Fiona Watts

As lead delivery manager across four teams, I worked on a large-scale multi-million-pound project to replatform the existing eCommerce platform using new technologies to provide further agility and ability to change.

I introduced dynamic reporting using Smartsheets to create a dynamic dashboard linking directly to Jira that allowed us to identify bottlenecks and support key strategic decision making, including moving to Agile Scrum.

I was a key member of the project team and the scrum master for several teams and managed all risks and issues to ensure that blockers and bottlenecks were cleared.

I was vital in the implementation of Agile Scrum practices across all teams.

Managed a team made up of developers and data scientists to create a tool that used historical data to match students to university courses that students with profiles similar had been accepted to. The applicant would then have the option to share their details with the University Admissions Service to let them know that they were interested. This was a ground-breaking project that would form the MVP of a product to revolutionize the way in which students interact with clearing as well as securing the position of the company in the higher education admissions market.

I was the delivery lead responsible for improving customer satisfaction of our 900 school customers whose CSAT score was only 53%. I carried out numerous stakeholder engagement events to identify a comprehensive list of pain points and then brought together data analysts, technology, operations, and communications colleagues to address these through technology and process changes. Satisfaction rose year-on-year, peaking at 80% after three years-an increase of around 9% per year.

Following a business initiative to support flexible working practices, my role was to support the initiative through a range of technical changes. These included improvements to security practices through the roll-out of multi-factor authentication to all employees, the roll-out of Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, and the implementation of DocuSign. This included working with the business to manage the changes effectively, creating champion groups, and engaging with users to ensure a successful feedback loop. Additionally, I worked with third-party suppliers to implement improved room technology for conferencing and meetings.

Working with the department for education’s digital delivery team, I led a raft of changes requested in response to falling numbers of students applying to teacher training courses, from technical application changes to the use of data science to support communications strategies with potential trainees.

I worked with an offshore technical team, product owner, and solutions architect to develop a proposal for changes that we could make to our systems to meet the goals of DfE. These included changes to the application to reduce the application fee to a nominal charge of £1, which was completed in just eight weeks.

We also engaged with data scientists to create modeling of previous application data to create an understanding of the impact of policy changes which led us to create a clearer opt-in and opt-out system that allowed potential applicants to agree that we could share their data for them to access support to complete their application.