British Council

Principal Designer

Accenture Song

My role involved leading the Strategic Design practice at Accenture Song Poland, serving clients across Europe and the Middle East; facilitating multinational leadership and client sessions; providing international communications coaching to the local team and leadership.

Senior Manager | Design Lead | Communications Coach

Datacom

My role involved leading the Design & Experience team at Datacom, the largest creative and technology services company in Australasia. I was also responsible for designing and leading coaching and collaboration sessions for senior Government and corporate stakeholders and executives.

Built and scaled the team as a new, multi-disciplinary group of designers, researchers, and artists, working for large Government and private sector clients.

General Manager | Leadership Coach | Creative Facilitator

Solnet (now part of Accenture)

My role was responsible for Solnet's national creative practice. I was also responsible for providing strategic advice and coaching to the leaders and teams of large New Zealand organisations, helping them understand digital transformation and deliver impactful digital products and services. 

Delivered experience and service design work for organisations including MSD, MoH, NZDF, Transpower, Farmers Retail Group, ACC, and Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori.

Digital Practice Lead | Facilitator | Leadership Coach

Element Digital Consulting

Founder of a strategic advisory and coaching service for digital transformation and communication. Created and led numerous leadership coaching sessions for public and private sector. Advised Government ministries and corporate clients on communication and digital strategy. Mentor to the Victoria University Graduate programme.

Director | Leadership & Communications Coach | Mentor

ClemengerBBDO / Touchcast

Experience and customer innovation coach and strategist for New Zealand's leading brand & digital experience agency Clients included Education NZ, Toyota, New Zealand Post, Spark and many more.

Director of Digital Innovation (contract)

SSL Consulting

Advisor and coach for multinational companies (Microsoft, Sony, 3 Mobile) and executives on digital transformation, digital communication, and creativity.

Lead Advisor | Leadership & Digital Communications Coach

Musician

Musician and session vocalist. Signed to AR Vocal Management. Wrote, recorded and demo-ed for the likes of Guy Massey (Paul McCartney, Ed Sheeran), Paul Steel (Empire of the Sun), Groove Armada, Ben Carrigan (The Thrills), Dan Spartacus and many more.

Session vocalist

Ogilvy Public Relations

Head of the UK office and European hub of Ogilvy’s global Digital Influence network; as the strategic lead, I oversaw  delivery of digital experience strategy and design at a pan-European and global level for blue-chip clients  including Volvo, IBM, Grohe, Motorola, Cisco, UPS and Ralph Lauren.

Notable achievements:
- leading the global digital strategy for Volvo's flagship e-car program
- increasing positive engagement across key digital channels for Motorola by 800%
- groundbreaking interactive live video event via Facebook featuring Boris Becker, for Ralph Lauren as part of its Wimbledon sponsorship
- digital planning for Nestle, UPS, IBM and more
- new business wins from Grohe, Cisco & IBM

Head of Digital Influence

One of two people responsible for the digital strategy and experience practice at DigitasLBi. Managed UK & pan-European engagements for blue-chip clients including Lloyds Bank, Sony, Volkswagen, M&S, Starwood Hotels, Orange, Oxfam & British Red Cross

Notable highlights:

- Pioneering converged media campaign for Starwood Hotels across paid, owned & earned media
- Managing digital for the British Red Cross' annual Refugee Week appeal
- Interactive European campaign via bespoke microsite & Facebook apps for Sony Playstation
- New business wins - Orange, Sony, M&S and Lloyds TSB 
- Representative on the first IAB Social Media Council

Digital Lead

Curious about how you can gain greater influence as a Polish executive working with international teams? 
Do you want to unlock the secrets of better collaboration and business communication in English?

I help Polish executives master the skills essential for success in international business. 

My approach is to work 1:1 or with small senior teams. Contact me today via LinkedIn DM or book an intro meeting by clicking ‘Umów Spotkanie’ / ‘Book An Appointment.’

---

Originally from New Zealand, now based in Warsaw, I have lived in five countries and worked in 10, leading senior teams for companies and clients such as Ogilvy, Accenture, and Microsoft. 

This experience has given me a unique understanding of both the Polish and the Anglo-American perspective, and the challenges of working across cultures. 

Polish and Anglo-American styles of business are quite different. Problem-solving, collaboration, and business communication are just some of the areas where cultural contrasts cause issues. 

Many Polish executives have told me they are frustrated at not getting the results they want when working with international clients or colleagues.

The good news is that we can fix this.

I will support you in learning: 
- creative leadership techniques for better business problem-solving 
- skills to communicate persuasively in English
- cultural awareness to easily navigate differences and manage multi-national teams

Coaching will benefit any Polish business leader or executive team working with Anglo-American clients or colleagues, particularly those where English is the daily language of business.

My approach is to work 1:1 or with small senior teams. Contact me today via LinkedIn DM or book an intro meeting by clicking ‘Umów Spotkanie’ / ‘Book An Appointment.’

Specialties: Creativity, Team Leadership, Business Communication, Innovation and Problem-Solving, Strategic Planning, Behavioural Design, Coaching and Facilitation

Kev F.

Accenture New Zealand

Senior Software Engineer

nib Group

Design, build and configure applications to meet business process and application requirements on Nib's strategic programmes in the areas of insurance claims, assessments and entitlements

Tech stack:
- .NET (EF)
- AWS (serverless: lambda, api gateway, event bridge, SAM, ECS)
- Postgres
- Graphql
- Sumologic

Highlights:
- Resolved critical database connection issues accross dozens of step functions and lambdas
- Resolved integrations issues with a legacy claims system
- Remediated impacted production data as result of incidents
- Notable reduction in the number of production issues and alerting
- Bolster the testing coverage and quality of tests in areas prone to errors
- Delivered a complex recalculation process around insurance claim excess amounts

Software Engineer (vendor)

Heartland Bank LTD

Revamping their customer banking documents system by integrating with major collection of web services.

