Nina Wilkinson - Technology

• What inspires you?
• What attracted you to Barclays?
• Why did you choose to join GRB Technology?
• What have you been doing since you joined?
• What does your current role involve?
• Can you outline any interesting projects you've been involved with?
• What support and training have you had since joining?
• What qualities do you need to succeed in GRB Technology?
• have you been involved in any inspirational moments?

Transcript

What inspires you?
I’ve chosen to draw a group of stick men as my artistic ideas and very good all round in the circle. Because when I was thinking of Barclays and the things that really inspired me about Barclays has been the teamwork, the fact that everyone pulls together to get something done and the ambitions of Barclays is to be a top five Bank. Nobody is going to get the individually, the only way we’re going to get there is to pull together as a team and reach that goal to be a top five Bank.

What attracted you to Barclays?
I’d looked at a number of different companies to work for and had been interviewed by a number of different companies and the thing I liked about Barclays was that the people that had interviewed me had been in the company a number of years, some had been in there ten – twenty years, others had been in there thirty years and for people to stay in one company for such a long period of time, especially in today’s climate where a job is no longer for life, I thought the company must really have something special there. Also the final interview was at One Churchill Place, the head office of the company, and it’s absolutely fantastic. As soon as you walk in the building you get a real buzz about it. It’s very corporate and you know there’s a lot going on there, a lot of change and a lot of work’s getting done there.

Why did you choose to join Technology?
I joined CIO because I’d always been interested in computing. I’d done IT and computing at degree level and also at master’s level, I’ve always been a bit of a computer geek, so that is why I was looking for a job in IT. The beauty about Barclays IT department was that you could try a number of different areas in IT and you weren’t put into a category you had to stay in. So I could try roles in project management or go more technical if I wanted to.

What have you been doing since you joined?
I’ve done four roles since I joined last year. With the CIO graduate scheme you do four different jobs, three months each. In the first one I was in the design and engineering team looking at the application inventory, which is looking at all the different applications that Barclays have. In the second one I was in infrastructure service delivery which is more of the technical side, where I was a project manager delivering an online security project. On the third one I was working on Barclaycard International, also as a project manager, where I delivered a new card application system to Italy, which was really good fun, and I’m currently working in security as an information security consultant.

What does your current role involve?
In the information security department I was brought in to help with the management information. We’re getting a new head of information security and before she comes in they want to gather as much information about security throughout Barclays at the moment, so I’m putting together a report with the help of other people throughout the group to present to her when she comes into the organisation, so that she has a pack to know exactly what’s going on. I think that really, well it’s an honour that I’ve been given such high responsibility at such an early stage in my career.

Can you outline any interesting projects you’ve been involved with?
Probably the one that I most enjoyed was Project Aurora, given that the project had been on hold for a number of months because they were having a problem with the project and I was given it just to solve those problems. I managed to fix the problems and then implement it. The reason that that one really sticks out was because it was an international team that I was working with, it had people in Italy, Spain, Germany, just so many different characters and personalities and ways of doing work, it was a really brilliant atmosphere.

What support and training have you had since joining?
Barclays are very keen for you to develop yourself, you’re given a training allowance of £2000 and you can spend that on whatever you like. There are people who’ve had Spanish lessons or technical training if they want. I spent mine on the first part of a design diploma, and I’ve also had training in every different placement that I went to. In the first one I got my Prince 2 Foundation Qualification. They are very keen on you to develop yourself as a person and also get technical qualifications if you want them.

What qualities do you need to succeed in GRB Technology?
In an IT role you need to be a good team player because you can’t do it all yourself and you can’t know everything. It’s such an old organisation, there’s so many things, that you need to go to different people to find out what it is you need to do your job. I think you need to be a self starter because they’re not going to sit you down and say do x, y and z. They’ll give an outline but it’s up to you to go and mould that into what you need to do. And also just energy to be able to do the job, to keep going, and the willingness to learn just to absorb as much information as possible.

Have you been involved in any inspirational moments?
My most inspirational moment was on the project I talked about earlier, Project Aurora. They’d had this problem, it had been around for about three months and morale on in project was very low at that point, no one could be bothered with it, everyone was going off to other projects to do that, everybody knew it was there but didn’t want to get involved with it. When I was given it I knew there was this issue, so I found out as much as I could about this issue and who the key contacts were for it.

What had been happening is that the people had been individually going to the project manager telling him what was happening and then he would have to regurgitate that to somebody else and then come back and tell them. That project manager had been off for a number of months so nothing had happened. So when I came in I decided, well I don’t know anything about it, so instead get everybody on one call to discuss the issue and from that one call it was evidential that we couldn’t solve it in one meeting. So what I decided to do so as to keep it at the forefront of everybody’s minds, was to arrange that meeting every day at 10 o’clock so people knew it wasn’t going to go away. They had to think about it and get on that call and find the issues as quickly as possible.

And it was great because within, I think it was six days, we had come up with a solution, put it through testing and it worked and it was an absolutely brilliant feeling, that everybody had been so negative around the project and by everybody pulling together and putting in all this extra time and effort that we actually came up with a solution to the problem and we were actually able to launch the project.