Inside of work:

Firstly, clear and effective communication is key for any company to succeed!

My role in the retail world enables me to perfect my communication skills, as a large part of the role requires me to speak with other departments and levels of management. This is due to me needing to understand the full requirements of a new report whilst explaining what information is currently held in the database. For the majority of the time, there is a lack of information past over to me, normally due to limited knowledge of the level of detail the database can go into. Whilst scoping out a new report, I feel it best to sit with the requester and discuss exactly what they are wanting now and what the vision is for the future. We will also talk about the purpose of the report and who the intended audience is. All this information provides me with a clear objective and whilst developing the report, I keep checking in with the requester to ensure, mainly to provide an update but to also ensure no new ideas have come to light - if there has been, I will include this into the report where possible.

In the past, I have taken the lead on numerous passenger migrations. The aim was to transfer passengers from another airline to our own flights, which involved new processes being created and training staff. These are always difficult, as two different airlines will report and store data in different formats. My challenge was to ensure we received the data, validate it then begin to create new bookings and inform the passenger. The situation becomes more difficult as passengers itineraries change and both airlines want updates and expected resolution dates.

I successfully created a bespoke process which enabled me to quickly convert the other airlines data into the format we preferred. Once done, another new automated process was designed to create the bookings and inform the passenger.

Before, during and after, I liaised with the other airline, spoke directly with our teams to ensure everyone was aware and understood what was happening and potential work coming their way, such as passenger inquiries to our reservation team.

(Please note: If two airlines operate the same route and one ceased operating, sometimes the 2 airlines will agree to accommodate the other passengers. Sometimes, if no agreement has been made, it will be a straight forward refund to the passenger and they are expected to re-book onto the other airline's flight. Alternatively, you could be re-routed depending on the airline's operating network.)

Inside of work:

Regardless of the task I am doing, I have this statement in mind: "how will this impact on the customer"

During my time in the utilities industry, I worked on the high level complaints team. I dealt with complaints which were on the same site or street as each other. Most of the time these would be new builds where the plot numbers eventually changed to a different house number and we (or anyone in the industry) were not informed.

By the time a customer came to me, the likelihood would be they had dealt with 10+ people and already had a complaint outstanding for over 60 days - you can easily imagine their frustration by this point. My first challenge was to convince them that I could resolve the issue and would no longer be passed around.

I only made promises which I knew I could keep, such as when I would update them, rather than when a site visit would happen. I would explain to the customer the situation and constraints, such as other properties having another supplier, it caused further issues and delays.

During the investigation process, I ensured the engineers carrying out the site visits had clear instructions and my contact details if needed. The customer would also have my contact details in case they had any further questions.

Once the investigation process was complete, I would prioritise my customers account over national and other suppliers systems, so that the customer could, finally, start receiving correct invoices.

I received numerous thank you letters/emails which I am very proud of, given the situation.

Inside of work:

At times, there has been no available senior manager due to time of day (such as of an evening) or due to meetings.

A situation came to light whereby a flight was due to be cancelled. As this was the last flight of the day and not operating this routing for the next 3 days, the passengers would have been stuck at the departing airport. Once I knew the situation, I took it upon myself to aid our operations team, since no one from the senior management team were available.

Knowing the matter in hand, I advised the team to allow the passengers to be place in taxes so that they could get to the arriving airport.

I took this decision for a number of reasons, with the main 2 being a) to get the passengers to their destination b) reduce the compensation and hotel costs.

As this was not standard company policy, I informed our senior management team of my actions, which they understood and agreed with my reasoning.

Inside of work:

Back in the aviation industry, the joy of my role and earning the trust of the senior management team is that I have the freedom to take the initiative.

Unfortunately, back then our operations system did not 'talk' to our selling system. Due to some reductions in the schedule, we had a number of passengers turn up for a flight without an aircraft planned to operate. At the time, the failure was put down to a lack of communication between the commercial and operational team and to limit this situation from happening again, a weekly meeting was organised.

In my eyes, this was not enough and would be a time consuming process. I took it upon myself to learn the operational system's reporting capability. Once I knew the options available to me, I began creating a process which would highlight any mismatches between the two systems. The process was driven by an Excel macro, resulting in an emailed report consisting of the mismatches. This email was sent to all 3 key departments (operations, commercial and the customer care team).

Nowadays, the process has survived 2 system migrations and continues to play a key part in the business. It has saved countless amounts of compensation and embarrassment for the airline. The only challenge today is to encourage people to read the email!

Inside of work:

Whilst in the aviation industry, when the airline entered into a franchise agreement, we needed to ensure all future bookings could be created in the new system.

Whilst analysing how to gather the information, the main issue I encountered was our current system provider would charge us to provide the data in a usable format. The second issue was the format required for the new system, which was unlike any format we had preempted or dealt with in the past. These two issues would cause all future bookings not to be created in the new system. This would effect all passengers and result in a large loss of revenue.

I knew we needed a solution which would be cost effective and enable the bookings to created.

I reached out to my colleague who knew how to script within the selling system, this would resolve issue 1, the second problem was resolved thanks to the VBA I created to covered the data from our selling system into the new system format.

The migration was a massive learning curve but thankfully a successful one.

Inside of work:

My custom made suite of reports is a perfect example of my research and investigation techniques, along with my persistence.

Originally, myself and a colleague would spend, on average, 2 hours a day working on the reports for the business and it's owners. Some of these reports are business critical and time sensitive. Each morning, it would be a manic rush to get the reports done and emailed out before starting the rest of our day jobs.

Early into learning the process of creating the reports, I quickly identified elements which I knew could be speed up using macros. This was an instant success however, I knew the process could be fully automated, I just did not know how to do it.

I spoke with people in and outside the business, spent time googling bits and finally came up with a strategy which would work but, more importantly, was at no extra cost to the company, since all of the automating was done using per-installed programs (task manager, VBA, VBS and Excel).

Admittedly, there was a good deal of trial and error, with a lot of time spent on this process which, in the end, was worth it. We could come into work with the reports already completed. On bad days, when there are system issues, thanks to the emails, we know what has failed when we walk into the office and, with the way I designed the process, we can quickly re-run the reports.

Inside of work:

There is no I in "team"

Firstly, people take the word "team" too seriously. By that, I mean people will only think about their own team whereas they should think about the larger team - the company as a whole!

I believe my time in retail is the perfect example of that statement. I know I worked in the finance department, under the BI team however, I was a key team member for other teams across the business and was regularly included in their team meetings. This soon became the norm and I encouraged my fellow BI team members to follow suit with the teams they worked closely with.

In the past, whilst in the aviation industry, I worked very closely with the operations, communications, marketing and customer support teams along with other members of the commercial team. I would be tempted to go as far to say I am the glue which holds us all together. Know that is a big statement to make, but with all the support, training, understanding and cooperation I provide, I believe I can say such a statement, especially given that the teams worked in almost complete silos to each other before I joined.

In general, I go out of my way to share information between the teams, to help those understand the cause or effect actions have further down the line. I have created numerous processes to assist in the daily running of each team/department but, each time I have tried to develop others so that going forward, they have the skill set to enable themselves to make such changes.

The challenge at first is to help people understand other people's problems over their own problems. Once you manage that, people will start to think about the chain reaction and, by changing the way they work, can save time further down the line.