About Me

Learn more about me and the things I love to do!.

Hi, I'm Richard Allen - an avid current affairs boff, music loving looney, political junky, atheist believer, part-time geek, full-time Project Manager and an aspiring entrepreneur living and working in the heart of central London.

I'm the founder and CEO of Backs\ash Media, a web design company that creates nice and simple websites, hosting, and business services. Check them out, you never know what they could help you with! I'm also the co-founder of a start-up called Kanto App, a political app that's launching soon!

I invest both assistance and money into small technology start ups around the U.K through RA Angel Investments. Currently I'm in the process of setting up a charitable foundation that will provide assistance and small grants to people that use technology to increase visibility, raise awareness or get people involved in the local community!

Every now and again I get bored and put my head into a new small project, you will find most of these under the mashups page on my website, but to name a few of the more popular ones; Open MP, which allows people to view their MP's details, performance and expenses all in one place! FTSE100 Data Feed, a real time FTSE100 data feed api.

I'm activity involved in politics both locally (Treasurer for London Conservative Future) and nationally (National E-Communications Officer for Conservative Future), I enjoy culture,coffee, travel,reading, food and a good glass of wine! Feel free to get in contact with me, I love meeting new people!


Education

London School of Economics
- BSc Economics and Management

University of Oxford
- Advanced Diploma in Data and System Analysis

Alton College
- 4 A-E A-A/S Levels in Politics, Philosophy, History and Computer Science

Philip Morant School
- 11 A*-C G.C.S.E's including; English, Maths, Maths Statistics, Triple Science and I.T

Professional Membership and Certifications

Certified Scrum Product Owner
- CSPO - 2011

Prince2 Practitioner
- 2011

NVQ Level 4 - Management
- CIPD - 2009

Member of The Charted Institute for I.T
- MBCS

Associated Member of The Charted Institute of Personnel and Development
- AMCIPD

Member of The Internet Society
- ICOS

Member of Young Professionals in Foreign Policy
- YPFP

Geeky Skills

HTML5/CSS3

Java

PHP/MySQL

JQuery

Javascript

Objective C

Work Experience

Project Manager - BskyB

Working within an Agile development department, duties include;
  • Initiate, lead and manage projects to deliver business change and competitive advantage
  • Managing relationships with users, stakeholders, 3rd parties and executives
  • Managing projects, creating resilient project plans and managing associated risks
  • Manage projects budgets
  • Project estimating and finance

Application Support Analyst - BSkyB

Working on a team of 6 support analysts, duties included;
  • Monitoring of Java, c#, Ruby and Python applications
  • Defect management
  • Ensuring system stability and data integrity
  • Ad-Hoc SQL/Unix Reporting
  • Raising and tracking bugs and issues

Operational Support Manager - The Listening Company

Supported the daily running of a team of 120 FTE, managed client expectations, improved business processes. Duties included;
  • Built provisioning and fault assurance processes for the client for both SMPF LLU, WLR2 NLP and WLR2 Tranfser products
  • Increased additional services used by the client
  • Wrote and developed training material for both employer and client
  • Assisted in the set up a new Department on behalf of client, including training, reporting, handover, process documentation and planning
  • Managed internal work streams to ensure all SLAs were met

Team Manager - The Listening Company

Managed provisioning teams up to 30 FTE
  • Implemented Productivity Measuring and increased productivity by 24%
  • Undertook a departmental review and increased gross profit by 34%
  • Recruitment, Training and coaching of staff
  • Ensuing SLA's and KPI's were adhered toe

Projects/Misc

National E-Communications officer for Conservative Future
- Conservative Future

Treasurer of London Conservative Future
- London Conservative Future

CEO of Backslash Media
- Backs\ash Media

Joint CEO of KantoApp
- Kanto App

Creator of FTSE100 Data Feed
- FTSE 100 Data Feed

Creator of a Free CashMachine App
- Cash Machine Locator



I love to travel, and am a common contributor to WikiTravel. At the age of 18 someone bet me that I couldn't visit very European country, since then I have been an avid traveller!

My favourite city in Europe is Budapest, with it's history, parks, beauty and nightlife (which is almost on par with Berlin!)