Samer Ayyat

Result driven and versatile strategist, recognized by industry leaders as a pioneer in the fields of technology, innovation, digital transformation, software security, banking and payments integrations, customer success and project/programme management. Commended for formulating innovative products, optimum operational solutions, world class service delivery and achieving consistent year-over-year growth. Some of these achievements were recognised and show cased in the United Kingdom Parliamentary Review (Westminster Publications) in 2015 and in the 2019 Prolific North Technical Awards.
Has more than 18 years of experience in technological innovation, project and programme management. Achieving and establishing a strategic direction for the company, developing and implementing smart technological solutions, project delivery optimisation and enhancing organisational processes. Always looking to identify areas of improvement by using best practices and drawing from my experience in the roles held, to innovate, increase efficiency, productivity, customer satisfaction and reduce running costs.

ICT and PMO Senior Consultant – Digital Transformation Jan 2020 - Present
Gulf Consultations and Services Company Main functions of the role:
• Provide innovative and effective solutions to all clients (global and local clients in Oman).
• Lead and manage small to large scale projects and programmes.
• Business Process Mapping; to improve working processes and support product implementation.
• Consult with clients to provide a vision for the overall solution, advising on best use of product, how to achieve
maximum value.
• Support Solution Design by conducting requirements gathering and other sessions, documenting
requirements, storyboarding.
• Lead in structuring programmes of work; developing roadmaps and creating sustainable delivery models.
• Support closely the technical delivery teams in design and build of solutions.
• Data mapping requirements for data loads, migration and integrations.
• Support pre-sales activities; proposals, SOW's, Service Agreements.
• Client partnering, full end-to-end project involvement and management.
 Technology Strategy Senior Consultant – Digital Transformation
World Bank / Ministry of Digital Economy and Entrepreneurship
Main functions of the role:
Nov 2020 – Nov 2021
• Lead and manage a $200 Million Dollar Digital Transformation Governmental Programme.
• Worked with the United Kingdom Digital Services Cabinet and setup a 5-year roadmap,
Governmental Strategic Direction, Programme Implementation Plan and a Digital Transformation
Strategy for the Jordanian Government, Central Bank and Telecommunication Sector.
• Lead, presented and approved the digital transformation solutions with the Jordanian government,
crown prince office and the UK cabinet office.
• Researched and guided the implementation of the Digital Transformation Governance, Services, and
strategy enablers such as Digital Transformation Technologies, Cloud services, E-Payments, Jordan as a Platform (JAAP), Digital Identity, National Information Systems, government Data Classification, Personal Data, National Broadband, Digital Technologies, and Secured Government Networks.
Chief Technology Officer and PMO Director April 2020 – Dec 2020
City Fleet Networks / ComfortDelgro, London, United Kingdom
ComfortDelGro is one of the largest land transport companies in the world with a global workforce, a global shareholder base and a global outlook. ComfortDelGro’s businesses include bus, taxi, rail, car rental and leasing, automotive engineering services, inspection and testing services, driving centres, non-emergency patient transport services, insurance broking services and outdoor advertising.
Main functions of the role:
• Responsible for all Information Technology (IT), Project Management Office (PMO) operational and developmental aspects and business transformation of the company.
• Direct and oversee the PMO, Infrastructure team, IT support team and Software Delivery Team.
• Direct projects with support from the PMO. Manage complex technical projects and monitor its
successful implementation. Some of these projects include large integrations with HSBC and Lloyds
Banks.
• Resolve all design conflicts and inform all business process owners of all impending risk implications
and develop efficient integrated workflow in coordination with project team.
• Ensure compliance to all project schedule and supervise all activities of local system team.
• Evaluate all project plan status to identify and resolve all issues and manage all integrated
applications for organization.
• Prepare designs, validate sessions and maintain appropriate deliverables of all projects as per
requirement.
• Coordinate with Project Manager to monitor all technical activities. Administer efficient working of
project lifecycle within required management services.

