Steve Hallett
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Steve Hallett

Principal ConsultantSpecialising in Product & Delivery, Technical

With over 20 years experience as a successful consultant, Steve is highly skilled in delivering niche tech and digital experts to complex projects. Steve specialises in Product & Delivery and Technical: Development, Software, Infrastructure, Security & DevOps.

Hanover are proud to support a range of UK Government Departments in their mission to deliver digitised, optimised, public services for the benefit of UK Citizens through consulting and team building.

Our services are available through the following frameworks:

  • G-Cloud

  • DOS

  • Bloom/NEPRO 3

  • PSR

  • "I worked as a Hanover associate on a complex central government technology project. The working relationship with them was over a sustained period of time and I always found them to be supportive and knowledgeable, both on the associate and project side. They understood the complexity of the technical project I was landing into and it was a great fit for my skills, resulting in the right outcome for the client."

    Silvia

    Software Engineer

  • ​"Unlike other recruiters, Hanover treats contractors like human beings, rather than revenue-generating commodities! I would not hesitate to recommend their consultants"

    Chris

    Project Manager

  • ​"Hanover were clear, friendly and straightforward. Their intuition about roles suited to me was excellent and now I love my job!"

    Karin

    SEO Analyst

  • ​"My biggest appreciation of Hanover is that they helped me believe in my own work. It completely paid off and I got the job!"

    Henry

    Digital Designer

  • "What especially impressed me was that Hanover truly listened to what I was looking for and what my expectations for career progression were."

    Teri

    UX Designer

  • ​"Not only were Hanover great to deal with but they also followed up with me when I started in my new job to see how I was settling in." 

    Tom

    System Admin

  • Software Engineer
  • Project Manager
  • SEO Analyst
  • Digital Designer
  • UX Designer
  • System Admin
  • Product & Delivery
    Project Manager

    Project Manager to develop business cases for projects to support the organisation achieve target condition for assets, manage flood risk, and meet legal requirements.Main responsibilities: Develop business cases for projects to support the organisation achieve target condition for assets, manage flood risk, and meet legal requirements. Manage projects in line with the organisation’s policies, procedures, and guidance. Lead a project team, working collaboratively, with stakeholders and delivery partners to successfully deliver projects. Monitor and report on progress of the project schedule and expenditure, identifying risks, issues, and opportunities, with a focus on mitigation or escalation. Seek to influence customers and build strong partnerships with key stakeholders, customers, and suppliers, internally and externally to maintain a positive reputation, response, and effective resolution of issues. Encourage and develop a culture with a strong focus on health, safety and wellbeing, sustainability, inclusivity within the team to drive best practice across partner organisations and communities. Essential Skills:Extensive project management experience in the delivery of public Infrastructure projects across construction.  Experience of NEC4 contracts –  Stakeholder engagement at all levels Experience of 5 case business model – business cases.  Strong self starter – be able to hit the ground running Excellent Communication skills at all levels Have a deep understanding of Health & Safety regulations with construction projects Be able to set a team culture rather than recognise issues Desirable Skills:Preferred professional membership of Institute of Civil Engineers (ICE), Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM) PRINCE2 or AMPQ qualification (or working towards)

    Apply Now
  • Product & Delivery
    Salesforce Business Analyst

    We’re looking for an experienced self-motivated Business Analyst with experience in coordinating projects across cross functional teams including agile teams globally to join an ecommerce business.  You will be responsible for successfully rolling out our Salesforce CRM solutions to our global business operations team and work directly with multiple stakeholders within the business but also the CRM team to ensure delivering on track within scope. The job requires a self-starter with preferably experience in marketplaces and technical domains. As BA you have deep functional knowledge about the business application of the system being developed. You will work with the Product Manager to ensure that functional requirements are accurately captured and conveyed to the Agile team through well written user stories.Key Responsibilities:Work closely with relevant stakeholders to gather, understand and define business requirements Understand the structure, policies and operations of an organization to recommend solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals Develop user stories and to-be process flows to support the design and development of our Salesforce solution Partner with the Product Manager to translate product roadmap features into well-defined product requirements/user stories Work collaboratively with team members to design a solution that will meet business requirements and create user stories Collaborate with developers and QA to test and verify that solutions will meet business requirements Plan and drive key meetings with stakeholders and experts including requirement sessions, system demos and user acceptance testing Participate in prioritization meetings with the SCRUM master and Product Owner Manage risks and issues, escalating to senior stakeholders for resolution Coach and facilitate champion users across various teams to enhance their success Provides ongoing production support, including responding to user issues, collaborating with the technical team to analyze and resolve reported system issues, and communicating the resolution of issues to the departments Document use cases, business/system/functional requirement Essential Competencies & Qualifications:Excellent interpersonal skills, verbal and written communication in English Excellent stakeholder management skills and team player Experience of working in an agile environment Highly adept to change Willingness to learn Strong experience with Salesforce CRM (primary Sales Cloud, Experience Cloud)

