Graham Harris's Email

I am a trained, experienced and energetic leader, manager, and company director now working in a large business finance and governance role. This builds on previous technical and management roles and my mature Masters degree. I have used my IT and project management experience and qualifications mostly in the UK and New Zealand and in the USA, Europe and Australia. I commit time every month to professional development and looking at related fields outside my current experience. Specialties: Leading teams and managing both projects and business as usual activities. Managing development and risk- including high risk start-ups Intellectual Property (freedom to operate, patent, copyright, software, trade secrets)

Director @ Killigray is developing a 23 ha block of pasture and bush, with all-year flowing water, as a tree farm and orchard. We focus on trees that are uncommon in New Zealand (to avoid fluctuations in the markets for our most commoditised tree crops) yet grow exceptionally well in our subtropical environment and have thus quite short cycles to first harvest. We hope our early success will allow us to expand the operation to much larger areas with similar conditions. From 2009 to Present (6 years) Northland, New ZealandInvestment Manager @ Over 4 years I have progressively widened responsibility for long range planning (out to 3 years horizon) and managing the capex spend on our infrastructure to include: BSS Business Support Systems, OSS Operational Support Systems, Fulfil, Assure and Bill, desktop, databases, server and desktop virtualisation, internal voice and data networks, enterprise integration, security, Lawful intercept, Identity and Access management including SSO Single Sign On, data management and BI Businesss Intelligence. My major motivator is to reduce our cost to serve through simplifying our technology. By using academic research to demonstrate the benefits from simplification, I successfully championed business cases to spend capex to simplify, where previous attempts have stalled on lack of precisely identified payback. This has now become a cultural norm. I help negotiate our major software license, support and maintenance committments with vendors like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Citrix, Novell/Attachmate and others. I have achieved several multi-million dollar savings, by resolving ambiguity in the licence and actual usage and by getting vendors to go beyond their published licensing and support policies. For example, vendors have claimed that we were breaching their software licences, and sought many millions of dollars in immediate capex and in ongoing annual maintenance fees, often back-dated. Such claims have come with with extreme pressure to settle by a deadline 'for a reasonable fee before the dispute goes to litigation'​ and 'before directors become personally liable'​. This tactic casts the customer as having 'stolen'​ the vendor's intellectual property, and puts the onus on the customer to demonstrate that they have not broken the licence contract. I have generally been able to reduce costs dramatically, exclude claims of wilful infringement and sometimes have claims formally retracted by demonstrating that vendors were misinterpreting their own licences. From February 2011 to Present (4 years 11 months) New ZealandStarter-Upper @ Startup Weekend compresses much of the stress of an early startup into 48 hours. It's an immense learning experience. Kudos to the organisors and mentors. Both times I have participated, I pitched an electronic hardware concept. Hardware is a harder sell to Startup Weekenders because few have any experience of it, but hardware based startups achieve higher valuations in recognition that they have overcome a barrier to entry. I prepare myself for a hardware startup by building electronics, including a range of Internet of Things devices; low power (solar powered) sensors, sleep modes, m2m and satellite transmitters, distributed processing such as hardware Fourier transforms and statistical techniques to recognise unusual patterns or activity. These techniques have applications in healthcare, factory automation, security, environmental monitoring and my favourite, offshore marine applications. From June 2015 to June 2015 (1 month) Auckland, New ZealandInvestment Manager @ Resolving the tension between the need to renew and extend infrastructure; and the funds available to renew them. I work on medium-term planning for much of the technology that keeps New Zealanders connected to the phone, mobile phone network and internet. I weigh options against one another, trying to satisfy customers and shareholders. I work with suppliers of intellectual property and related services to get the best outcomes for us, while making it attractive for our suppliers to continue doing business with us. It can be hard to make the case to simplify. Simplifying the complex systems needed to deliver what customers want reduces the cost to serve, but does not usually increase sales, which is often seen as the goal. I have succeeded in making the case for radical simplification, based on estimating the cost of complexity, and been funded for this despite competing demands justified as increasing sales. From February 2011 to August 