Where I have worked, and what I did there

My formal title is Consultant. In practice the work is solution architecture and security delivery: I am the sole architect and administrator across the whole Azure and Microsoft 365 estate of an Australian financial services licensee, an AFSL and ACL holder. I am employed by AppGenie and contracted to that client rather than billing them directly.

The estate was neglected when I arrived. No documented configuration standard existed, and work already done showed no apparent rationale, so repair came before uplift. Everything below is remediation of a neglected estate followed by the establishment of a standard.

• Architected an end-to-end Microsoft Defender XDR to Azure telemetry pipeline, running at roughly A$160 a month for the full monitored estate.
• Reduced Azure run-rate by approximately 81 per cent, from about A$1,826 to about A$340 a month, around A$18,000 annually.
• Cut privileged directory role assignments on the primary administrative account from 97 to 5.
• Raised tenant Microsoft Secure Score to 77.8 per cent against a 53.7 per cent all-tenant average.
• Replaced a credentialled deployment model with an Azure DevOps pipeline authenticating through Workload Identity Federation, closing a cleartext credential exposure.
• Authored an integrated compliance manual adding 13 policies across the IT, cyber and privacy layer, alongside an 18-sheet risk and control register.
• Wrote AI guidelines and an LLM usage register, then implemented AI usage policies in Microsoft Purview so the standard is enforced and not merely declared.
• Rethought the client’s business continuity and disaster recovery plans to cover the estate as actually rebuilt.
• Diagnosed a tenant-wide external file-sharing failure to a Microsoft platform change, verified independently against the vendor’s published change record before acting.

The anchor role. Nearly six years at New Zealand’s largest government ministry, approximately 8,934 employees, across three levels. I joined as a Junior Technical Business Analyst in January 2020, two months before the country’s first lockdown, and left in October 2025 through voluntary redundancy taken in a restructure.

The Lead Technical BA and Product Owner responsibilities were never formalised. There was no title change and no change in pay. They were held and recognised in practice by my delivery teams, my people managers and business stakeholders up to Head of Product level, and I present them that way because that is what they were.

• Acted as the quality gate for requirements written by other business analysts, peer-reviewing before team refinement and again before handover to developers.
• Extended that review gate from one delivery team to all three heritage teams as heritage lead on the employment platform replacement.
• Set priority and allocated work across other technical business analysts, agreed with Scrum Leads, and acted as their escalation point.
• Owned standards, templates and quality gates, established as team decisions rather than imposed.
• Presented user stories, features, refinement sessions and functionality demonstrations to every level from frontline service centre staff to Head of Product.
• Prepared features, estimates and requirements for quarterly PI planning across roughly 20 teams, presenting in plenary and breakout sessions and owning dependencies and risks.
• Authored options papers and Lightweight Business Cases for 4 to 6 small and 1 to 2 large initiatives a quarter, refined to feature level with story point estimates.
• Built, validated and presented the heritage estimates for a roughly 150-person replacement programme.
• Sat on a formal selection panel for the ministry’s graduate programme, assessing four candidates through group exercises and individual interviews against a defined framework.
• Mentored two business analysts formally and two informally.
• Collaborated on business continuity plans covering roughly eight delivery teams, and on the disaster recovery simulations run to test them.