    Apply Now
  • Product & Delivery
    Senior Delivery Manager

    The Senior Delivery manager is accountable for the effective delivery of complex, high-risk products and services. Experience across a range of products and services, throughout the entire product life cycle and have responsibility and accountability as the main point of escalation.  You will be expected to have strong communication skills and engage senior stakeholders.Your Role: Lead teams in agile and lean practices and recognised as an expert. Always innovating and can create and tailor new ways of working.  Take responsibility for complex relationships with contracted suppliers, negotiating with them to get good value.  Manage stakeholder expectations and facilitate discussions about high risk and complexity within constrained timescales and represent the community to large audiences (internal and external). Negotiate, influence or set budgets in a complex environment and able to input in to business cases.  Apply experience of multiple parts of the product life cycle and recognise when it is right to move forward and when it is right to stop.  Recognise the appropriate deliverables and the right people to meet these.  Actively address the most complicated risks, issues and dependencies including where ownership exists outside the team, identifying innovative ways to unblock issues.  Identify and challenge organisational processes of increasing complexity and those processes that are unnecessarily complicated, coaching the organisation to inspect and adapt.  Lead a continual planning process in a very complex environment. Skills Required: Demonstrable experience of project managing a technical supplier contract (delivery and commercial) in the delivery of a complex financial system (ideally an ERP implementation to include the HR element). Extensive technical project management experience (including Agile delivery), managing BAs, Architects, Business Change analysts and the full and wide range of business stakeholders. Demonstrable experience of service transition from legacy systems to new solution implementation, including the decommissioning of complex /highly integrated legacy systems.

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  • Technical
    Oracle Payroll Cloud Specialist

    We're looking for a Oracle Payroll Cloud Specialist to be responsible for delivering and supporting the Oracle Payroll Cloud solution, including reporting, integrations and data related to Payroll. Working closely with the Payroll Lead and Delivery Manager, Solution Architect and business colleagues, you'll ensure the system and processes are defined to meet client requirements using standard functionality and following best practice.Your skills and experience: Demonstrable experience of working with the Client to shape their requirements, business processes and solution for Payroll alignment. Demonstrable experience of designing and configuring Oracle Cloud Payroll. Good understanding of Oracle Time and Labour (OTL) and Absence Management standard links to Oracle Payroll. Considerable experience of writing complex Fast Formulas for Payroll. Demonstrable experience of developing, enhancing and supporting complex functional designs covering for standard functionality, reports, integrations and PaaS e.g. Travel Package. Ability to work collaboratively with Payroll Lead, Client and system integrator, shaping the solution based on client requirements. Experience of coaching and supporting the business to execute system and user acceptance testing acceptance testing Desirable: Knowledge of other Oracle HCM modules beneficial – Core HR, OTL and Absence Management. Previous experience of developing Payroll Costing solution between Oracle Payroll and ERP. Experience of working in a large team including Business Process Owner, SMEs and Product Owners. Oracle Cloud Payroll Implementer Certification.

