Andrew - General Management - IT Leadership

I thought I would explain more about my role and give a bit of detail around the aspects I am involved in on a day-2-day basis.

I work in the 'Risk' department of Retail IT, basically this department designs, develops and maintains all the systems used to support the business in balancing risk and operating a regulatory environment – this can include things such as fraud prevention, credit decisioning and anti-money laundering checking.

Given the size of the business some of these systems can be very large and complicated – especially when you get into aspects such as real-time processing.

In terms of my typical activities, normally on a morning I'll come in and pick-up with the support team in India whether there have been any issues with the system batches overnight. Usually things are fine and everything has worked, other times there might have to be follow-on actions to fix any issues or begin to liaise with other teams in HBOS to resolve. I don't technically fix the issues myself but co-ordinate the responses in the various teams and manage the users expectations about when any problems will be resolved.

Later in the day there will typically be a team meeting to catch-up with the latest activities on the project and ensure that what ever phase we are in that we are actively managing the issues.

Currently I am also managing the implementation of the project I am working on – this involves a lot of up front planning to ensure that when we put the new system live it goes in right first time, doesn't affect any other critical systems and that the it meets the users requirements. I may have time blocked out to continue the implementation planning for instance or host a workshop with the users to walk them through the approach and activities for putting this new system live.

Then, depending on what I am involved in outside of my project I may have some 'graduate' work to undertake as part of being a member on the scheme. I'll go into more detail in my next blog about graduate activities but typically we can spend 20% of our time on activities outside of our day-2-day project role.

So, by the time I have got through most of that – plus a lot of emails, phone calls, chats and meetings is usually the end of the day!