Dave is available for hire

Dave Thornton

Verified Expert in Project Management

Project Manager

Durham, United Kingdom

Toptal member since March 16, 2022

Expertise

Jira Project Management

Bio

Dave is a project manager interested in the bleeding edge, but he's genuinely passionate about leveraging practical technologies to solve complex business challenges. Solutions are what he does, not technology for the sake of it. He delivers solutions quickly and reliably to help his clients achieve their goals.

Expertise

DevSecOps
HTML5
Jira
Microsoft Project
Portfolio Management
Project Rescue
SQL
jQuery

Work Experience

Program Manager

2019 - 2022

Federal Council, Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office

Recovered a failing Oracle Fusion Cloud transition program, moving from a legacy Tier 3 system to sovereign cloud at Tier 1. Got the program's business case redeveloped, funded, and delivered.
Developed solid ways of working that brought together a team of 200+ members from the department, specialist resources from the freelance market, and several niche suppliers.
Established a hybrid Agile and traditional reporting capability to executives within the department to track progress to fixed timelines managing solution, delivery, and security risks.

Head of Technology

2018 - 2019

UK Government, Cabinet Office

Led the technical delivery of a major cross-government program that transformed ways of working across all government departments and provided a platform for future legacy system evolution.
Collaborated with industry experts to create high assurance cryptographically secure communications products and capabilities.
Developed highly secure networking, infrastructure, platforms, and applications.

Service Introduction and Transition Manager

2018 - 2019

Defra

Led the service introduction and transition for a major business and technical change program within Defra to enable the UK to smoothly transition to Brexit.
Set up the products, teams, and service capabilities to support users of new digital services.
Collaborated with key stakeholders to develop a suitable target operating model enabled by new digitally enabled business services.
Developed several internally facing web and custom applications to ensure the support team was able to deal with the volumes and complexities of the nature of the support.

Project History

Automation of Container Port in Rotterdam

https://www.ect.nl/en

Delivered a solution that managed all movements of containers from rail, barges, trucks, and DSVs for the sixth-largest distribution hub in the world.

Delivered order management systems integrated with web and traditional data feeds, complex planning systems, and the execution and reporting functions needed to support all the port's operations.

Working with heavy engineering firms, we built robotic control systems to control automated goods vehicles, field force automation systems for straddle carriers and reach stackers, algorithms for the physical defragmenting of container stacks with automatic stacking cranes.

Skills

Tools

Jira, GitHub, Microsoft Project, Confluence, SQL, Oracle ERP, Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft Exchange, VMware, Apache

Platforms

SharePoint, OS X, Linux, Oracle

Other

Project Rescue, Portfolio Management, HTML5, jQuery, DevSecOps, IT Security, Cybersecurity, C, C++, ServiceNow, Java

Collaboration That Works

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