    Apply Now
  • Technical
    Digital Developer

    The Senior Developer is key for our product delivery, you will develop core components of our solutions and help select appropriate technologies. Your subject matter expertise will enable you to operate with greater levels of autonomy and decision making. You will work to our technical standards writing clean, secure code following a test-driven approach, ensuring the code is open as far as possible and can be re-used. You will be expected to mentor and lead other engineers in technical tasks, as well as support recruitment and assessment activities.Responsibilities: delivering secure, reliable and scalable software, and supporting your team with technical tasks when needed evaluating and advising on design choices and ensuring that software is high quality and balances technical and business considerations defining and documenting test cases for new systems and maintaining live systems to ensure ongoing performance evolving new approaches/solutions with other professions through discoveries, maintaining a focus on development and deployment helping prioritise and direct technical tasks across your team, to balance new and live services Skills:Strong knowledge of cloud-base services (ideally AWS) and cloud native solutions. Practical experience of architecting and designing solutions is desirable, following best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable systems in the cloud, aligned to the AWS Well-Architecture Framework. Good technical knowledge and experience of:Kubernetes, Kafka (Confluent and/or MSK), AWS SQS, Microservices, Serverless Technologies

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  • Product & Delivery
    Project Manager

    We're hiring an experienced Project Manager for a large Central Government agency. You will need:Active SC Clearance Project Manager experience – 5+ years Assurance experience Engineering experience Desirable:A recognised project management qualification e.g. APM, PMQ, PRINCE2 Practitioner qualifications OR equivalent work experience Engineering background and/or background in being an Engineering Project Manager is highly desirable. Project Management experience managing technical projects.

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  • Data
    Governance and Metrics Officer

    Governance & Metrics Officer is a new and exciting role, which will play a key part in outcome metrics development, process assurance, benefit tracking and business workflow analysis.Experience with measuring outcomes and realising benefits Analytical skill sets Ability to think critically and develop metrics Ability to compile and present findings to high level and varied level of stakeholders Strong stakeholder skills at all levels Analytical qualifications would be beneficial. Degree level or equivalent experience

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Cybersecurity
cybersecurity

​We’re living in an increasingly connected world, with a growing number of devices and digital services collecting, storing and processing more data than ever before.Emerging technologies continue to add value to our lives in work, social and consumer settings, but how does this impact cybersecurity risk?​Our Digital FootprintOur personal data is collected in countless ways. Manufacturers collect technical data when we have issues with an app or our computer, we fill out online forms to access public WiFi when we travel, retailers collect our behavioural and demographic data to inform advertising efforts – the list goes on.According to anti-virus provider Kaspersky, more than 940,000 of its users were attacked by malware designed to harvest a variety of data on their computers in the first half of 2019. In a world where most transactions are now done online, we often assume organisations will have appropriate security measures in place, but even the most sophisticated cybersecurity technology isn’t foolproof. A study from Juniper Research predicts annual online payment fraud losses from ecommerce, airline tickets, money transfer and banking services will reach $48 billion by 2023.​Emerging Technology and Increased ConnectivityAs businesses continue to disrupt traditional industries with emerging technologies, there is immense opportunity to create value but equally a greater need for security. Although IoT offers endless possibilities – from smart homes to entire smart cities, data sharing and connectivity between devices leave businesses significantly more vulnerable to a breach.The sheer amount of data being collected, not to mention how and where it is collected, processed and stored, makes it extremely difficult to safeguard. When a breach occurs in one data point, the entire ecosystem is at risk of being compromised. In the absence of official IoT guidance, technology partners are left to develop their own cyber risk policies as data governance is not evolving at the same pace.​Data Protection LegislationJust over half of all countries globally have some form of privacy and data legislation in place, and nearly one in three companies fall under the EU GDPR jurisdiction. GDPR applies to any organisation processing data of EU citizens, requiring the secure storing and processing of all sensitive data using appropriate operational and technical measures. It holds businesses accountable for managing security risk, reporting incidents and minimizing the impact when they do occur.Data protection should be the concern of more than just the IT department, and organisations should demonstrate shared accountability across key business functions. In its latest annual Cyber Security Breaches Survey the Government Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) reported that cyber security is a high priority for 78% of businesses, up from 74% last year.Among the organisations that identified breaches or attacks (32%), the most common were due to phishing emails, impersonation and viruses or other malware. 30% of businesses made changes to cyber security in regard to policy, training, system configurations and contingency plans because of GDPR, but there’s still a long way to go.​If you're looking for a new job in data, analysis, marketing, tech or digital, head over to our jobs page for our featured jobs or to submit your CV!

