Providing confidential advice to organisations looking for continuous improvement in a fast paced and changing service delivery environment, including pre and post acquisition.As a Certified Support Manager with over 20 years of people management experience in various locations and cultures I am confident at leading through change initiatives, including acquisition growth. I very much enjoy building teams and developing the skills of individuals for future sustained success.With my background of working as a leader of technical support service delivery teams for global software vendors I have experience of working cross functionally and bringing together Engineering and Operational teams to focus on delivering a high quality and consistent customer or partner experience. Experienced in applying a lean six sigma approach to deliver continuous improvement of operations for efficiency and to support future growth. Able to influence the acceptance of change through clear, appropriate, timely and closely reasoned communications and building trusted relationships.

Over time took on operational leadership for an increasing number of frontline and backline support teams, requiring engagement with many globally located Engineering and Operations teams.The scope of this role covered responsibility for the delivery of frontline support services to partners and large scale customers (including universities, banks, healthcare, local authorities, manufacturers etc) as well as the provision of backline support services. I worked with other teams daily for product launch, readiness, knowledge improvement, system improvement and rollout.In late 2017 I developed a two year improvement plan to transform a UK based frontline technical support team in the UWM and Security space from a 24/7 single location operating a tiered model into a geo located case ownership model. This involved the creation of a new team in the US, training delivery, withdrawal of shift patterns over time and ensuring adoption of many process and system changes. This was achieved while improving the standard of service for customers and ensuring a go forward opportunity for the original team through cross training to other products. It was completed on time against a backdrop of changes through company acquisitions and over this time customer satisfaction steadily increased from 78% to 95%. Added responsibility for backline and frontline teams (mainly in Warsaw) delivering EMEA customer support of a set of products in the ITSM space (on-premise and SaaS). Brought experience of the delivery of a support service for a cloud service, the processes required and the relationships with operations teams.Much of my time was spent hiring and developing individuals to improve tenure and have clear succession planning for future growth. I was able to use my background in process improvement to develop processes that were future proof for scale and globally adopted.Member of cross functional leadership team at the Daresbury site and Women in Technology contact.

Ivanti is a software vendor and provides technical support to partners and to IT or business professionals within global companies. I initially joined Ivanti to lead and develop a team of highly skilled and technically talented problem solvers with the responsibility for reducing the demand for assisted support and maximising the value customers or partners realise from their investment. While the primary focus of this backline team is to act as the technical escalation point to bring timely resolution to customer issues they also proactively share and maintain knowledge and assist in new business opportunities.Partnering closely with Engineering and Product Management to improve product adoption, user experience and quality the team also leads the validation, release and communication of sustaining fixes. For new product releases the team drives readiness, internal training and product support enablement.Through clearly defining the scope of the team and the roles within it and through optimizing processes and testing approaches we were able to deliver a quicker and more consistent service to the frontline teams and bring more focus to product improvement activities to reduce the need for customers to engage with the support service.

As the roles at Oracle best suited to my preferred skills were being moved away from the UK I took the opportunity to look for a new challenge which would focus on the skill areas that I enjoy applying, rather than take a role which would not use them. I looked for a role which would use my extensive customer service delivery skills to focus on service improvement, leading a growing / large team or advising on improvement as I very much enjoy developing the skills of others.

Domain lead with responsibility for the 24/7 global service desk and customer support service globally for a set of Oracle Hyperion products and underlying technologies. The total pool of around 100 engineers were located in all geographies. including direct line management of up to 17 3rd line engineers in the UK and dotted line in other global locations. The service was provided to IT departments of many of the top companies in the world, partners, field consulting and cloud operations with contacts of varied technical or language capability and seniority. Continual service improvement was a primary and ongoing part of this role, including the move from local test machines specific to an engineer to a centralised virtual environment, the move to an automatic incident assignment method rather than a pull queue and the move to on-line chat rather than telephony. I worked with readiness teams to ensure succession planning was in place and appropriate training delivered to engineers in line with new products and technologies. Working with the proactive team I ensured that knowledge management had an appropriate focus, service request automation projects were progressed and appropriate analytics delivered. I set, delivered and actively monitored KPIs (SLAs, customer satisfaction, time to resolution, telephony, backlog, volume etc) to ensure that targets were met and trends quickly recognised. I worked with critical accounts, country based customer management and pre-sales on a daily basis for support related queries.I acted as first and second level escalation point and proactively monitored priority working as well as reacting to the range of automatic system alerts generated.Centre Manager for business continuity plan.All standard line management of engineers duties were covered and experienced in performance improvement situations, through to dismissal and with reduction in force exercises.

