his time working on the Jet project for GlaxoWellcome, a re-engineering project that successfully combined the geographically- and organisationally-separate IT groups within Glaxo into a single new organisation managing all of Glaxo's IT infrastructure. The PSO built the new infrastructure for network management, and delivered it to a new operations team based at Stevenage.

Projects completed

In addition to providing technical and administrative support for the deployment and operational teams, Frank completed the following projects:

He designed, implemented and documented a solution to the problem of remotely managing certain legacy production systems essential to Glaxo's core business. As part of this, he wrote new software to allow HP Operations Center to monitor equipment via RS-232. This solution was subsequently applied to environmental monitoring equipment on this and the Caspian project.
He performed the business analysis, and prepared the subsequent report, on how Glaxo could re-implement their existing production batch archiving systems.
Working with one other PSO associate consultant, Frank conducted a full technical performance and security review of the existing operational systems, and wrote the comprehensive plan for the next stage of the operational systems development.
He worked with the Jet Project's HP project manager on the initial phase of integrating Wellcome's IBM-based IT infrastructure into the new Glaxo structure.

System administration @ Disney

Frank Wales

1994-1995

Buena Vista Home Video is the video distribution arm of the Walt Disney company. Frank was responsible for the day-to-day administration of the Sun and HP Unix-based servers that ran their national sales and marketing systems in seven countries.

He also continued development work on the Discovery application hosted by these computers, provided software and communications consultancy to other projects within Buena Vista, and internet consultancy to the networking group.

System administration @ Nat West Markets

Frank Wales

1993-1994

NatWest Markets was the part of NatWest bank that handled trading in shares, equities and gilts in the City of London. Frank worked as one of two Unix consultants to the global technical support group, and was responsible for the smooth functioning of the bank's gilts, equities and settlement systems.

Along with one project manager and one DBA, Frank was part of a 'skunkworks' ream responsible for planning and executing the successful move of equities service from Edinburgh to London without interruption of service to the business.

He provided round-the-clock support to the operations team, and also consulted on global derivatives and world-wide security projects.

System administration @ Charity Commission

Frank Wales

1991-1993

The Charity Commission is the UK government agency with responsibility for regulating charities in England and Wales. Between 1991 and 1993, Frank worked with them, helping to manage their computer networks and support their development team.

As a senior Unix system administrator on the Commission's computer management team, Frank was responsible for the day-to-day operation of all of the Charity Commission's production and development systems, a mixture of HP, Sun, Data General and other systems.

He set up systems, procedures and tools to allow the Commission's inexperienced Unix staff to manage and operate their diverse Unix network, and trained staff as appropriate.

>p>He also designed, and led the implementation of, a network job-management system for overnight and batch processing. Finally, he also provided Unix technical support to their internal software development team.

Duties and responsibilities

Frank's duties at the Commission included:

Planning, supervising and performing systems upgrades and maintenance without loss of service to users
Setting policy on matters such as security and account administration
Helping with contract staff recruitment and permanent staff training
Providing detailed consultancy on all aspects of HP-UX and SunOS software development and systems management.

Projects completed

Projects Frank completed for the commission included:

Developing centrally-managed software to run across all Unix platforms to perform automatic file system maintenance.
Designing, and supervising the development of, a network-based job scheduling system with command line, script and menu-driven user interfaces (which allegedly was still in use long after Frank's assignment at the Commission ended)
Writing a package for tracing Sybase OpenDB activity so developers could see what their 4GL tools were doing behind the scenes.
Re-writing a software release system to allow multi-server operation.
Writing back-end components for a PC-based front-end menu system allowing access to both PC and UNIX-based applications.

Strategy report

Near the end of his assignment, and at the invitation of senior management, he wrote and presented a report on long-term development and IT strategy.

Software development @ Orbitel Mobile Communications

Frank Wales

1991

Frank wrote some GSM base-station communication software while serving a three-month stint at Orbitel Mobile Communications.