Chelsea Reid | CTO Architecture Governance Lead | Barclays

 

I was one of the very first Northwest Female Apprentices in 2006 answering an anonymous Ad for a role for a blue-chip company apprenticeship scheme in a local newspaper. I was the only female in my intake, and it would be some years till our flagship Apprenticeship program arrived. I have spent the last 17 years in a variety of roles with my grounding as a Mainframe System Programmer.

I worked in Infrastructure over varying technologies in database and messaging for around 8 years and from there I diversified into Service and Support management. Reflecting on this change, I realised I was better at collaborating than coding.

The next 6 years I spent working on various transformation projects requiring a high level of planning, organisation and collaboration which began with the build out of the campus’s state of the art 100 seat Command Centre facility bringing colleagues together across the group for the first time. I worked on how the technology, colleagues alongside the design and ethos of the space would put service, customers, and clients at the heart of Technology.

I Set up the firm’s first Social Media Operations function looking at how to track and alert on sentiment and trends online in relation to our diverse portfolio of services and how to use it to help in major incident scenarios supporting early detection of both internal and external issues. I was shortlisted for the Computing Women in IT Excellence Awards for this work in 2017.

Alongside my role building the Social Media Operations function I managed Major Event management for the space which was a cross functional team that got together for large scale changes, peak transaction periods and Industry events such as Tax Year end; Black Friday. My role involved coordinating internal and external stakeholders to great action plans including assessing risk, set up monitoring and reporting, capacity and impact planning and communicate out to the business on stability plans during these periods with Rapid escalation channels in Major Incident Management.

It was later in this tenure that I transitioned into Governance having worked closely with Major incident management in my previous role in Mainframe and then with the team directly. I worked on the roll out of numerous changes to our Incident Standard, Continuous Improvement module and Service Management Module within our ITIL Tools before securing a role as Architectural Governance Lead supporting our Risk, Finance and Treasury Business in the Chief Technology Office across 700+ applications supporting global group services, across 12 CIOs and 25+ architects.