Following the acquisition of the Hyperion brand by Oracle my first task was to establish how the service from Hyperion support teams in the UK and India could be improved to deliver the support level and hours of coverage in Europe provided as standard by Oracle. I visited a service centre in Romania to assess what skills and time zone coverage were available, compared with other locations and advised that a team should be built in Cairo. I was responsible for the roll out plan for application specific, installation and troubleshooting training, which included my team of engineers delivering that, some in person and some virtually, and providing ongoing coaching. We achieved the provision of 24/7 support with reduced reliance on an expensive on-call approach within six months.In 2008 I was asked to head up Technical Support in the EMEA region/ time zone for the Oracle Hyperion products, with the 4 other managers in the region and their 80 engineers reporting to me. Technical support at level 2 and above was delivered to the finance teams of some of the top companies in the world, with deadlines for stock exchange submission or large penalties for late filing. Our objective was to maintain customer satisfaction during growth and rising volume but we achieved an increase. I received the Global Middleware Support Manager of the Year 2008 for ‘exemplifying values of customer success, excellence, leadership and integrity’

As part of a drive to improve the service to customers and partners globally the advocacy and beta management roles moved to be physically located with developers and the centre in The Netherlands was closed. I was tasked with delivering a new language based team of 20 UK based 2nd and 3rd line engineers to support customers in their native language in the Benelux and DACH regions.For ongoing service improvement the analysis of skill levels and customer satisfaction identified a need to transform to a product based support model rather than language. Along with a need for more depth of knowledge and consistency of customer experience the requirement for support in native language was reducing as telephone support evolved to more online and remote contact. I built and managed a team of engineers, responsible for technical support in all languages across EMEA for one of the main products.A new support centre in India was built to cover all time zones at a reduced headcount cost. I was involved as soon as the high-level strategy had been confirmed and involved in transition of the service, including making the announcements to the teams, determining what needed to be achieved, the detailed plans and the timescales. I took on the role of designing the process training, spending time in India delivering it to over 100 support engineers and working with the local management team. The business targets of reducing high-cost headcount and maintaining customer satisfaction were achieved in the financial year timeframe through achieving closely defined operational targets. Those targets were fluid as the projects evolved through business drivers such as changes to office location and ability to recruit in volume or through legal drivers such as visa approvals and redundancy processes.

EMEA wide customer advocacy role to liaise between support and development on bug fixing and delivery and beta management. Attendance at user groups across Europe for customer meetings. Each year I delivered a simultaneously translated technical session at the European user conference to a large multi-lingual audience as well as manning the demo booths or support stand to meet with customers. I rolled out in Europe a newly launched ETL tool, including the delivery of training to pre-sales and consulting, ensured support readiness and carrying out the first few pre-sales engagements. As the team grew I became the manager of 8 advocates.

Part of the team transforming a UK based support team into a European centre to provide telephone support for financial consolidation and budgeting applications to European customers such as Akzo Nobel, Gaz de France and British Airways. I spent a week each month in The Netherlands coaching a new team of 40 engineers on customer service, processes and technical implementation.

As a support analyst I tailored financial applications to reflect the accountancy requirements of individual companies. I worked with the customer to determine requirements, testing, installed at the customer site and delivered end user training. In 1991 I became the manager of a team of 6 support analysts, continued to expand that team to cover additional software products and also build an additional team of 4 administrators to use the software in-house as a service.