Cloud
evolution of cloud computing

At a time when Digital Transformation is on everyone’s lips and the sheer volume of tech coverage around some of the usual suspects such as AI, VR and Big Data is huge – Cloud Transformation is still current and one of the most prioritised initiatives for both big and not so big businesses across EMEA going into H2.It is no longer a question of whether or not companies will undergo a cloud transformation – but what services should be shifted into the Cloud exactly, how quickly can this happen, how much will it cost or indeed save the business and what are the priorities; from either a bottom up or a top down strategic approach. Cloud computing has an ability to kick-start other activities, for both external customers and internally as an organisation.​Short History of Cloud ComputingCloud Computing has been around for years and started back in the 60’s when an intergalactic computer network was first conceptualised by JCR Licklider. Since then, Cloud Computing has evolved somewhat. By the late 90’s, Web 2.0 came around, thanks largely to the availability of much improved bandwidths for the masses.SFDC arrived in 1999, leading the charge of delivering enterprise applications through a relatively basic website, laying the foundations for other software houses to begin delivering applications over the internet too. Google and others began offering browser-based enterprise applications including Google Apps (G Suite) as Web 2.0 really took off and another SaaS milestone passed. Microsoft contended with Office 365. Oracle, SAP and Microsoft encouraged their customers to upgrade to new cloud-based products over the next few years with great success. Monthly subscription services also appealed to IT buyers to avoid the CapEx peeks associated with hardware and software upgrades.Amazon Web Services (AWS) emerged in 2002, before launching Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in 2006. Today, they dominate the global IaaS market and according to Gartner in 2017, many enterprises now spend more than $5m of their IT budgets on Amazon’s cloud services a year.The next decade of Cloud Computing will be just as eventful. Security in the Cloud is perhaps now seen as a strength rather than a perceived weakness early on. Over the course of the past decade, cloud computing has evolved from being something service providers told companies they should be adopting to becoming the technological lifeblood that runs through most modern enterprises.​Legacy providers vs. cloud native suppliersLegacy software providers, such as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, have all made a concerted effort over the past decade to encourage users of their on-premise software offerings to upgrade to their cloud equivalents that they usually subscribe to on a pay-as-you-go basis. This, in turn, has seen IT departments gradually shift away from treating their software and hardware purchases as “big bang” capital expenditures that happen once every so often (or as the upgrade cycle dictates).As enterprises have become increasingly accustomed to the pay-as-you-go cloud billing model, treating IT purchases as more of a day-to-day expense has become the norm, and – where SaaS is concerned – there is still a lot of room for market growth. Particularly, there are still plenty of enterprises yet to join the cloud software bandwagon, points out John Dinsdale, chief analyst at IT market watcher Synergy Research Group.“Traditional enterprise software vendors like Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and IBM still have a huge base of on-premise software customers and they are all now pushing to aggressively convert those customers to a SaaS-based consumption model,” he says.“At the same time, born-in-the-cloud software vendors like Workday, Zendesk and ServiceNow continue to light a fire under the market and help to propel enterprise spending on SaaS.”​IaaS and the public cloudAnother important milestone in the development of the cloud market as we know it today was the emergence of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2002. The company provided a suite of cloud-based infrastructure services including storage, computation and even human intelligence through the Amazon Mechanical Turk.Then, in 2006, Amazon launched its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) as a commercial web service that allows small companies and individuals to rent computers on which to run their own computer applications. Today, the firm is the undisputed leader of the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market, the company continues to add thousands of new services and features to its cloud services portfolio each year, and is a bone fide multibillion dollar enterprise.According to figures published by IT analyst house Gartner in 2017, many enterprises now spend more than $5m of their IT budgets on Amazon’s cloud services a year. “With an accelerating pace of innovation on top of an already rich portfolio of services, and an expanding impact across a range of IT markets, [AWS] is the provider most commonly chosen for strategic adoption,” stated Gartner in its 2017 IaaS Magic Quadrant report, which ranks the runners and riders of the cloud infrastructure sector. While not the ideal for every need, it has become the ‘safe choice’ in this market, appealing to customers that desire the broadest range of capabilities and long-term market leadership.”