Sam Lawrence

Current

• Senior 2nd Line IT support engineer at Food Standards Agency
• Managing Director at S E Lawrence LTD

Past

• 2nd line Project support / engineer (contract) at Computer centre / Bradford Council
• 2nd line support / Deployment engineer (contract) at HP CDS / Yorkshire Bank / NAG
• 2nd / 3rd Line Support (contract) at ICM / Servo / Phoenix

• 2nd Line Desktop Support (contract) at Wakefield District Housing
• XP Deployment Engineer (contract) at DTP / Bradford & Bingley
• 2nd Line Desktop Support (contract) at ICM / Clariant
• XP Deployment Engineer (contract) at Computa Centre & Lloyds TSB
• 1st Line Support (contract) at Nestle
• 3rd Line Support Engineer (contract) at BT & NHS24
• 2nd & 3rd Line Support Engineer (contract) at Univar
• 1st & 2nd Line Support Engineer (contract) at Thales Information Systems/EWS Railway
• 1st Line Support Engineer (contract) at Centrex Harrogate / Police
• Desktop / Network Engineer (contract) at HP/NAG/Yorkshire Bank
• 1st, 2nd, 3rd Line Support Engineer (contract) at Advanced Processing
• 2nd Line Support Engineer (contract) at South Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive
• IT 1st 2nd 3rd line at Exel Logistics
• IT Sales at Evesham Technology

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14 more...

Education

• Silcoates

Connections

27 connections

Industry

Information Technology and Services

Websites

• My Portfolio

Sam Lawrence’s Summary

Professional Experience and goals...

Currently studying for my MCSE 2003 and MS enterprise administrator with a bit of Citrix thrown in there for good measures. All of which is where the bulk of my experience from the last nine years in the IT industry has been.

My goal is to further my career to such a point where I should be able to pick up the top contracts and build on that.

Another goal is to travel the world and make it to CEO of a big company, but I think the first goal is big enough for now!

Sam Lawrence’s Specialties:

Specialise in IT! in General!

Sam Lawrence’s Experience

• Senior 2nd Line IT support engineer

  Food Standards Agency

  (Government Agency; Food Production industry)

  June 2009 — Present (8 months)

  Supporting 300+ users in the head office and 1200 users out at site. This role included technologies such as Exchange 2007, Citrix Xen Apps, Office 2007. Alongside my normal second line duties I was also given extra projects to manage, these included anything from Exchange housekeeping to creating a new Ghost image for organisation wide rollout. During my time at the MHS I had the role of training up various junior members of staff.

• Managing Director

  S E Lawrence LTD

  (Information Technology and Services industry)

  November 2005 — Present (4 years 3 months)

• 2nd line Project support / engineer (contract)

  Computer centre / Bradford Council

  (Information Technology and Services industry)

  March 2009 — April 2009 (2 months)

  This was a four week project updating public use desktop computers at libraries; training centres and homes in the Bradford Metropolitan area. Very focused on customer interaction with the public. Also heavy on project management and troubleshooting skills. Also incorporating a Landesk rollout.

• 2nd line support / Deployment engineer (contract)

  HP CDS / Yorkshire Bank / NAG

  (Information Technology and Services industry)

  January 2009 — February 2009 (2 months)

  This role included the role out of 4000 new desktop computers for users spread across the country. This involved visiting each user and transferring data from the old computer to the new. HP CDS also have the contract for IT support for NAG and the bulk of my time here was spent doing 2nd line support and fixes, anything from Windows XP errors to bespoke applications and software installations.

• 2nd / 3rd Line Support (contract)

  ICM / Servo / Phoenix

  (Information Technology and Services industry)

  July 2008 — November 2008 (5 months)

  This was an internal role supporting ICM and Servo environments of the Phoenix IT Group IT infrastructure. With 2800 IT qualified users over multiple domains, sites and situations, ensuring the internal users were able to fully support the external clients, via networks / firewalls and third party software. Also largely supporting current projects such exchange server migrations and domain migrations from the old ICM domain to the PITGUK domain. Problem solving PDA’s and configuring Citrix PS4 was also a daily occurrence.

• 2nd Line Desktop Support (contract)

  Wakefield District Housing

  (Government Administration industry)

  March 2008 — July 2008 (5 months)

  1200 users over eight sites. Supporting this complete Microsoft house was initially a 2nd line role however due to staffing became a 1st line role with the main focus on first time fixes and second line duties when possible. Providing support to a company wide Mitel VoIP roll out when needed. Invoking DR for some departments during the VoIP rollout also showed very good problem solving skills.

• XP Deployment Engineer (contract)

  DTP / Bradford & Bingley

  (Information Technology and Services industry)

  February 2008 — July 2008 (6 months)

  One weekend in four during this period rolling out new IBM desktops to users in the two main offices in Bingley and Crossflatts. Average of one hundred per night. Working from 5pm Friday evening till 2am Saturday, then either 8am Saturday till 5pm deploying laptops or 12am till 8pm deploying desktops. Similar to the Lloyds TSB role, deployment, installation and check.

• 2nd Line Desktop Support (contract)

  ICM / Clariant

  (Information Technology and Services industry)

  December 2007 — February 2008 (3 months)

  400 users and five sites across the UK on a 2nd line level. Also managing issues and work schedules for engineers based on the remote sites. This role involved taking charge of any new incidents, at any site, ensuring the correct hardware and support were at the correct site for remote sites whilst also providing desktop hardware and software support for the Leeds site. Mainly including Windows XP and Office 2003. 50% of my time was devoted to a Dell Hardware replacement program associated a three year renewed lease with Dell.

