Professional experience

Siobhán Sarelle has worked for over 20 years for one of the UK's largest employers. She has primarily worked as a Software Developer for the company's in-house development team. She has also worked as a Business Analyst which is crucial to connecting people with each other to understand their needs.

How Siobhán likes to work

Siobhán sees emotional wellbeing as being fundamental to operating a healthy organisation. She feels that what works best for her is working in an 'agile' way. Siobhán views everyone working on a project as part of her team, including developers, managers, product owners, and users. It's very important to her that everyone's voice is heard, that everyone feels valid, valued, and respected, that roles and boundaries are understood. She highly values people having good space to talk, be listened to, and to negotiate.

Siobhán sees having good structure to 'hold' the group, being essential, so everyone feels equally valid, and everyone feels they have the appropriate responsibility for their role. Siobhán's idea of structure, embraces change at any time though. She believes that good structure can encapsulate fluidity, change, and diversity in the healthiest way, so that that everyone involved gets their emotional needs met.

Siobhán can be a specialist herself, but because she has a very keen interest in people but also in technology, perhaps her key skill, is in understanding people & systems, then connecting specialists with non specialists.

Current and past roles and experience

Business Analysis and Project Work

Siobhán has a passion for connecting with people, listening to them, empowering them and helping them to realise their needs and the needs of Customers. She then translates those needs for specialists, and helps bring everyone together to create meaningful solutions with positive outcomes that everyone feels. Siobhán's approach is based on her skills and experience with people, relationships, and psychology. She likes to be structuring and nurturing, she highly values the opinions of her colleagues, uses assertive communication skills, and seeks to empower people to work together in the best, healthiest way.

Acting in the role of a Business Analyst, Siobhán helped improve and develop her team's development methodology. She established regular, routine meetings with clear purpose and outcomes, connecting people in different roles, with different levels of technical knowledge, together. She can lead meetings to help people be on the same page, connect with each other, but then step back and let others lead. Siobhán is excellent at refining and rationalising the requirements or Product Backlog for a project. She can turn often complex thoughts and needs, into meaningful, useful User Stories, bringing order and clarity to a project so that the work can be prioritised well, and those undertaking the work can discuss what is needed, feel confident in what they need to do, and deliver the work.

Software design, development, implementation, and maintenance

Siobhán also has a wealth of experience in designing, building, implementing, and maintaining business critical applications herself. She has worked conscientiously for many years to look after the systems and those who rely on them, and the data, on a day-to-day basis. She particularly enjoys listening to people, understanding what might make their working lives better, helping them to find solutions, and delivering a User Experience and seeing the positive emotional results of everyone's collective effort.

Applications and systems that Siobhán has been part of designing, building, and/or implementing, have been some of the most needed, and most used (including by hundreds of people simultaneously) in the business. They have been very stable, had few outages, and though mostly small systems, they have been critical to some of the most important processes in the business, critical to achieving good standards of data quality, and to supporting larger, integral systems which as the Customer billing system.

Test Management

Siobhán has performed the role of Test Manager for applications that have been used by hundreds of colleagues across teams and departments to improve their working lives, refine processes, improve Customer data quality, and ultimately improve the experience of Customers. The role included creating test cases, overseeing groups of people testing the applications, gathering results, and then communicating them to developers to fix bugs and make improvements as part of the development cycle.

Customer Retention

For several years, Siobhán was critical to her part of the business's Customer Retention. This included the building and maintaining of crucial systems, processing the data, ensuring a high level of data quality and allocating that Customer data to several Customer contact teams. Siobhán worked closely with her colleagues throughout the day to help ensure one of the most important processes for the business, ran as smoothly and quickly as possible. Her work didn't stop there though, as she and those teams were on a very tight, time sensitive deadline to report results of the work back to the industry as a very strict legal requirement. At the end of each day it was Siobhán's responsibility to check the quality of the data from the day's work and then ensure industry data flows were sent in order to retain Customers. Another critical part of Siobhán's role was to fulfil the legal requirement of contacting competitors to keep them informed. This also sometimes involved Siobhán using specialist industry knowledge to speak to competitors, listen to challenges, and deal with legal disputes.