Carl Leslie

A culture had developed where customers created tickets for issues they encountered without minimum verification to ensure it was a product issue. This resulted in support and product development teams spending a lot of time trying to recreate issues and verify their validity.

I introduced a new multi-step engagement process requiring customers to provide a minimum set of information. This allowed support and product development teams to confirm the issue more quickly and enabled developers to allocate more time to finding a solution instead of trying to verify the issue.

As a result of the additional investigation required by the customer, some issues were resolved before ever being raised to support. This was seen by the decreasing number of customer-related tickets created in the subsequent 6-12 months.

Initially, there was some push-back from the first-line support team and customers who felt this degraded the support service. But after a trial period where we saw reduced ticket numbers and a more consistent approach with all customers, both the support team and customers expressed their approval of the new approach.

When the EU announced the introduction of the GDPR, we set up a project to assess our product's requirements and how our customers would be impacted. As part of IBM, it was decided that an overall company-wide approach was appropriate.

Acting within agreed-upon parameters, my team began assessing product areas that needed to be addressed. Since our product was on-prem and customizable, we proposed and got approval that responsibility for the data and how it was gathered rested with the customer. This was also in line with customer preferences.

We created a set of documentation for each product area where private personal information was entered or displayed. This augmented the product documentation and gave customers full instructions on how to customize the product to comply with GDPR.

This project was completed on schedule and within budget and formed part of IBM's overall response to the GDPR introduction.

Our maintenance team consisted of four scrum squads. I managed one assigned to small projects and enhancements for customers. Some examples of our most recently completed projects include:

• 3rd-party Software Modernization – This involved an assessment of hundreds of 3rd-party libraries that had been introduced into the product over many years but, in many cases, had gotten out of date or were no longer fit for their purpose. My team's task was to consolidate these libraries, verify their ongoing need, update where appropriate, and document their use.

• Data Extraction – The customer wanted access to data stored in the database's BLOB and CLOB fields. This customer requirement was technically challenging as these fields held varied records, and some were of the same type but variable size. This required regular interaction with customer representatives to validate our solution and was delivered as an asset outside the main product.

In addition, I co-managed the other three squads. I worked with the product owners, development managers, QA, and support to maintain the backlog, assess and prioritize new customer issues, schedule tasks and releases, and ensure adherence to development standards and quality deliveries.