• XP Deployment Engineer (contract)

  Computa Centre & Lloyds TSB

  (Information Technology and Services industry)

  January 2008 — January 2008 (1 month)

  Working weekday nights Throughout January, along side the ICM contract, deployment of one hundred XP desktop PC’s per night in their Scunthorpe call centre. This role included rolling out software via SMS, installing and updating McAfee AV and ensuring other aspects such as MS office were working.

• 1st Line Support (contract)

  Nestle

  (Public Company; NESN; Food Production industry)

  October 2007 — December 2007 (3 months)

  A dip in the market let to this first line role, answering calls, dealing with Windows 2000 & XP issues, including MS Office support. Covering about 20,000 UK wide users. This was an interesting role as I and two other people covered the service desk as it was closed down in favour of a self service “service desk” via the intranet pages.

• 3rd Line Support Engineer (contract)

  BT & NHS24

  (Information Technology and Services industry)

  May 2007 — October 2007 (6 months)

  Originally setting up a new 75+ server Infrastructure in the new Edinburgh data centre. Consisting of Exchange clusters, SQL clusters and application servers, 30+ server Citrix XPe farm, huge Active directory Infrastructure. With backups via images. With the infrastructure also touching on… tcp/ip switches and firewalls, blade servers and switches, landing zones for third party access, MOM and Nagios servers for monitoring.
  
  Once the new environment was setup all management and support was dealt with in 12 hour shifts from the Leeds covering 24/7. This contract probably used all of my skills together and whilst very challenging also very rewarding on this multi-million pound NHS24/ BT contract.

• 2nd & 3rd Line Support Engineer (contract)

  Univar

  (Privately Held; Chemicals industry)

  April 2007 — May 2007 (2 months)

  Covering multiple sites within the United Kingdom, focusing mainly on 2nd line desktop support with Windows XP and Office 2003, also taking a server inventory of about 60 servers (including 20 Zen Citrix Servers) before the IT was outsourced to Digica.
  
  Other main duty’s involved travelling to Dublin to supervise an office move, with no IT support based in Dublin I was the only IT contact and to ensure that servers, desktops and thin clients were all working Monday morning in the new office.

• 1st & 2nd Line Support Engineer (contract)

  Thales Information Systems/EWS Railway

  (Information Technology and Services industry)

  December 2006 — March 2007 (4 months)

  4700 users across England, Wales and Scotland, 130 Citrix servers, 1600 servers in total. Working on a seven week rota covering a 24/7 ITIL service desk, working shifts. Some weeks on 1st line other weeks on 2nd line Supporting 300+ Citrix Applications (XPe Farm)
  
  As well as the XP clients all remote sites had thin clients, all using a huge variety of in house applications, with integration to Railtrack for signal and track information and integration / full support of the retail National Rail timetable system.
  
  Later on Thales actually took over the EWS building and merged service desks to provide multi-lingual 24/7 cover for certain government contracts and contracts elsewhere in Europe.

• 1st Line Support Engineer (contract)

  Centrex Harrogate / Police

  (Law Enforcement industry)

  November 2006 — December 2006 (2 months)

  During a lull in the market I found myself in this first line role advising front line Police how use the national police training system. Focusing mainly on password resets and user training.

• Desktop / Network Engineer (contract)

  HP/NAG/Yorkshire Bank

  (Information Technology and Services industry)

  May 2006 — November 2006 (7 months)

  Originally a three month contract at various ATM sites around England and Wales upgrading ATM’s from NT3.5 to Windows XP.
  
  Once that contract had wound down National Australia Group were keen to extend the contract to 2nd / 3rd line support role once again around England and Wales. A typical day would involve been in Bristol for 7am to install the new chip and pin hardware for the branch office, then travelling over to High Wycombe to solve a hardware issue and rollout out wireless technologies, then back to Blackburn to complete a chip and pin rollout.
  
  On the quiet days there were still several thousand employees and 503 offices incorporating three national banks, all to support from the head office in Leeds.

• 1st, 2nd, 3rd Line Support Engineer (contract)

  Advanced Processing

  (Textiles industry)

  February 2006 — May 2006 (4 months)

  300 users, 30 Servers. 1st/2nd/3rd line support, supporting a series of low budget systems. E.g. Access Database' and wireless networking.
  With heavy use of remote access software between two sites, three main focuses were a roll out of Office 2003 via group policy, usual desktop support for 2000 / XP desktops and support / service of HP laser printers.

• 2nd Line Support Engineer (contract)

  South Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive

  (Public Policy industry)

  December 2005 — February 2006 (3 months)

  800 users, various sites. This involved support all public travel centres in South Yorkshire including the Traveline call centre. This was my first real contract after been made redundant from Exel.
  Supporting all users on levels using Windows XP machines with office 2003, Windows 2003 servers and Active Directory. The server support was kept within a very small team however I was seen fit to carry out various server maintenance on the VMware GSX server and on the Exchange infrastructure, Whilst also resolving any second line hardware and software issues.

• IT 1st 2nd 3rd line

  Exel Logistics

  (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; Logistics and Supply Chain industry)

  January 2003 — December 2005 (3 years )

  First, Second and Third line role supporting three hundred uses for the Special Products side of the business.

• IT Sales

  Evesham Technology

  (Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Computer Hardware industry)

  January 2001 — December 2002 (2 years )

  Personal and Business IT sales, incorporating a bit of IT support as the first contact for a user when they get problems!

Sam Lawrence’s Education

• Silcoates

  1990 — 1997

Additional Information

Sam Lawrence’s Websites:

• My Portfolio

Sam Lawrence’s Interests:

IT, travelling, Business, relaxing

Sam Lawrence’s Groups:

MCP

Sam Lawrence’s Honors:

MCP

Sam Lawrence’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• career opportunities
• consulting offers
• new ventures
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• business deals
• reference requests
• getting back in touch