  Global Head of Professional Services (IT, PMO and Service Delivery) Jan 2017 – March 2020
Autocab Group / Uber, Cheadle, Manchester, United Kingdom
Autocab international is the world leading software supplier for the transport industry (Owned by Uber). Autocab currently has approximately 60% market share in the United Kingdom market and operates in 34 different countries, 350 different cities and more than 1.5 million journeys are booked through the Autocab system every day.
Key Achievements:
• Successfully implemented, coordinated, directed and overseen the optimisation of a global IT, Service Delivery and PMO functions delivering over £100M of projects/programmes portfolios which increased resource throughput by more than 40% and reduced running costs by 25%. Few examples of these projects and programmes include: providing professional services and bespoke complex solutions to the 2019 ICC World Cup, MGM Group (Hotels and Casinos), Co-operative Group, Brunel Total Ground Transportation and Various European & International Transport Authority Regulators.
• Improved the quality output of projects, programmes and professional services delivery by implementing and tailoring Scrum, ITIL and Project Management Institute (PMI) best practices methodologies such as Prince2, Project Risk Management and Managing Success Programmes (MSP) which improved cash flow and reduced the aged debtors by 96% (from £2.5M to just over £100K).
• Refined customer touch points and service delivery processes which significantly improved customer satisfaction from 47% to over 78% and an increased Net Promoter Scores from 14% to 49%.
• Evaluated and improved employee engagement; aligned staff to their skill sets and ensured that were working in an environment in which they were setup to succeed. This increased employee satisfaction from 32% to 80% and improved staff retention from 61 % to 97%.
• Captured lessons learned, created actionable and analytical reporting that spotted anomalies and drove key informative decisions by the board of directors as part of the continual improvement plan.
Head of IT and Product Management Nov 2013 – Jan 2017
AutocabGroup /Uber,Cheadle,Manchester,UnitedKingdom
Promoted to direct, innovate, coordinate and oversee a multi-million-pound products transition programme from legacy client foot print applications/hardware to online SaaS applications.
Some of the achievements and products were recognised and show cased in the United Kingdom Parliamentary Review (Westminster Publications) in 2015. The range of products included company branded mobile applications, business analytics, bespoke phone systems, web and marketing tools, accounts package and major integrations with other technologies and payment providers.
Key Achievements:
• Designed, built and implemented enterprise-class security systems for a production environment.
• Identified and communicated current and emerging security threats.
• Defined the overarching product strategy, roadmaps, programmes and operational plans that
successfully achieved all business outcomes against fiscal targets and operational objectives.
• Proved a significant market need and acceptance for the SaaS based products. This drove efficiencies across the business, significantly improved client offerings with substantial profitable growth and
scalability worldwide achieving 20% year-over-year growth.
• Delivered a range of new “verticals” such as a corporate accounts portal, driver applications, passenger
applications, bespoke phone system, business analytics and payment gateway integrations. This
increased year-on-year revenue by > £4M and raised customer retention rates from 78% to 92%.
• Developed and refined software development life cycle processes, including introducing system tools such as JIRA, Confluence, metrics tracking and analysis which enhanced quality, improved client
satisfaction, and reduced service response times.
• Turned around inefficiencies and aligned projects with corporate objectives such as profitability,
margins, market share and operational SLAs.
• Proactively engaged senior leadership in tactical planning and decision-making, optimising allocation
of resources in support of corporate goals.
• Aligned standards, frameworks and security with overall business and technology strategy.
• Designed security architecture elements to mitigate threats as they emerge.
• Created solutions that balance business requirements with information and cyber security
requirements.

  • Identified security design gaps in existing and proposed architectures and recommend changes or enhancements.
• Used various programming languages and technologies to writes code, complete programming and performs testing and debugging of applications.
• Trained users in implementation or conversion of systems.
Senior Software Solutions Architect Jan 2011 – Nov 2013
Autocab Group / Uber, Cheadle, Manchester, United Kingdom
Key Achievements:
• Successfully planned, managed, controlled and delivered assigned projects within time and budget whilst ensuring highest customer satisfaction.
• Created, maintained, enhanced procedures, processes and software / security network designs.
• Ensured that the application architecture team can deliver system solutions for required system
architecture.
• Enhanced and improved the implementation process, created best practices guidelines and
documentation such as statement of works for new project deliverables including infrastructure and
software deployments and major work packages.
• Created work packages for infrastructure, software, equipment upgrades, software version migrations,
proposals and business cases for internal approval as and when required.
• Conducted an evaluated the solutions system architecture with an emphasis on the design and
security.
Lecturer in Computer Networks and Telecommunications Sep 2008 – Jan 2011
The University of Salford, Manchester, UK.
The university of Salford is one of the UK’s leading universities with approximately 21,000 students and 2700 staff members.
Key Achievements:
• Designed and implemented, as part of the Ministry of Defence advanced research programme on Wireless Sensor Networks, a new Quality of Service (QoS) architecture called DiffSense to enhance the reliability and deliverability of the Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks. The DiffSense architecture has been successfully deployed to differentiate between the various types of traffic such as critical data (Vital Health Signs), real time data (Voice, Video, Tracking, etc.) and non real time data (best effort traffic).
• Designed analytical tools for data traffic profiling, statistical analysis, reporting and packet monitoring.
• Designed and implemented various extension networking modules with a multi user interface (to aid researchers/students to test and simulate their projects) for simulating and testing Local Area Networks (LANs), Wide Area Networks (WANs), Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), Geographic Information Systems (GIS) through open-source suites such as Network Simulator 2 (NS-2), Open Data Kit (ODK)
and Open Street Data Map.
• Delivered three publications in the areas of Telecommunications and Computer Networks and
presented 2 of the publications at the BBC scientific review.
• Setup a knowledge transfer programme between Salford University and Autocab.
Project Manager - Quay Contact, UK Dec 2004 – Jun 2006 Managing the delivery of projects across the UK, responsible for the ongoing provision, installation and maintenance of communications services and infrastructures to various companies.
Systems Surveying Engineer - Quay Contact, UK Sep 2004 – Dec 2004 Responsible for the surveying and capturing of data equipment, LAN’s, WAN’s, Telecommunications Systems and Cabling Infrastructures throughout the UK. Also responsible for producing reports on the existing Communications Services and submitting recommendations on how to up-grade the existing systems and infrastructures on to the latest technologies.
Telecommunications Engineer - Royal Jordanian Armed Forces Sep 1998 – Jun 2002
Joined the Royal Jordanian Armed Forces on a four-year Programme as Telecommunications Engineering Cadet to deploy, maintain, repair and service a wide variety of networks. This included Wide Area Networks (WANs), Local Area Networks (LANs) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs).
  

PhD) Doctorate in Data Telecommunications and Computer Networks
The University of Salford, Manchester, United Kingdom
Master’s Degree in Telecommunications and Computer Networks
The University of Salford, Manchester, United Kingdom
(BEng & Hons) Bachelor of Engineering with Honours in Electronics and Communication Engineering
The University of Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom
High School Diploma with Honours
Annandale High School, Virginia, USA
Project Risk Management
2008 – 2012 2007 – 2008
2002 - 2006
1995 – 1998
The University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom 2018
Other Professional Qualifications:
PMP, Agile Project Management, Prince 2 Practitioner, Managing Successful Programmes Practitioner, ITIL Service Delivery Foundation, Tarigo, Waterfall Principles, Scrum Principles and Agile Principles.