Katie B.

I've had great opportunities that have paved the way for my career

I started my career in Insurance before taking a year out to go travelling throughout Asia and Australia. When I returned, I wanted a new challenge and landed a role as Service Desk Analyst for Kingfisher IT Services. My latest career move to Service Transition Manager has enabled me to grow and expand my skills further being challenged 15 years later.

Service Transition Manager

The Service Transition Manager role owns the protection of live services by the effective implementation and adoption of Service Design, Service Introduction, Change Management & Release Scheduling processes.

Being on this Journey of future ways of working

Service Transition plays a big part in the Group Tech strategy ensuring a smooth transition into production resulting in success rate of changes and releases for the business. New tools and ways of working

Be open to exploring and trying new things

Don't get used to something and stuck in your ways, keep an open mind and try to look for the value in the change, at the same time don't be scared to challenge or ask for more detail before you make up your mind, and if you still don't think it's the right thing be vocal but also be willing to try.

Creation of scheduling release and a master release calendar

It was recognised that we did not have a long view for planning change, Change Management only show planned changes 2-4 weeks ahead. This was making it difficult to schedule in big project releases and not giving key stakeholders the required visibility. I became the Release Manager and created a framework to follow for release scheduling and a master release calendar for visibility. This provides a one-point view of major releases and changes enabling us to detect contention early and for there to be no surprises for the stakeholders. The end-to-end process has been a great success ensuring changes can be delivered without compromising the integrity or availability of the production environment.