2014 (3 years 7 months) Masters Candidate @ I worked under Dr Mike Packer on commercial applications of algae cultivation. This work resulted in advice to several Cawthron clients, input into my thesis on Freedom to Operate and a good relationship with Mike which resulted in joint authorship of a science book chapter in 2014/2015. From 2010 to 2010 (less than a year) Nelson, Marlborough & Tasman, New ZealandProject Managers Team Leader @ One of Australasia's largest companies, CHH manufactures and sells a wide range of wood and paper/packaging products. I led the team of up to 12 Project Managers who managed all IT projects in the organisation. I recruited and led a mixture of permanent and contract Project Managers, and mentored people working towards project management roles. CHH's owner Rank Group made me personally responsible for many international and Group-level projects, such as replacing phone systems and virtualising their corporate IT infrastructures across Australia and New Zealand. I see two project manager types. Some can start projects from a clean sheet, inspiring people to get around an idea. Far more can take someone else's plan and finish it. It's rare to find someone who is a star at both ends of the project. Sometimes someone very talented at one end is a flop at the other. I love, and am good at, fleshing out new things. I have to work at tying up all the loose ends. Rank Group bought CHH and gave us 3 months to split it into two separate divisions, anticipating a trade sale. I ran the project to reverse the many years of determined integration of IT infrastructures and systems across the group. The innovative technical approach was developed by Krassi Modkov. Our team achieved the split on time without significant business disruption, and we earned substantial bonuses. I managed the programme of SAP projects we outsourced to Oxygen as well as running a mixture of software development and infrastructure projects myself. I led projects on most core infrastructure, plus time-clocks, payroll, manufacturing and accounting systems including two changes of Fiscal year across several companies. I led several very sensitive acquisitions, divestments and I 'divested' CHH of customers CHH could no longer afford to service. CHH considered me a safe pair of hands. From January 2006 to August 2009 (3 years 8 months) Project Manager @ I was recruited from UK into Oxygen to support their thrust to win large infrastructure outsourcing work. Oxygen was then a division of Carter Holt Harvey, one of Australasia's largest enterprises. Within a few days of migrating to New Zealand, I was representing Oxygen in corporate clients. CHH sold Oxygen but retained me to lead their Project Management team. From May 2004 to December 2005 (1 year 8 months) Senior Consultant @ NCC (previously part of the National Computing Centre) is an independent provider of Escrow Solutions, Testing Solutions and Consultancy Services. I delivered IT Strategy assignments (long and short) for a wide range of customers, both Public and Private sector. I specialised in Telephony, IT infrastructure and Networks, and managed projects to procure strategic applications and large scale implementions. From 2001 to 2004 (3 years) Partner @ Equinus is an IT consultancy servicing the Travel, Transport & Leisure business. I provided consultancy particularly around Internet and Call Centres. In one engagement, I used technology to enable a client to double turnover from their existing marketing spend. A year later, they asked me back to manage telephony aspects of their move into larger premises to to capitalise on that new business. From 1998 to 2001 (3 years) Director @ SoftKlone UK was a software development and marketing company, developing and selling a range of applications- principally communications and hypertext software and client/server reporting. SoftKlone Development (US) was sued in the first case on software copyright on look and feel to make it to court. The judgement we achieved there set the scene for many developments since. From 1987 to 1998 (11 years) Seaman Officer @ I was an Executive officer in the Royal Navy, leaving as a full Lieutenant (equivalent to Captain in the Army). I was a Bridge Watchkeeping Officer and Divisional Officer (man manager) for the Strategic Communications branch, with responsibility for long-range (HF and satellite) radio communications, cryptography and intelligence gathering. I led the Ship's Diving team, responsible for operational diving capability for underwater maintenance and defence against underwater attack. After the Falklands war I had postings in Stanley, Falkland Islands as officer in charge of the (Mine) Clearance Diving Team and Assistant Queens Harbourmaster. From January 1978 to September 1984 (6 years 9 months)

Research Masters, BioScience Enterprise, First Class Honours @ University of Auckland From 2009 to 2010 BSc Honours, Microbiology with Physiology & Biochemistry, Second Class @ University of Reading From 1979 to 1982 Graham Harris is skilled in: Start-ups, Project Management, Strategy, Leadership, Business Strategy, Outsourcing, Intellectual Property, Business Analysis, Management, Consulting, Business Planning, Program Management, Analysis, New Business Development, Project Delivery