How I became a Delivery Manager

I work as a Delivery Manager and am currently based in London. I'm originally from Denmark and lived there for 29 years.

In my spare time I play a lot of badminton and was playing First and Premier division in the UK, but all good things come to an end, unfortunately, as you get older and the competition gets younger! It looks like my daughter is following in my footsteps though which is great to see.  I also like running and am helping my fianc? train for her first marathon.

I grew up just outside Copenhagen. When I was 15, the age you finish your first stage of schooling in Denmark, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. I kind of bumbled my way through school without knowing what the end would be did I want to go to college or go into business and finance before I started university? I ended up selecting business and marketing, which I was pretty interested in at the time. After this, I went to business school, completing a master's degree in Management of Technology. Bear in mind that this was back in the 1990s before the internet had arrived? yes that shows my age? Technology was new and for the few 'high tech' companies set up and working within Denmark, so the degree focused on how to deliver such products and services. I really enjoyed this time of my life studying and working part time and later full-time, for a Norwegian oil company, running data analytics for them. It was challenging at times writing my dissertation in the evenings, balancing my working life with study, but really set me up for my future.

In my first job with the oil company, I was exposed to some of the large tech companies we'd still know today. At that time, the technology they brought to data mining and analytics was really new and fresh. We were able to do really exciting analytics using statistical software developed in the US to work out patterns and predictions about our customers and how they buy fuel. This got me really interested in technology and project delivery.

The world of IT

Shortly after this, I made the switch to 'consulting', building applications for commercial and government clients. I did a project for the Danish equivalent of the FSA for a while working on some interesting solutions to help monitor insider trading. This was an amazing delivery project, working with a small team to create a really robust product, and it was still working flawlessly 10 years after we finished building it! 

Moving to the UK

Unexpectedly one day, I got a call from a large tech company in the UK, offering me an interview and three months later I moved to London. I assumed it would be a brief opportunity and that I'd leave three or four years later? but here I am twenty years later still living in London with no intention to leave. So things don't always work out the way you think!

I worked on a number of different projects, moving services for private sector customers from offline to online, providing safe and secure places for customer data. My first role in London gave me the chance to work on large scale cross-European projects. I was firmly embedded in the delivery world and loved working on big challenging projects with large distributed teams.

I then had the opportunity to move to a smaller organisation and immediately saw the difference. I really liked this type of culture, where you knew most of the other employees by name, and the leadership team knew mine. This company grew rapidly and eventually got bought by a large defence and consulting company, so after 12 years the next step for me was Kainos.

When I heard about the opportunity, I started doing some research on the company and what it'd be like to work there. What really set Kainos apart was the focus on people. It had a small company feel, but was working on some really incredible projects with UK Government.

I did more digging and learned that Kainos had great word of mouth. I related, because I had worked for organisations in periods of growth, so I recognised the challenges and the similarities. I joined in November 2017 as a Delivery Manager on what is now one of our large government accounts, where we're building a centralised service allowing local highway authorities, utilities and contractors to plan and manage roadwork permits. It's a really exciting project, I'm really embedded in it working with a great team. We ran a 3-month Alpha and are currently in Beta, with around six months to go. Completing the Alpha was a really proud achievement for me and a great way to start in Kainos.

Working as a Delivery Manager in Kainos

It's great and I love the challenges it has thrown at me!  Part of my role is to manage all different aspects of project delivery this is where all the pieces of experience from my background really come to the fore and I can apply them all.

We're an agile team of 42 people. I work with distributed teams: feature teams in Belfast, WebOps and testing teams in Gdansk, and our experience designers and architects teams in London. On top of this, we're working closely with two delivery partners, customers, and our subject matter experts in London too. It's a real melting pot of cultures, people, characters and skills - that's what makes it work so well. But as you can imagine, at times it can be tricky to coordinate! 

Skills for a great Delivery Manager

I'm not the most technically strong I realised that early on in my career. What I'm great at is planning, coordination, management and engaging customers so I have a full spectrum of skills that are really important on customer projects. My career path has led to this point and I believe the set of skills I've developed working on large and small IT projects has given me the right mix for working on Digital Services projects at Kainos.

Inspirations

I've worked with some really inspiring people in my career. For me working with many different people on different projects and from different backgrounds