Are you looking for someone to solve your problems? Perhaps I can help with (some) of them!

(if you want to email me already, you can do that at john at jvrglanville dot net)

what can I help with

from highest to lowest level, with some examples

Understanding how to manage and implement technical change and solutions (like building out a new data model alongside a CRM, or conceptualising an AI strategy that’s more than an LLM policy)

• developed a unified, organisation-wide outcomes reporting framework which has subsequently been adopted by their umbrella body virtually unmodified

Reporting and storytelling with data

• Five years of comprehensive funder reporting from a data driven project, principally authored by me
• Visual storytelling and mapping of police violence around protests in Glasgow

Talking to and working with second- and third-party stakeholders to develop projects, run them, evaluate them, and conduct research

• devised an anonymity-preserving process for dataset matching as part of operational research
• managed stakeholders at fourteen commercial law firms over three years and a £180k budget

Developing custom short-term and long-term products to meet urgent needs

• a zero-budget, marginal-resource CRM during the pandemic to keep an organisation compliant, which was built in three weeks and ran for two and a half years
• an explorer tool to allow auditors to browse a commercial product’s database after they found the firstparty front-end unfit for purpose
• an azure functions serverless synchronisation provider to keep two CRMs in lockstep with mutual foreign keying, to support analytics being able to abstract away the boundary between the two

Finding, specifying, and fixing interesting and difficult problems with datasets –

• Connecting datasets from a proprietary CRM with open data on regional deprivation, to identify mismatches in provision and hotspots in demand
• Implementing a ‘cold store’ data minimisation and archival process to allow decade-plus historical datasets to be used for review and inference, while complying with PII minimisation and deletion requirements
• Developing observability tools like AIS mapping and filtering to identify and track vessels of interest

Building tools and utilities for specific, fine-grained business needs

• Building Python API bindings for a CRM
• Reformatting thousands of bill records to comply with a new reporting standard after the (very expensive) vendor couldn’t meet the new spec in time (mangling XML to different XML)
• Reformatting tens of thousands of CRM records and the underlying semantic structure, to meet a new CRM vendor’s import format and structure (mangling a stack of JSON to a stack of CSVs; yes, they didn’t want anything better or safer)

what have I done, though?

I’ve spent most of a decade building and helping build high level software to solve business problems. Most recently this is three ETL systems over two generations of legal case management architecture – one for MSSQL, one for an impressively old version of Firebird still in production with an undisclosed SaaS vendor, and one for a different vendor’s not-quite-RESTful API. All of these have ended up, as is traditional in the modern enterprise, in PowerBI and being used to generate actionable data and directly generating revenues in the three million quid range. I looked after the rollout of PowerBI across the organisation and built the organisation’s data model from the ground up, including designing a lot of the data collection framework and model.

While I was doing that, I’ve also built a lockstep connector between those systems to, for the first time ever in that organisation, create reliable, trackable data about client journeys all the way through the organisation. They’ve started using the insights from this to understand who isn’t getting served properly, predict who will progress through into serious client work, and identify and eliminate the gaps between the two sides of the business.

While I was doing that, I inherited, ran, and grew by a project partnering hundreds of commercial lawyers with immigration specialists, to help children acquire citizenship. We got citizenship for about 170 children a year, for five years (and I ran it for three of them).

I’ve also run and optimised a few websites over the years but so has everybody, really. I once got WordPress down to a 6ms load for SEO reasons, which I am unreasonably proud of.

sounds cool

you can email me at john at jvrglanville dot net if you fancy a no-commitment chat – I like hearing from cool people even if they don’t want to hire me, but if you’ve got a problem you need solving, let’s talk.

how much?

let’s talk. I don’t want to waste your time, or my time, or your money, and I’m happy to negotiate rates based on what you actually need and can afford. Maybe that’s half a day to be a critical sounding board, and maybe it’s six months to build out your infrastructure.