Liam Robinson

In March of 2024 I was recruited by BT Group, as a Digital Delivery Manager to take over the role of leading delivery for EE Business Digital Software Development Unit. Within this role I manage the overall programme delivery of three Tribes who are responsible for the EE Business shop domain. Within these Tribes we are solely responsible for creating the Digital Buy Journeys for Business Acquisition, Retention and Automation. The three Tribes are made up of close to 80 professionals, all with different expertise in Product, Engineering and Design, with a CAPEX/OPEX managed by myself of 13.7m annually.

In my role as Digital Delivery Manager for EE Business Digital, it has been my responsibility to manage the overall delivery and planning of my units quarterly roadmap and medium term plan which focuses on the future of EE Business Digital over the next five financial years, whilst ensuring there is a robust delivery framework implemented across what is a complex matrix business framework.

Since joining in March, I have taken tremendous pride in moving forward the vision for EE Business Digital and continuing to build a high performing business unit, that delivers quality products on time in a predictable fashion. In my tenure to date at BT Group, I have helped transform EE Business Digital, from a unit that was in desperate need of direction and structure, into a mature high performing area of the business that delivers results as shown below.

• Since taking over the role as Delivery Manager for EE Business Digital, as a unit we have moved from automating no orders, to now automating roughly 9% of the total EE Business raised sales, using complex API's and RPA bots to achieve this milestone.

• Overall Shop traffic has continued to lift throughout the 24/25 financial year, up an average of +20%.

• Conversion on both Acquisition and Retention have followed an upward trend this financial year of around +4% compared to the previous year.

• Most importantly we have seen a continuously steady trend of upward lift in EE Business Digital channel share, which is a testament to the pace and quality of work that is being delivered by the unit.

Below is detail on just some of the successfully delivered products that I have launched as a Digital Delivery Manager:

• In April my unit began working on the migration of the new EE Business shop domain, going from a legacy tech stack to a new strategic platform. In this deliverable we had a strict deadline of migrating off the old stack and onto the new strategic platform by Nov 2024, if we were unable to complete this by the date given, we would incur an estimated £700k unaccounted OPEX spend. I took a leading part in managing the project from start to finish, ensuring we had key risks and dependencies being managed along with detailed project roadmaps, ensuring business areas were collaborating as a collective group, by having a robust cadence in place. On 24th Oct the new EE Business Shop reached 100% scale, achieving a conversion uplift of around +20% (From 5.25% to 6.26%) and drastic page speed enhancements. I am extremely proud to have led from the front on this deliverable along with receiving recognition from multiple C-suite stakeholders around the business.

• I took a leading role in managing the relationships and overall go to markets, for all of the full automation via API journeys which was a firsts for the EE Business shop.

• Some of the most impactful deliveries I've been involved in within my unit, have been the release of new Digital Buy Journeys, not previously available to customers on the EE Businesss shop. Such as Multi-sub resign, Add-A-line SIMO and Handset, Enhanced Trade-In, eSIM, Re-Sign of all Categories and refurbished devices which have all been delivered since Q2 this financial year.

• I have collectively worked with Marketing, Digital Trading and Base Management to deliver a multitude of targeted customer campaigns. These have delivered volume and new customer journeys into the Digital space, such as End of Contract Campaign landing pages, and Out of Contract landing pages.

• Across EE Business Digital, I have also played a pivotal role in representing my unit in regulatory changes, such as the new Ofcom Price rise changes, as well as being involved in the release of the new iPhone 16 launch.

One of my key goals when joining a new team or business is to drive positive change. In my time at BT so far, I have transformed a unit that had very little structure into what I would consider a high performing team that embodies the core values of agility. After only a few weeks in the area, I restructured the team and tribe leadership ways of working, ensuring there is a robust framework in place that tracks on-going deliveries. This led to a business area that is forward thinking, has regular cadence with key partners around the business, proactively discusses and acts early on risks and dependencies, and most importantly creates visibility to senior leaders in the business.

