Selected work
Problems, approaches, results.
Evidence of how Education Host delivers and how I lead it — platforms the company operates, the methods behind its consultancy, and the strategic calls behind both. No invented clients, no vanity metrics.
Education Host
Browser-based teaching labs for higher education
- Problem
- University computing labs tie practical teaching to physical machines: slow to reset, hard to standardise across cohorts, and painful for remote or distance learners.
- Approach
- As Managing Director, I set the strategy for Cloud Pulse and led its development at Education Host. Our developers and specialist partners built a platform where lecturers create teaching environments once and deploy them to whole cohorts in the browser — from Linux administration to AI, cyber security and web development labs.
- Result
- A live Education Host platform used to run practical computing teaching, with reusable templates, a custom lab builder, cohort deployment and single sign-on through institutional identity providers. It now also powers AI Labs (OpenClaw), the company's AI-agent teaching service.
Education Host
Governed student web hosting at institutional scale
- Problem
- Web development courses need every student to have real hosting — but ungoverned student hosting creates account sprawl, security risk and an administrative burden every academic year.
- Approach
- Education Host built Student Web Host Manager around the academic structure itself: courses, modules and teaching blocks, with Microsoft Entra sign-in, automated provisioning and end-of-module lifecycle controls. I directed the product decisions that shaped it — starting with governance, not features.
- Result
- A live Education Host platform giving institutions governed, auditable cPanel hosting for students, with lifecycle automation aligned to the academic calendar.
Education Host
Taking the morning scramble out of school cover
- Problem
- Allocating cover for absent staff is a daily, time-critical puzzle that most schools still solve with spreadsheets, paper and a very stressful 7:30am.
- Approach
- Our team developed Cover Manager as an MIS-integrated platform: absence requests and approvals feed a single morning view that highlights unallocated sessions, with timetable context pulled through Wonde. I oversee its direction as part of the company's product portfolio.
- Result
- A deploy-ready Education Host platform that turns cover allocation into a clear, repeatable workflow, with printable cover sheets, reporting and Entra single sign-on.
Data & Insight
Enriching housing data for better decisions
- Problem
- A social housing provider's management system held years of operational data, but on its own it couldn't answer the questions managers actually asked about communities, deprivation and need.
- Approach
- In an individual consultancy engagement, I joined core housing management data with external datasets — indices of deprivation, postcode lookups and demographic segmentation — and supported the evaluation and selection of an enterprise reporting tool.
- Result
- Housing data that could carry real analytical weight, and a reporting tool decision informed by hands-on evidence rather than vendor demos. The kind of ground-level data work that now informs how I steer Education Host's data and reporting services. (Historic engagement; details deliberately kept general.)
Data & Insight
Dashboards managers actually use
- Problem
- Organisations accumulate reports nobody reads: too many metrics, unclear owners, and dashboards built around what the data warehouse contains rather than the decisions people make.
- Approach
- Start from the decision, not the dataset. We work with the people who own the outcome, agree the handful of questions that matter, fix the data quality issues that undermine trust, then build reporting that answers those questions plainly.
- Result
- The method Education Host applies in its data and reporting consultancy — grounded in my earlier enterprise BI delivery — covering data quality groundwork, reporting design and the training that makes reporting stick.
Consultancy & Delivery
Getting stalled digital projects moving again
- Problem
- Digital projects stall for predictable reasons: unclear ownership, a gap between what stakeholders asked for and what was built, and technical decisions nobody feels able to revisit.
- Approach
- We map the systems, data and stakeholders as they actually are; identify the practical options; recommend a delivery route with honest trade-offs; then stay to build, configure and support the implementation rather than leaving a slide deck behind.
- Result
- The engagement model used across Education Host consultancy — from platform strategy and migration planning through to hands-on delivery and review — with me accountable for what the company recommends.
Platforms & Products
Education Host Studio: focused products, company standards
- Problem
- Some problems are too small for enterprise software and too real to ignore — they deserve small, well-made products that respect people's time and data.
- Approach
- Education Host Studio is the company's product-development initiative. Our team designs and builds focused apps end to end — problem framing, interface design, engineering and the operational plumbing behind them — with me setting the direction on what gets built.
- Result
- A product practice inside the wider company, with StackShift, SNAP Ring and Check First — Scam Protection currently in development.