Alan is a qualified social worker with extensive experience of working and managing in children’s social care. He has been project managing for the past ten years within children’s social care. He has also carried out contractual work for the Department for Children, Schools and Families undertaking development of the Integrated Children’s System as part of the Improving Information Sharing & Management (IISam) Programme.

Most recently this has been in the role of Policy Expert as part of the ICS Improvement Team to enhance usability, practice and front line satisfaction with IT systems that facilitate the ICS. His specific responsibility was for producing guidance to assist with local authority ownership of the ICS and by providing advice to the Social Work Task Force and the Expert Panel regarding the local simplification of the ICS – particularly in regard to recording formats (commonly referred to as the “exemplars”) and practice issues. This first stage of this work was published and circulated to local authorities on the 16th October 2009. Following a favourable response from Local Authorities, a further set of guidance was commissioned by the DCSF. This was published in March 2010.

With regard to Alan's social work background he has managed teams and services in the following areas: Referral and Assessment, Child Protection, Looked After Children, Youth Offending and Leaving Care.

He has project managed and fully implemented new social care systems for Children’s Services at four different boroughs with three different suppliers - LiquidLogic twice (once replacing SWIFT, once Carefirst), CoreLogic (replacing SWIFT) and CACI (replacing SWIFT). The projects have all managed to PRINCE2 methodology/standards and (at the time these projects were undertaken) were 100% compliant with DCSF minimum business requirements (although these are now no longer compulsory). Work undertaken has included managing the tendering process, writing system specification, writing the PID, compiling and overseeing the project plan, issue and risk logs, business process mapping, testing, training, data migration and pre and post implementation change management. The replacement of legacy systems was an important aspect of this work as, in all these projects, the legacy system had been used across children and adults social care and was replaced by a specific children based system. He has written and delivered training on the Integrated Children’s System at all four boroughs and for other local authorities. He has also worked as a project manager on the procurement of an integrated case management system, which was looking to replace approximately fourteen legacy systems across education, children’s social care and youth offending with a single fully integrated system.