Helen Stephenson's Work Page

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Background Information

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CV - Skills Summary

CV - Employment History

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Background Information

IBM Skills

I have been an IT professional since 1976, when I started work as an RPGII programmer. In the course of my career, I have used RPG on a variety of IBM's midrange hardware offerings, the most recent of which are the AS/400 and the iSeries, on which I have worked since 1989. Much of my recent experience has been of financial and insurance applications, including over seven years between 1992 and 1999 working on the Diners Club charge card application CHAMPS; with the time since then spent working on the Xchanging (formerly Rebus iS) insurance package IRIS. I also spent about three years working on the BIS asset management package Fundmaster, including a stint at BIS in 1988 and 1989 and just over a year at Barclays Bank between 1990 and 1991.

In addition to mainstream commercial RPG experience, I have a proven track record in two other IBM languages: ACL, which I used on IBM Programmable 3741 data entry machines for about eighteen months; and EDX/EDL, which I used on IBM Series/1 for around six years. Projects I worked on during that time included the capture of weighbridge data and remote order entry.

Other commercial languages of which I have background knowledge include COBOL and Synon/2. I have done a small amount of COBOL troubleshooting during the time I was at Diners Club. I understand Synon/2 models and have undergone Synon/2 training in both 1991 and 1997. I have done some Synon/2 database administration work, but have no significant experience of developing action diagrams.

Internet and Java Skills

In recent years I have become interested in the Internet and have acquired a good knowledge of HTML in the course of developing and maintaining my website http://www.wuronga.me.uk/. I have also acquired some knowledge of JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets while involved in this activity.

During 2000, I learnt the programming language Java, using a mixture of self study texts and classroom tuition. The classroom work consisted of the Javaconsult course which covered the syllabus for the Sun Java Programmer certification exam. However, I have not had an opportunity to follow this training up with commercial experience.

In 2002, I enrolled in the Open University's postgraduate Computing for Commerce and Industry programme, where I took units which broadened my knowledge of databases, SQL, and object oriented software development.

I have also received work-sponsored cross training in Visual Basic, and I am starting to work on a major object oriented VB project.

Strengths

I have always been an excellent problem solver and have had considerable success with investigating and resolving user problem reports. I have also done a significant amount of more immediate user and operations support, including rostered night shift work where I had front line responsibility for live systems.

In September, 2000 I had occasion to sit the Parity Aptitude Test, and achieved a 100% score.

I have fulfilled a mentoring role within departments in which I have worked, but I have not done significant team leading, and do not see my career progressing in that direction as I prefer the more technical aspects of Information Technology to management.

The Future

It is my intention to remain in stable permanent employment where I will be encouraged to further develop my career along technical lines. I see myself using my RPG skills less and intend my improving object oriented programming skills to fill that gap. The transition from RPG is likely to occur on an iSeries site where my current skillset would be of use, although I am happy to move to other hardware should the opportunity arise to do so. With my strong track record in multiple languages and my exceptionally high score on the Parity Aptitude Test, I am well equipped to meet the challenges of the changing workplace.

I prefer to work in Central London or Kent.

If you are interested in employing me, please contact me via email on programmer@baronmoss.demon.co.uk. My full Curriculum Vitae is currently available as hard copy, or on magnetic media as a Word document. It can be viewed online from this page, and a downloadable version in Word 6.0/95 format is also provided. If you require magnetic media, and the downloadable version is unsuitable for you, please email me specifying which release of Word you can read.

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CV Download Area

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Skills Summary

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Employment Summary

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Details

IRIS Insurance Package - I was employed on a permanent basis to do IRIS Support. The duties involved investigation of error reports, and also a considerable amount of project work, as the RPG resources in the IRIS Support team were required to do any RPG enhancements. IRIS has a GUI written in Visual Basic, and I received VB cross-training and am currently coming up to speed on the IRIS GUI, which is a substantial collection of object oriented Visual Basic projects. I have strong SQL skills, which are equally useful as an iSeries investigative tool, and for accessing the IRIS database from the IRIS GUI. I enjoy investigating database problems and I am highly successful at diagnosing and fixing them. I also enjoy writing and amending programs, but I delegate some of the coding to other team members after I have investigated a problem and specified what needs to be changed.

Change Control - IRIS uses Thenon as its change control package for iSeries code, and I have acquired a programmer's working knowledge of Thenon. The VB code is controlled using Subversion (SVN) and the IRIS GUI projects use the Windows Tortoise client in conjunction with SVN.

Training – I do some unofficial mentoring of other RPG programmers, and I spent 3 weeks in India during 2006, where I introduced some RPG programmers employed in our Indian division to IRIS. I have continued to mentor them since returning to the UK, and expect to return to India from time to time as the need arises.

Courses – I attended a Learning Tree Visual Basic course; and at my own expense, I completed two units from the Open University’s Computing for Commerce and Industry postgraduate programme: Relational Database Systems and Object Oriented Software Development.

Microcomputers - My iSeries connection was via a PC running IBM Client Access. In addition to this software, I used Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, and to a lesser degree, Access. Functions such as time recording and project tracking and accounting were handled by SAP, of which I have a user’s knowledge.

