Georgia Dowdeswell

Head of Ways of Working @Oxford University Press

Oxfordshire, GB

The largest University Press in the world. OUP publishes to the academic, education and English language training sectors- Line management of a team of 8 Product Owners and Business Analysts - Team responsibilities across the entire Digital Services arena, in particular: Oxford Academic, Education assessment platforms and the launch and iterative development of the Next Generation product for English Language Training- Joined as the Digital Services team was being functionally split into ‘consumer delivery team’ and an ‘internal delivery team’ - Created and implemented processes for VROM (Very Rough Order of Magnitude) and Proof of Concept requests thereby decreasing the average time for delivery of requests from many months to under a month - Wherever possible moved from pure waterfall to a hybrid agile mode of working - Improved velocity and predictability of work through development teams by deploying Technical Product Owners - Instilled good agile practices for story writing and the creation of acceptance criteria - Standardised the use of Jira through the story creation process - Mentored Business Analysts to find deliverable value in small iterations, enabling OUP to switch key teams from a multi-year project model to a continual development model with quarterly releases - Busted knowledge silos through structured knowledge sharing Management tools and skills- Aha! software to plan roadmap and deliverables for programme increments - Backlog management, writing user stories and sprint reporting through Jira - Working with multidisciplinary Fusion teams - Product documentation and knowledge share through Confluence, MS Teams - Technologies: SQL, PostgreSQL, Mongo, microservices, RestFUL API, PostgreSQL

University of Bedfordshire

BA (Hons), Sports Studies