My 25 years in BT Group

I joined on 27th July 1998 on a graduate programme to learn systems analysis and programming in those early days of business computing.? My BT journey started in Swindon, Wiltshire with the Cardiff & Swindon Engineering Centre (CSEC), working with software development in PL/SQL, C and .NET, writing code for managers of people across call centres (as they were back then), allowing them to access agent call data.

Some of you know that I am a qualified mountain guide and during my first 2 years in BT I persuaded my team to take part in the 3 peaks challenge (to climb the highest mountain in England, Wales and Scotland in 24 hours) for charity.

2000 - After completing the 2 year graduate programme I took up a technical delivery manager role with the Fasttrack team in Bristol.? Working on tactical solutions and code red projects.? This Included FastGOA (aka BT’s Ordering system), FastCobra (ADSL account transition), and FastJuliet (for which I won the top prize on the BT Ideas programme (not bad for a youngster to BT).? This is also about the time I undertook my first 'My Customer Challenge Cup'.? This is where teams come together to solve problems.? I went on to complete in 12 competitions and reached the Grand Final and Semi-final 5 times.

I got to spend a year or so working out of the Microsoft headquarters in Reading on a joint project with Rotherham Bury Council.

I ended up leading the Bristol team.? Probably the proudest moment for me was being part of the first teams in BT to run a true agile SCRUM project.

I used to work from the Exeter office every Friday, just so I could jump on a boat in Plymouth every weekend, so that I could sail to France and back in order for me to accumulate enough miles to obtain my yacht master ticket.

2005 - After my time in Fastrack I did a variety of work from working on early health apps (using medical devices like spirometers) connected via Bluetooth to health records connected to your doctor; to working on carbon foot-printing as a service offering, including for Tesco stores (for my India colleagues that is the major food retailer in the UK); to working on bid projects for the Met police and Foreign and Commonwealth Office; to working on Defence projects at that secret donut shaped building in Cheltenham (which I can't detail of course).? One thing I can say is that I was part of a team of two responsible for working out the greenhouse gas production for it.

I settled in a role working on BT's SharePoint external intranet offerings out of Cardiff.? This role even took me to Seattle to meet the Microsoft exec.? What came of this is a big push by Microsoft to improve accessibility and usability of SharePoint across Europe.? Some of you know I'm good on SharePoint… now you know why!

2008 - Next I got involved in managing a project in the employability skills arena called Talentmap. This exposed me to working with four government departments, three nations, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the Federation of Small Business (FSB), the UK Commission for Employment & Skills (UKCES) and the Prime Ministers Talent & Enterprise Taskforce. The project existed to address the gap between employers and the education world and established standard language through which all can engage, with the ultimate aim of improving employability skills in people of all ages.?? I had the good fortune to work on a secondment for the UKCES and to work with some immensely passionate people up and down the country.? After finishing on the project, I realised that this is where I can best support BT and — more importantly for me — progress my career and make a real impact on society.

2009 - My next career-developing opportunity was to get involved very early on in developing BT’s fundraising service – Mydonate (sadly now closed). This got me working directly with charities in a consultative ambassador role to develop a rival service to ‘JustGiving’. I developed Mydonate using agile SCRUM which was the ideal way to build the service as part of a team collaborating with the customers and charities alike.? Through building Mydonate I learnt a great deal about the third sector as well as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as a subject within a large organisation. Once the service went live it really shook up the competition and charities have reaped the benefits. Mydonate enabled 100% of the donation to go to charities and this fundamentally impacted local communities. I am immensely proud of my time on this transformative programme and I feel a sense of achievement every time I see remnants of it.

Next up with the help of my mentor, Joanna Lewis (special advisor to our ex-Chairman Sir Mike Rake) I found an external charitable secondment role working for Business in the Community (BITC) to programme manage a campaign to bring about transformational change to the way work experience happens across the UK – known as Work Inspiration.? The role meant effectively leaving BT (temporarily at least).? Whilst in the role, the skills I gained at BT quickly became apparent and this gave me confidence in the role. I look back on it as an amazing learning curve.? I was exposed to working with hundreds of businesses and charitable organisations at all levels, such as Marks & Spencer, Royal Mail, Serco, Capgemini, Boots, National Grid, Eversheds, Chime Communications, MacDonald’s and Barclays.? I built up a huge network of contacts and gained some great friends in the process. The programme converted 110,000 (of the 500,00 a year) work experiences in the UK.? We took the programme to Australia and Sweden and even trended #1 on Twitter at the 1st anniversary of the initiative.

2010 - On my return to BT I was offered the opportunity to get involved in BT’s employee-supported volunteering efforts.? We completely transformed and operationalised the way employee volunteering was delivered by BT.? In the space of just a few years we were able to literally quadruple the amount of volunteering activity and contribution to society.? In my time as the volunteering operations manager, we passed the milestone of 2 million hours of volunteering and became the largest volunteering programme in the world.? We picked up a big society award from Number 10 which I am hugely proud of.

All of the collective insights and learning that I have picked up has led me to talk openly about employee-supported volunteering at plenary sessions and various events with charities and businesses.? I even got the opportunity to be seconded to British Airways to act as a consultant on volunteering engagement strategies. This helped me to realise that I have something to offer society around employee-supported volunteering and how to engage and transform the volunteering fortunes of both businesses and more importantly employees.? On the back of it I wrote a book (Volunteering in a box) which you can find on Amazon.

In the latter half of my career I was involved in all things risk, compliance and assurance.? Starting out in IT I sort of became synonymous with risk ("Mr Risk").? Developing some of the risk tooling still used across Digital and Networks today.? I got stuck into all sorts of security, compliance and assurance programmes. Highlights for me were in the control space, developing new and enhanced controls.

Weaved through this time I started a sort of pet project/ initiative to transform the way we do project review (aka Post Implementation Review) in BT.? I started supporting a virtual team of modern apprentices coming and going to help deliver a new service called Project Review & Learning.? Together we took my concept from an idea to a service supporting over 2,300 colleagues with 288 team across BT using the service.

Another development that I have loved to bring to life over my career, is My A to Z Glossary service which is benefitting all of BT.? This is communicated to all new joiners.? It's available as an app so people have it to hand and are able to suggest additions via a workflow.? This is helping to remove barriers for new joiners of BT or teams.

Dec 2021 - My final role in BT took me to Group Business Services (GBS) in the world of data, security and Health, safety & environment.

Moments I'm proud of:? developing the closed loop 'operationalised' assurance programme that learns inspects and adapts.? Baselining and measuring the awareness level for GBS.? Launching the Secure+ mobile App to 3,500+ colleagues.? It feels to me like I did some of my best work over this last stint.