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CHAMPS Charge Card System - I was employed to use RPG to further develop the software used by Diners Club in the UK and make it suitable for Diners Club franchises in other parts of the world to use. Installations I participated in included those in Germany, Canada, the UK and the Benelux Countries. I was the reporting Subject Matter Expert, which encompassed internal MIS (Management Information Systems) and customer-visible reporting supplementary to statements. In Canada, reports sent out to clients must be provided in the language chosen by the company taking the reports, so I developed a multi-lingual capability. I did much of the design work on the Canadian project, and had a second programmer to assist me with the programming. I subsequently produced a formal test plan and designed test data for proving the system. During User Acceptance Testing of the UK and Benelux systems, I was heavily involved in reconciling reports and spent a great deal of time investigating and resolving user problems. I often found problems elsewhere in CHAMPS in the course of investigating reporting problems. Some of CHAMPS is written in COBOL, and I occasionally maintained a COBOL program.

Operations Support - I was a member of the out-of-hours support team, and once every two months I provided a week of front-line operations support cover for all subsystems on all the installed sites. Some of this cover was on an on-call basis, but as CHAMPS installations became more numerous, I worked a night shift during my rostered week, and only provided on-call cover at the weekend. I also worked evening shifts from time to time. I was permanently on-call for escalation of issues within my Subject Matter Area. Initially, I was issued with a mobile telephone and a laptop computer equipped to dial into the office AS/400 to enable me to carry out my support functions. Later I was able to load software onto my own PC to save carrying a laptop home.

Administration - the CHAMPS project is too large for one person to carry out all the database administration tasks. I have had responsibility for maintaining system tables and for policing the change control system. This latter task involves following up all items checked in after a change which are not then shipped to appropriate client sites within a reasonable period.

Change Control - I provided integrity checking of software being scheduled for installation to ensure that such software shipments contained all related objects. I periodically checked the integrity of production object libraries to ensure that versions in use were as expected. I used Query for much of this work.

Microcomputers - For five years I had an Apple Mac running Interaxcess to connect to the AS/400; then I was switched to a PC running Rumba for AS/400 connectivity. In addition to this software, I also used Microsoft Word and Excel; Lotus cc:Mail; and Microsoft Outlook.

Synon - Both Synon/1 and Synon/2 are used by Diners Club. I have made some minor changes in Synon/2 programs, and towards the end of 1997 I attended five days of Synon/2 training, but my improved knowledge of this product did not result in significant use of it. I am familiar with the tools in Synon/1, and have made extensive use of the library list, object list and member list functions provided by this product.

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Holiday Bookings System - I was employed on a contract basis to assist in upgrading programs to make them suitable for use in America. The principal change involved the formatting of dates, but other changes were required as a result of database changes. I also wrote some programs to analyse income for the credit control department.

Mailings System - I wrote selection programs which provided addresses and other details for mail-shots. The volumes of data to be processed made efficiency important and techniques such as OPNQRYF were used.

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Construction Industry - I was employed on a contract basis by this American Software House. I investigated and fixed errors and made enhancements to programs in their packages.

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Testing Insurance Programs - I was employed on a contract basis to write formal test plans for programs developed using Synon/2, and to run the tests I had devised. I used the word processing facilities of Office Vision/400 when writing test plans.

Courses - I took the EMJECS Synon/2 training course.

QA - I checked Synon/2 Action Diagrams against specifications.

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FUNDMASTER Asset Management Package - I worked on a contract basis investigating error reports and enhancement requests, recommending solutions, specifying changes and carrying out programming.

Team leading - In addition to performing programming tasks, I had responsibility for the standing data and environment subsystems; and was responsible for allocating programming work to other team members.

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Open-Item Ledgers - I was employed on a contract basis to develop an archiving suite for this property management and development company's ledgers. I also made enhancements to other programs and fixed errors as necessary. Synon/1 utilities were available to aid programmer productivity.

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FUNDMASTER Asset Management Package - I worked on a contract basis at "Fundmaster Central" fixing errors encountered by system testers. I became familiar with the logical design of FUNDMASTER, which was written using BIS/IPSE methodology. I worked on three FUNDMASTER client sites where I assisted in continuing development and maintenance of FUNDMASTER. This included six months on an AS/400 client site. Subsystems I worked on included Market Feed ("EXSHARE"), Income Administration, Capital Changes and Standing Data.

Training - I gave help and technical advice to trainee programmers.

MIDAS Banking Package - In November 1989 I moved to a MIDAS error fixing team, where I helped clear up a backlog of difficult errors. Subsystems I worked on included Funds Transfer ("SWIFT"), Retail Accounts, Securities Trading, Dealing and Lending. The work was a mix of System/38 and AS/400 work, with a small amount of System/36 work.

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Personal Equity Plans - I was employed on a contract basis in a team continuing development of the PEP System, incorporating death and early withdrawal routines. Programming was done according to specifications set out by Systems Analysts, but I contributed to program design. I used System/38 techniques such as message subfiles, and time-outs.

