During my time with Civica, I’ve enjoyed both customer and internal assignments across various domains including finance, healthcare and education, in the role of product owner as well as technical and business analyst. Clients have included Nationwide Building Society, Education Scotland and HESA (Higher Education Statistics Agency). This period has seen experience of Digital First (Scottish Government equivalent to GDS), organising and conducting UR (user research) interviews, working with UX (user experience) practitioners, use of the Microsoft Bot Framework and various projects using the Scrum agile framework.

Led a User Experience (UX) discovery for the Health & Care business unit in support of a replacement patient care administration system that supported Civica’s strategy of gaining new customers in this sector and ensured that the new product best met the needs of users. • Planned discovery project and liaised with the internal customer to ensure alignment with expectations.• Analysed and validated user journey mappings as well as selecting most complex to analyse and prototype, thus ensuring best value returned by the limited UX resource.• Designed and conducted user research (UR) interviews with clinicians and healthcare administrators • Led subsequent analysis to draw out key user insights.• Navigated the new supplier process to on-board a user recruitment agency to allow us to ensure breadth of users represented in the research.• Considered and addressed GDPR in the user research process to ensure compliance.• Mentored a junior UX practitioner on their first Civica project.

Digital transformation alpha project (adhering to Digital First, Scotland’s equivalent of GDS) alongside user researchers and UX designers to design and produce a prototype portal for use in preparing for school inspections.• Added value by functioning as proxy Product Owner, supporting and coaching customer-side Product Manager in agile product management.• Interviewed administrators, inspectors and headteachers to identify pain points and validate UX prototypes.• Responsible for producing a product backlog to take into the beta phase prioritised based on the output of our user research (UR) considering both the needs of the stakeholders and the development process.• Supported the alpha team in deciding priorities within the alpha and in estimation of the beta backlog.

This start-up style agile project supported Civica’s long-term strategy of remaining competitive by delivering a platform to provide reusable natural language chatbot functionality for embedding in existing products and for use in bespoke deliveries. Based on Microsoft’s Bot Framework, it consumed Microsoft’s LUIS (natural language understanding) and QnA Maker cognitive services, the platform was hosted on the Azure cloud platform. • Produced roadmap and subsequent epics, features and user stories to transition from low-value question and answer type services to high-value complex transactional services that allow users to self-serve tasks. • Identified opportunities in Civica product portfolio to conduct R&D, including pilots, on chatbot approach.• Facilitated channel shift from call centres to online to allow agents to focus on complex transactions and to increase availability during busy periods as well as offer 24/7 option.• Collaborated with technical architect to design an infrastructure that allowed chatbots to be integrated into existing products via API consumption with minimal effort and expertise, thus maximising ROI.• Designed rich functionality on top of the vanilla Microsoft bot framework product to increase value of the proposition e.g., sophisticated usage and accuracy metrics, and user flow mapping.• Pioneered the new ‘low-code’ Bot Framework Composer visual design tool allowing the delivery of an initial prototype in days and production-grade chatbot in weeks rather than the months previously required.• Integrated a chatbot in the Northern Ireland Department of Health’s ‘COVIDCare NI’ app in under 2 weeks, enabling communication of up-to-date information to the public to reduce the burden on the 111 service. My custom metrics allowed us to quickly improve the response accuracy from 30% to 60% once live.

Supported HESA’s transformation programme with a cloud (Azure) based data collection and dissemination portal.• Worked with product owner and dev team to write user stories including the definition of a new API.

Responsible for producing High Level Designs on a variety of projects including inter-institution account migrations, dormant account reclaims and loyalty-based variable interest rates.

Responsible for gathering business and technical requirements for a replacement system for use in a call centre supporting a public sector client. The system allowed call centre staff to accurately record the time spent on individual calls and other tasks.

Variety of technical roles, supporting major in-house bespoke software deliveries and on-site embedded assignments in a wide variety of domains including Mobile Telecoms (Orange, Vodafone, O2 and ADC Metrica), Transport (Rail Delivery Group) and banking (Nationwide Building Society) in a highly customer-focussed organisation.

Responsible for defect analysis, test planning and preparation of acceptance test procedures for £7m bespoke solution to manage and distribute complex information on rail timetables and fares throughout the UK.

Responsible for work planning and allocation, tracking, monitoring of day-to-day activities and interfacing with project management and other teams within large project.

Assigned to various projects as a technical analyst including inactive account closures, free travel insurance refresh, PPI redress, regional brands integration and regulatory 7-day current account switch.

Responsible for the analysis, design and implementation of fault monitoring and service management solutions for various systems/services.

Responsible for planning and implementation of the subscriber migration process on the live network.