Daniel Worrall
Global Service Desk Manager

I lead technical operations at The Orchard, supporting our 1,200+ global users + multiple offices of varying sizes. My time at The Orchard involved restructuring the IT team, adjusting and implementing new policies to streamline services and improve the efficiency of our support team and improve customer service/experience. I was responsible for managing daily operations of the service desk, supervising our networks, servers and infrastructure. I managed vendor relationships to ensure we attained the best value for money and performance. I was responsible for my department's budgeting reviewing Capex/Opex costs.

During my employment I developed and led the worldwide IT team of 7, split between EMEA,APAC,NA/LATAM. I made it a priority to ensure they could grow in fields they were passionate about offering exposure and mentorship, delegating tasks where possible. I reviewed the team's progress/performance using feedback from staff and tools, weekly 121’s and team meetings. In addition to my direct team I could leverage global sony technicians in regions we didn't have a solid presence in.

Although the orchard was owned by Sony Music from 2015, it operated as a completely independent entity until late 2021, due to my past employment at sony music I had valuable experience with both environments and slowly prepared to transition the orchards IT services into Sony environments. I lead Worldwide projects from global office moves and acquisitions to collaborating with business leaders on events such as live broadcasts, Culture initiatives and Company Programmes.

Main Tools & Services Used
Gsuite, O365, JAMF, Kace, Cisco, Okta, Salesforce, Manage engine, slack, Macos, Windows, VMware, AWS, Jira, Dashlane

My Duties at Vice included supporting inhouse and external systems, our client base was a mixture of full time, freelance and often returning staff, I managed all in-house assets and licenses of full time employees, worked closely with our post production tech team to support studios and meeting rooms, worked with techs based throughout our EMEA offices as an escalation point and where required supported on-site for shoots.

One of my Major tasks at Vice was to Migrate Pulse (250~) employees into the vice environments globally. I managed all It services at Pulse Films covering their London and LA offices in addition to the Facilities for the London office. To make way for Pulse to join Vice i was charged with offboarding a handful of smaller ventures that left the organization but were still leasing support and office space from us, i also Moved these departments out of the Vice office space and later moved Pulse in after renovations.

Main Tools & Services Used
Gsuite, O365 Jamf service now, Adaxes, Synology, ubiquity, Cisco Meraki, Macos, Windows, Dell, VMware, Lastpass, Anydesk

Pulse films was purchased by Vice Media and had recently lost their only IT employee, as I had no formal handover, my initial task was to understand pulse’ Current IT setup and work to align it into Vice’s existing IT ecosystem. During my time at pulse I reconfigured their network, enrolled all devices into Vices MDM systems,migrated their backlog of backups from physical drives onto a new NAS, managed the 0365 tenant until its migration into Gsuite, upgraded all meeting rooms to have video conferencing and as the last project during my employment, moved them into the main Vice office.

Within my first month Pulse, the Office manager resigned, due to my experience at Restup the business approached me with the opportunity to manage both IT and Facilities in a hybrid role. I worked closely with the Vice facilities team to ensure we were compliant with regular safety checks, testing and staff training. I managed several projects throughout the office from repairs to installing a multi floor stair lift to make the building wheelchair accessible and often worked with the landlord, vendors and contractors on the building maintenance and later preparing the new office space within the Vice Main office’ building.

My responsibilities At Sony Music included providing deskside and remote support to users in the London & Dublin offices, the company was divided by multiple music labels and its user base varied from interns up-to industry VIP’s. Music labels within Sony had varied needs and came in all sizes. In addition to my responsibilities to the UK & Ireland(600+) employees I served as an escalation point for local site technicians on the smaller EMEA and APAC territories, we worked closely with our US counterparts and I gained exposure to multiple company wide projects such as domain migrations, label on and offboarding and a network refresh.

I personally supported multiple industry VIP’s such as Simon Cowel, Harry Styles, George Ezra, Little Mix to name a few, I would often be required to work in high stress environments to ensure business wasn't impacted, such as at award ceremonies, live streams and performances.

While working at sony I gained valuable experience through a handful of projects, I managed our UK windows refresh bringing us back in line with our warranty cycle by replacing 300 machines in a year. I worked with our US team to migrate staff into one centralized domain. In a handful of our offices I worked on network refresh projects to update old hardware bringing them up to a global standard set. I lead onboarding and offboarding for all general employees, and also lead onboarding projects for labels such as Insanity and Ministry Of Sound, additionally offboarding small music labels as required.

Main Tools & Services Used
O365, OKTA, Airwatch, JAMF, Cisco Meraki, HP, Macos, Windows, MDT, SCCM, HyperV, Active Directory, Teamviewer, Dashlane

My role at WorkPlaceLive consisted of supporting various customers, products and services on several platforms for thousands of users spread across hundreds of organizations. Our client base varied from financial institutions, legal firms, hospital trusts and small or large charity organizations. We provided the majority of support remotely but I would occasionally be required for on-site visits. Our services were split between RDS and Citrix solutions.

My day to day at WorkPlaceLive was generally incoming calls, ticket logging and hopefully resolving the issue at the first point of contact, otherwise the issue would be reviewed again in downtime or escalated to the appropriate team, occasionally i would be required to visit customers sites to support anything from a new office, printer installation, configuring new wifi ap’s anything the customer may have required. We worked at chargeable rates from 15 minute increments and had to log all work and troubleshooting in addition to documenting time spent supporting customers.

During my time at WorkPlaceLive I undertook an IT apprenticeship, completing a Software,Web & Telecoms L4, I also completed a Microsoft training certifications in Server, Security and Networking. I gained a vast wealth of practical experience working in such a dynamic environment , not just from the day to day but also dealing with a handful of Data outages at our data center, a Crypto attack encrypting several of our customers data and numerous other disaster situations that occurred across our customers.

Main Tools & Services Used
Microsoft server 2012/14, Microsoft Exchange, Active directory, Macos, Windows, Citrix, RDS, VMware, Skype for business, Teamviewer, Manage engine

As the assistant manager, I was responsible for room price adjustments, group bookings and running the day to day of the reception team (7-9) employees across 3 shifts. Part of my role required me to ensure we were compliant with health and safety checks, staff training ensuring we had appropriate health and safety, first aiders and fire marshals on shifts.

Restup was a large hostel in south london, hosting 500 rooms from 20bed dormitories to private doubles, our clients were mostly youth backpackers from across the globe, we also catered to large school groups of upto 200 students at a given time. I encountered many people from various places and backgrounds and were at times required to deal with high stress situations.

I occasionally would cover the Group sales and accountants annual leave which gave me great insight into both roles day to day operations, I would also work closely with the head of kitchen and Cleaning to ensure the daily operations of the business went smoothly. My role was in the center of all the action within the hostel, this gave me great insight into how businesses operate along with tackling challenges from any direction.

Main Tools & Services Used
Booking.com - Expedia - Agoda