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Ben Fennell

IT Support Specialist

I build PowerShell tooling that helps a university IT team work less reactively and more deliberately.

About

I’m an IT Support Specialist on Curtin University’s DTS Desktop Services team, where I’ve spent close to a decade progressing through Deployment, the Service Desk, and now Desktop Services. The work I’m most proud of is the tooling I’ve built and shipped to the people around me — PowerShell WPF applications that quietly take painful workflows and turn them into something supportable.

The clearest example is AdminForge, a tool I designed, built, and deployed via Intune Win32 that consolidates four high-volume Service Desk workflows into a single interface. It’s roughly halved median resolution time on the workflows it covers and meaningfully reduced escalations to our team. Alongside it I built the Power Grid — a radar-chart performance dashboard over ServiceNow data that gives the team a fair, transparent view of how work is distributed.

Outside Curtin, I run a home lab that has become my proving ground for the infrastructure side of things I don’t touch at work yet — virtualisation, container orchestration, mesh networking, DNS, and self-hosted services. I’m also slowly working through embedded electronics with an ESP32 kit, headed toward custom home-automation hardware.

When I’m not at a keyboard, I’m usually cooking, playing Frosthaven, or chasing my kid around.

Experience

  1. Mar 2022 — Present

    IT Support Specialist · Curtin University
    DTS Desktop Services

    Design and ship PowerShell / WPF tooling deployed via Intune to internal teams. Recent work centres on AdminForge (production), the Power Grid performance dashboard, an enterprise-wide Exchange Online room mailbox timezone remediation across 593 rooms, and the planning and design of a Distribution List → Microsoft 365 Group migration tool.

    • PowerShell
    • WPF / XAML
    • Active Directory
    • Exchange Online
    • Intune
    • Microsoft 365
  2. May 2020 — Mar 2022

    IT Support Officer · Curtin University
    Service Desk

    First point of contact for staff and student IT issues across the full Microsoft and Curtin-bespoke estate. Maintained broad knowledge of DTS support areas for accurate triage and escalation, authored Knowledge Articles used by the wider support function, and worked inside ITIL-aligned workflows in Cherwell and (later) ServiceNow.

    • ITIL
    • ServiceNow
    • Cherwell
    • Microsoft 365
    • Active Directory
  3. Oct 2016 — May 2020

    IT Deployment Officer · Curtin University

    Deployed PCs and peripherals to clients across the Bentley campus — imaging, reimaging, and user-data migration. Liaised with clients and coordinated scheduling across multiple Deployment Officers’ workloads. Built the institutional knowledge of Curtin’s endpoint estate that has underpinned every role since.

    • Windows
    • Imaging
    • Hardware
    • Data migration
View Full Résumé

Projects

  • AdminForge ↗

    Production internal tool at Curtin DTS. A WPF PowerShell application I designed, built, and deployed via Intune Win32 with versioned detection rules and a first-time-setup wizard that bootstraps PowerShell 7, RSAT, and ExchangeOnlineManagement on a fresh device. Four production tabs consolidate previously fragmented Service Desk workflows; the codebase was refactored from a 1,600-line monolithic script into a modular structure with dot-sourced event handlers.

    • PowerShell
    • WPF
    • Intune Win32
    • EXO
    • AD
    AF

  • Power Grid ↗

    Radar-chart performance dashboard scoring seven Desktop Services technicians across six axes (Volume, Variety, Difficulty, Consistency, Efficiency, Feedback) using 4,771 ServiceNow tickets and 218 NPS survey responses. Multi-view HTML dashboard with hash-based routing, per-technician detail pages, rolling 13-month trend charts, and a full decisions document explaining every formula and exclusion.

    • HTML
    • Recharts
    • ServiceNow
    • Python
    PG

  • Home Lab 

    Multi-service self-hosted stack on a single host. Home Assistant in a UTM VM, plus containerised Immich, Vaultwarden, AdGuard Home, and Homepage under OrbStack. Tailscale mesh networking provides three layers of off-LAN access - Serve for HTTPS-terminated tailnet hostnames, subnet routing, and direct tailnet IP - with HTTPS certificates and MagicDNS enabled. Uptime Kuma monitoring across the lot.

    • Home Assistant
    • Tailscale
    • Docker
    • Virtualisation
    HL

  • ESP32 / Embedded 

    Ongoing self-directed study of embedded electronics and Arduino C++ via a Freenove ESP32-S3 starter kit. Working through GPIO, strapping pins, pull-up/pull-down topology, current limiting, switch debounce, and the Arduino preprocessor model. Bridge target: building a rat-ratgdo board for local control of my Chamberlain garage door.

    • ESP32-S3
    • Arduino C++
    • ESPHome
    µC

Certifications