​Cloud service providers: The runners and ridersAmazon, in particular, initially started out pitching its wares to startups, hailing the public cloud as way to get their businesses up and running without having to shell out tens of thousands of pounds to acquire on-premise servers, storage and networking equipment.Unburdened by the capacity, cost and maintenance constraints that come from having to rely on traditional, legacy, on-premise hardware, this eased the path from startup to scale up for many of these early cloud-adopting companies. So much so, “cloud-native” organisations (as they came to be known) started to emerge that were able to out-innovate their longer-established (and oftentimes better-funded) peers because the business agility cloud afforded them.The Google Cloud Platform, which is the coverall term used for its IaaS offerings, has also followed a similar path, by starting out focusing on winning over startups, before ramping up the enterprise-readiness of its services to boost their appeal to a wider range of users. Keen to prevent their hold on whatever market they’re operating in from weakening, enterprises soon followed the lead of their nimbler, cloud-native contemporaries and began looking for ways to reduce their reliance on on-premise technologies too. And it is here that Microsoft, with its Azure public cloud proposition and its sizeable enterprise install base, has found itself with something of an advantage over its startup-focused competitors.While Amazon and Google have both sought to increase the enterprise-readiness of their offerings, as they have set their sights on conquering the world of corporate IT, Microsoft has years of experience in knowing what CIOs look for in a prospective IT provider. Originally pitched as Microsoft’s take on platform as a service (PaaS) at launch in 2012, the remit of Azure was extended to include IaaS in spring 2013 with the general release of Azure Virtual Machines around that time.On the back of long-term users of the Redmond giant’s on-premise technologies upgrading and migrating workloads to Azure, Microsoft is now regularly cited by the analyst community as being the second biggest IaaS provider (after AWS) in the world.“Microsoft is frequently chosen as a strategic cloud provider by customers that are committed to Microsoft technologies or that like Microsoft’s overall cloud strategy, which spans IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and on-premises solutions,” said Gartner, in its 2017 IaaS Magic Quadrant report. Microsoft is leveraging its tremendous sales reach and ability to bundle Azure with other Microsoft products and services to drive adoption. It is steadily growing the size of Azure customers; many are beginning to spend more than $500,000 a year, and a few exceed $5m in annual spending.​The evolution of cloudCloud has also prompted a number of other service providers to tweak their product offerings and wider business strategies to account for the change in enterprise IT buying behaviour this industry mega-trend has brought about. HPE, Dell and VMware, for example, initially set out to go head-to-head with Amazon, Google and Microsoft before calling time on their public cloud initiatives at various points over the past five or so years, citing competitive pressures.While some have opted out of the game altogether, VMware and Rackspace have taken a slightly different route, with both positioning themselves as organisations that can help enterprises manage the applications and workloads running in their competitors’ public clouds.In the case of Rackspace, it ended up ceding its initial early lead in the IaaS market to AWS, and since 2015 (or thereabouts) has moved to help enterprises manage their Amazon, Microsoft and Google cloud deployments. This pivot has paid off for the firm, with its AWS managed service offering regularly flagged by the firm as being one of the fastest-growing parts of its overall business.VMware, meanwhile, sold off its public cloud business to French IaaS challenger, OVH, in April 2017, having spent a couple of years before that repositioning itself as a hybrid cloud provider that can help enterprises manage and applications in the AWS and Microsoft clouds.​Where next for Cloud Computing?In light of all this, it is fair to say the next 10 years of cloud are likely to be just as eventful, as enterprise appetites for the technology (and their expectations about how it will benefit their organisations) continues to grow, adds Synergy Research’s Dinsdale.“Major barriers to cloud adoption are now almost a thing of the past, with previously perceived weaknesses such as security now often seen as strengths,” he says. “Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues for cloud service providers and technology vendors and we forecast that current market growth rates will decline only slowly over the next five years.”​If you're looking for a new job, check out our featured jobs and send us your CV here!Hiring for your team? 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