As part of my MA (Hons) Edinburgh University, my thesis was “Kanban Systems in Just-in-Time manufacturing in the semi conductor industry” in 1994. As a graduate I joined a global technology company based in Greenock, Scotland and my love for agile was born!

I left in 1997 after getting married and then worked as a website designer and data analyst at a European aerospace organisation.

After 3 years I returned to the UK to retrain as a teacher and ended up running the English and Modern Languages departments in a large Scottish secondary school. This involved a lot of data analytics for student exam insights to help reform the curriculum. I led the pilot implementation of the Curriculum for Excellence in the school. You might not think this was a ‘techy-techy’ role, but it involved taking a large organisation of (resistant!) teachers through organisational change. This experience has proven invaluable as I now advise clients on large digital transformational change. These changes are only ever successful when people, not process, are front and centre.

During my children’s younger years, I was co-director of a small software consultancy specialising in C++ projects for a variety of clients in public sector and banking.

 

Following a move to London, I joined a tech career returner programme. This enabled me to reignite my love for all things agile, and I’ve been working in this field ever since.

If I could sum up my career to date in one word, it would be ‘transformational’.

My view is you only get one life, one shot on this planet, so you absolutely have to make it count. I consider myself endlessly curious and I love the opportunity to constantly learn and restlessly reinvent. I am a proud neurodivergent, I am peri-menopausal and I know I still have 20+ years of fantastic career ahead of me. Working in tech is so exciting. Today we’re all learning about generative ai, but who knows what’s coming next!

The tech industry is vast, the only consistent factor across all of our fields is that change is rapid, constant and exciting.

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Enterprise Agility Lead IBM TechWomen 100 Shortlist 2023 women in tech