Sharon Down Email & Phone Number

London, England, Gb

London, England, United Kingdom

Responsible for the delivery of a digital service for Pensions Dashboard Programme, allowing a member to see all information referring to their state pension and multiple pension savings.Responsible for leading client mobile app updates, including the creation of a second Scrum team.Implementing, and applying a project governance, allowing for the freedom of agility for technical development.Key achievements• Led multiple workstreams in the successful completion of IT projects, including software development initiatives.• Implemented Agile methodologies, resulting in an increase in project efficiency and on-time delivery.• Managed project budgets ranging from £500k to over £5million, consistently meeting financial targets.• Collaborated with stakeholders to define project scope, objectives, and deliverables.• Oversaw risk management and issue resolution, ensuring minimal disruptions to project timelines.• Fostered a culture of continuous improvement, resulting in a reduction in post implementation issues.• Successfully delivered critical client driven updates, improving operational efficiencies. • Managed a portfolio of projects, prioritizing tasks, and resources to meet business objectives.• Conducted regular project status meetings, providing clear communication to stakeholders.• Developed and maintained project documentation, including project plans, timelines, and risk assessments.• Collaborated with vendors and third-party providers to ensure seamless project execution.

Redhill, England, United Kingdom

Key achievements• Leading two Scrum Masters, providing coaching, and mentoring on Scrum methodology and project governance.• Established key relationships to the LifeSight stakeholders and third-party partners.

Redhill, England, United Kingdom

• Lead a Scrum team of 15 automation specialists based onshore and offshore. Facilitated daily scrums meetings, managed stakeholders and mentored team members. • Fostered collaboration across other internal Scrum teams to ensure alignment of priorities and stakeholder messaging. • Decision maker for actions for escalation, whilst actively removing immediate impediments.• Led and encouraged cross-geography Scrum team to come together with a common understanding of the vision and the definition of success through the implementation of team initiatives. • Planned, organised, and facilitated Scrum events and rituals including, sprints, story estimation, daily stand-ups, and retrospectives to enable the Scrum team to be effective and efficient.• Managed risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies during Sprint and Release planning.• Proactively engaged and collaborated on Automation strategy to ensure quality delivery and aided minimise defects. • Supported and contributed to the projects budget through resource management including hiring permanent and contract resources.

Redhill, England, United Kingdom

• Responsible for the implementation and quality of a new QA team geographically dispersed. • Oversaw recruitment (hiring, onboarding), training and resource planning.• Initiated a mentor programme to transform cross-geography QA which created a culture of learning and transparency.• Proactively help drive the QA team through transition from Waterfall to Agile, by assisting team in understanding their role and lending support and encouragement as challenges were faced.• Implemented test management tool (qTest) to manage, track and organise test cases, as well as provide stakeholders with real-time test metrics.• Planned, organised, and facilitated QA events, such as project workshops and brown bag sessions.• Created a collaborative and flexible environment for the QA team to succeed.• Supported and contributed to both the management and development of a programme QA Team of 75 colleagues. • Managed and supported out of hours release testing. Independently managing up to 30 resources from multiple Scrum teams, leading test effort and coordinating test execution and progress reporting.

Kingswood

Role Included:Working on AE (Auto-Enrolment) for a number of large Schemes. Ensuring that the impact of the increased volume on existing internal systems and processes is managed to handle the new legislation. Responsibilities included – • Manage a team of Test Analysts.• Test status reporting to the client.• Maintaining client relationships.• Managing and planning all testing activities and identifying dependencies between other AE projects.Test Manager working on the IBM Data Centre Migration, which involved migrating the L&G Data Centre from their Kingswood office to the IBM Data Centre at Portsmouth. This project covered 70 Workplace Savings applications which needed to be tested within the organisation. Responsibilities included - • Liaise with Senior Business Managers on seconding Business Resources into end-to-end User Acceptance Testing.• Managing a team of 15 Testers responsible for UAT. Managing the scheduling and planning of all UAT activities.• Ensure UAT scenarios and scripts were written to a consistently high specification.Skills demonstrated: • Excellent communication skills – the ability to explain complex ideas in simple terms to Stakeholders. • Experienced in managing project expectations & scope, planning, leadership and organisational skills.• Excellent Documentation skills – providing appropriate test documentation which is defined and agreed and that balances the criticality of the schedule against the complexity of system and process changes.• Experienced in test planning including creating test strategy, test plan, test execution, test status reporting and learning & closure procedures.• Experienced in handling on shore-off shore models from both sides.• Good experience of stakeholder management, team management, estimations, metrics and onsite co-ordination.• Excellent Process Management – ensuring Quality Gates to and from testing stages are managed ensuring that transition is always controlled.

Role Included:Managing Implementations & Releases of complex programmes* Lead Implementation Consultant working on a Pension Simplification Project, which was driven from Government legislation and therefore had a hard deadline for delivery. Thisproject covered 60 applications within the organisation. As part of my responsibility on this project, I headed up technical resources and provided workshops to identify crossapplication impact * Managed weekend implementations which could include up to 50 different deliveriesacross every type of infrastructure - telephony, network, mainframe applications, ecommerce applications, AS400, MQ Series, Security, Utilities, large office moves etc.Undertaking overall risk assessment and overall planning of all deliveries to ensure no cross delivery impact.Strong communication and presentation skills coupled with high degree of self-motivation, commitment and ability to lead and motivate multiple project teams to deliver quality within set boundaries of time. Skills demonstrated: • Strong communication and presentation skills coupled with high degree of self-motivation, commitment and ability to lead and motivate multiple project teams to deliver quality within set boundaries of time. • Excellent analytical and reporting skills – Process Management, Audit & Compliance.Results:• Successfully worked with project teams from external suppliers to meet a common goal. Instilled confidence on projects by enabling perception I was one of the team despite being an external resource.

* Supporting Change Manager in Management of the process and procedures* Responsible for coordinating changes to the environments, ensuring correct proceduresare followed and changes are accurately recorded, scheduled and controlled* Assess the priority and impact of all changes for accuracy* Coordinate change approvals liaising between approvers and initiators* Create and distribute Change Management reports and analysis* Prepare all documentation for Change Advisory Board (CAB)

* Updating pension scheme member records* Liaising with other departments to ensure compliance with the legal and regulatoryaspects of pensions administration* Providing high levels of customer service* Process retirements and benefit claims