Alan Cookson

About Alan Cookson

Tenured career in project/program management, with a key focus on continual service delivery. 8 years of proven success and leadership in IT, production & service engineering industries. I am experienced in managing enterprise software implementations using Agile & ITIL methodologies and improving business maturity models.

Experience

1. Director - Platform Infrastructure

   Yahoo

   Mar 2018 — Present · Mountain View, CA, US

   Built a high performing global production engineering team, creating a round the clock operations support model- Implemented Service Management standards across the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) organization. Scope included designing a framework for support request workflows & tooling, implementing ITIL based Problem & Post Mortem procedures, ensuring change management standards were properly adhered to and creating structured mechanisms to close knowledge management gaps- Implemented shift turnover procedures, queue management workflows and service defect reviews - resulting in a 50% reduction in incident impact minute duration for the business- Developed lasting, sustainable & collaborative relationships with OpenStack support partners - opened up avenues of regular communication and created an environment which fostered clear alignment- Developed and facilitated a Knowledge Management program that scaled across multiple organizations, resulting in the removal of numerous single points of failure, an improvement of documented knowledge across support tiers, and the advancement of careers- Drove the planning and handoff of Infrastructure Services to an external company, who were brought in to take ownership of business as usual operations. I successfully managed the dispersion & training of knowledge content, access provisioning and integrated contractors into Production Engineering & Software Development roles. In addition, I worked to create new windows of opportunity for full time employees- Significantly reduced Tech Debt, removing OpenStack services, as well as company wide Configuration Management tooling and legacy pipeline management software- Directed the implementation of a private cloud platform, designed to replace legacy OpenStack on-prem infrastructure services. The platform, offering many advanced features, was successfully released to production across several global sites.

Education

• Kings Lynn College, United Kingdom

  Culinary School

  1989 — 1990

• University of California, Berkeley

  Engineering Leadership Professional Program

• Fakenham High School, Norfolk, United Kingdom

  G.C.S.E's

  1984 — 1989