Highlights:
- Delivered a major collection of well-tested web services for the purpose reliably serving customer data out of a core banking platform
- Integrated document platform and its documents with those new web services
- Upgraded and modernised legacy applications

Senior Software Engineer (vendor)

Solnet Solutions

I was focussed on implementing complex integration challenges and modernising existing applications and delivery practices.

In this role I worked on digital products for high profile clients mainly in the finance & health insurance industry.

Responsibilities:
- Demonstrating and teaching best practices of frameworks, tools and full stack software development processes
- Scoping and estimating work with a team
- Guided non-Javascript developers to build a modern UI and APIs
- Proposing potential solutions to the Solution Architects, Product Owners and other stakeholders
- Defining and document APIs by Swagger and Open API spec
- Developing and Angular and React apps
- Developing REST-APIs using Node.js (Typescript) and Spring Boot (Java)

Highlights:
- Delivered mediation and identity APIs, including OAuth 2, to secure sensitive third-party data sources effectively
- Delivered automation e2e testing tools in Node.js for API regression testing purposes
- Containerised and optimised all the different artifacts in a solution e.g. front-end applications and APIs for CI/CD purposes

Senior JavaScript Developer

Latitude Financial Services

I joined engineering teams to improve and implement new features of Latitude's buy-now-pay-later platform.

Highlights:
- Delivered a real time event driven integration with an enterprise collections capability
- Delivered parts of a major multi-product feature to enable big amount purchases
- Delivered payment arrangement features to help customers in financial hardship
- Migrated reporting capability to a new scalable solution
- Addressed underlying challenges and to keep the platform fit for purpose

ACC New Zealand

I was part of Agile product team of ACC's business customer facing applications. The product contained multiple front-end applications and REST APIs which were integrated with enterprise-wide systems -supported by DevOps to enable continuous delivery. My role was to plan, develop and deliver new features as well as continuous improvement of the product. . I worked in close collaboration with other developers, testers, BAs, scrum master and product owner.

Responsibilities
- Working effectively in an Agile product team
- Planning and estimating work
- Delivering tested features APIs in Java (Spring Boot)
- Developing UI applications in Typescript React / Redux
- Testing using Cypress, JUnit and Mockito
- Preparing releases using Jenkins and Openshift
- Promoting best practices and patterns
- Consolidating technical debt

Highlights
- Successfully refactored old Angular.js applications to React over time
- Improved the unit testing coverage
- Promoted the importance of thorough testing practices that resemble the way the application is used
- Delivered a brand-new app for ACC staff for business customers
- Delivered a major feature around employer claims
- Delivered a major feature subsidy offers and compensations for businesses
- Delivered features and enhancements with regards to bank accounts, payments schedules and invoicing

Software Developer (vendor)

Bank of New Zealand

I joined a team at BNZ to help in transforming their Onboarding and Lending procedures by brand new applications. Aiming to improve the experience for bank staff. This transformation was supported by a new way of delivery, promoting more modular systems design and implementation with supporting Platforms and DevOps processes. I shared the lead for the Front-end implementation of two major applications and a component library.

Highlights
- Pioneered application development seeing Angular 2 through its beta releases.
- Promoted and adapted a UI component library for multiple applications.
- Guided Front-end developers through best practices, process and tooling.
- Guided automation testers through best practices, process and tooling.
- Collaboration with key team members to ensure UX best practices and UI API integration
- Involved in the preparation for its first production release.

Senior Fullstack Developer (vendor)

wearereasonablepeople

WeAreReasonablePeople (WARP) is a digital agency specialised in prototyping data driven applications. A team of 15 developers and designers design and develop software. Javascript was the core language for developing algorithms, APIs on the back-end as well as creating human centered user interfaces.

Responsibilities:
- Developing backend modules and algorithms in Node.js
- Developing and refactoring UI-components with Angular.js
- Designing and maintaining MySQL and MongoDB-databases
- Defining application features and high level architecture
- Delivering software implementations as defined and agreed on in every Scrum sprint
- Communication between product owners and the team regarding the process

Fullstack Developer

Urban City Guide

Urban City Guide is a creative company focussed on creating video content about point of interests and events in Rotterdam. My role was to advise, develop, maintain and manage Urban City Guide's online concepts. The web platform was built for publishing content, created by a team of content providers.

Web Developer

David van de Vondervoort

I worked as a freelance developer for small and medium-sized enterprises. I worked for companies who I knew through my network. Apart from running my own business it was a great way to explore new technologies and trends, including:
- D3.js and data visualisations
- Realtime web apps using web sockets
- Prototyping realtime applications with Meteor
- Arduino

Owner

I'm skilled at implementing complex integration challenges, modernising existing applications and delivery practices, in a on-prem, hybrid cloud or cloud context. Focused on API design, system integration, security, architecture, database design and testing.

My current focus is on architecting and leveraging AWS services, serverless and Spring/.NET Core (micro)services, and modernising applications and architectures.

I'm a senior software engineer designing and building well-tested end-to-end solutions. I have industry sector experience in the fields of finance, healthcare, performance & management, security, consulting, education and non-profits.

taplio

The Battle

Kev F.

David van de Vondervoort

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