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Control Language - I reorganised the backup procedures at IR.

Customer Master File Redesign - I analysed the usage of the fields on the existing file and assisted in the design of the new file. I wrote the new master file maintenance program and converted the data file.

Maintenance - I supported existing systems, sometimes single-handedly.

Billings and Purchase Orders - I corrected many long-standing bugs and wrote new programs, including batch, and interactive programs which used subfiles.

PC Communications - I wrote file extract programs to generate data for transmission to PC via both Blue Lynx and AST Communications packages.

Other packages at IR included the JBA Purchase and General Ledgers, Dataplan spreadsheets, and Hawkeye's Pathfinder cross-referencing package. This last allowed the confident weeding of obsolete programs. I wrote batch posting programs to transfer data between the JBA ledgers and Dataplan, and I liased with JBA when problems were experienced with the packages.

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Card Stress Test Engineering Data Collection - I was employed on a contract basis to develop data collection for printed circuit board accelerated aging test results. A bar coded serial number was used to track the card through various tests and performance data was recorded at each stage. The bar code was read from each card by an Intermec hand-held laser scanner attached to the Series/1. Manual test results were entered via a 3101 terminal. The card was placed in a stress test chamber controlled by a PC, which transmitted information about the cards within. The information was stored on the Series/1, where it could be used to monitor trends, register production problems, and increase the overall quality of the product which was finally shipped. I was involved in all aspects of the project which were affected by the Series/1, which was running EDX Version 4.

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Videotex Order Collection System - I was employed on a contract basis by IBM Direct to use Videotex for collection of orders for IBM supplies. I gained a thorough knowledge of SVS/1, which supports Videotex. PCs were used as Prestel terminals in the customer's offices to enter orders without assistance from IBM personnel. I wrote re-entrant user programs to validate the Prestel data. This data was then submitted over communications lines to a host computer which processed the orders. I had some involvement with Communications Facility, which was used for data communications. I also wrote file maintenance programs on the Series/1 and was involved in the maintenance of the Videotex Data Base.

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Weighbridge System - I maintained and improved this system, and converted programs which ran only on the 4978 terminal to run from any screen.

Security - I developed a password protected menu system.

Pack Recording - This system collected data from sugar packing machines via PCs, which transmitted to the Series/1 over asynchronous communications lines. The main files used by the PCs were kept on the Series/1 and I wrote a file handler to process all PC I/O requests. I wrote application programs in COBOL.

Program Products I have used at TLR include Data Collection Interactive (used to support 5235 badge readers for entering vehicle information on the weighbridge); Indexed Access Method; and Multiple Terminal Manager, which I evaluated for use with COBOL). I acted as consultant to TLT where they used MTM and COBOL.

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Development - I programmed, tested and implemented a Membership Subscription System and a complementary Sales Ledger System, and was part of a team which developed Wilkins Payroll Package.

Package Support - Wilkins was an agent for the MFT Integrated Sales-Purchase-Nominal Ledger Packages and the PROMPT File Management Utility. I installed the ledger packages at several sites and performed troubleshooting, and I maintained EDL programs used in association with PROMPT.

System Generations and Operating System Conversions - I prepared EDX supervisors for client systems and installed EDX. I made changes to EDL programs so they would run under EDX Version 3 and migrated data files to Version 3. I modified the Gold Bullion Trading System for operation from IBM 3101 terminals.

Staff Training - I trained other Wilkins personnel in the use of EDX/EDL.

Sales Demonstrations - I demonstrated software to prospective clients.

Technical Expert - I have resolved technical problems relating to EDX/EDL and supported my colleagues when they have had programming problems.

Bonded Warehouse System - I assisted with system testing this system, which ran on the System/34.

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Software Maintenance - I was part of a maintenance team working on the ATAL Compiler and Interpretive Master Program used on automatic test equipment. I was involved in adding the Integer data type to ATAL, an offshoot of the ATLAS language. I also changed the MESAIC program development aid which needed the extra syntax to be added.

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Experience on System/3

Development - I wrote programs, OCL, and operating instruction, and assisted with testing Payroll, Creditors, Fish Market, and Cannery Warehouse Withdrawals Analysis systems. On the Quality Control System I performed all these tasks, and additionally I performed the analysis work.

General Maintenance - I maintained most of the other systems running at SAFCOL, including Debtors, Fishermen's Earnings, a front-end to the Fishermen's Earnings in which I played a major role on the 3741 side, General Ledger, Branch Expenses, Branch Payroll and Cannery Forecasting.

Experience on 3741

Automating of Branch Systems - 3741s were purchased for intelligent data entry and report production at branches. Valid data was transmitted to Adelaide for processing on the System/3 and report files were transmitted back to the 3741 for printing. The 3741s had 8K of storage and I developed overlay processing and an algorithm which made data validation virtually transparent to the operator by using overlapping instructions to avoid keyboard over-run.

Development - I wrote programs to input and validate data and print output, including cheques, for the Payroll and Fishermen's Earnings systems and trained another programmer to write ACL and supervised his writing of programs for the Debtors system.

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Last Revised: 21^st January, 2008.