In conclusion, during my time at BT Group thus far and previous companies I have proved I am an experienced leader, who is able to successfully deliver complex product roadmaps, whilst ensuring the area I work in has a robust delivery and planning framework in place. I have used data based decision making to continuously improve business areas in all aspects, whilst continuously championing Agile ways of working using various Agile management tools and frameworks across a multitude of sectors. This has led me to the point of wanting to embark on a new challenge, to be responsible for driving and managing change across a wider audience, and delivering key business deliverables at pace which contributes to the overall success of a company.

In April of 2023 I was recruited by AQA, to fill a newly created position of Performance and Planning Lead within AQA's Customer & Product business area. Within this role I managed two teams, made up of Scrum Masters, CI professionals, Insights and Research specialists.

In my role as Performance and Planning Lead it was my responsibility to organise and oversee Customer Experience and Product's entire portfolio of work. Whilst collaborating and working in a matrix style organisation, across all areas and levels up to C suite. My ambition was to ensure the business was provided insights, guidance and supported in improvement efforts, to ensure customers were kept front and centre in the key decisions being made by the organisation. A key focus was to develop and manage the roadmap of key Customer Experience activities, in order to drive performance and productivity, mitigate delivery related risks and to be the objective voice of continuous and sustained improvements.

Diving deeper into my core role, it was my responsibility to take the lead and ensure all the Customer Experience and Product portfolio of initiatives were meticulously planned, prioritised, resourced, budgeted and routed using agile methodologies and process improvement techniques, whilst keeping a key focus on driving quality throughout. Some key responsibilities within my work streams were to engage with, and hold to account key operational functions responsible for delivering improvement projects within the Customer Experience and Product programme of work.

When I started in April, I was first tasked with consulting on the restructuring of the Customer and Product business area. With the overall aim of moving the teams to a more mature delivery and planning framework, to create more visibility around the business. Having a background in Agile Delivery I proposed the move to SAFe, which was agreed with the Customer and Product Director Group. In the time between April and my last day at AQA I had successfully transformed and restructured 4 out of the 6 departments that sat within Customer and Product.

Along with the implementation of the new delivery framework, I also worked with the director group to enhance the usage of OKR's and KPI across the various business areas, with the aim of being more aligned and focused on our overall business strategic goals.

During my tenure at AQA I also took on the paternity cover role of Head of Customer experience for several months and continued to help drive deliveries that were customer centric.

Over the course of 2023, I had successfully delivered 29 improvement projects varying in size, my involvement within these projects has also varied from being Project Lead, Product Owner, Agile Lead. Within all of the projects I have solely led in coordinating the project planning and execution with the teams involved, which has required me to be meticulous with my stakeholder management. It has needed me to be visible to all working groups and have constant contact with Head of Department's and Directors to ensure work is prioritised on backlogs according to business value and return on investment.

In August of 2022 I was offered the position of Agile Delivery Lead, within Capital One’s Cloud Based Engineering Unit. Within this role I managed two separate business areas, of which one was an offshore function. These teams were responsible for the management of ECS Fargate, all of the UK businesses AMI’s and Container images, Chef, Lambda and Ansible APIs. Whilst also providing a support function for the Cloud Web Product Development team.

As an Agile Delivery Lead, I built a level of efficiency and mastery within the role which enabled me to identify, drive improvements and add value early and often across the teams. I have a full understanding of the key agile principles for both Scrum and Kanban and acted as a servent leader for the squads. This enabled the teams to deliver value back to the business efficiently, leading to capital expenditure cost savings through automation.

Within the role, I proactively lead sessions to produce detailed delivery roadmaps, which often have a variety of complex external dependencies and risks due to the highly complex matrix environment we sat in. During these sessions my job was to enable the teams to understand that successful planning takes into consideration not only delivery risks, but also solution trade offs and prioritisation. Positive challenge is something I focused on during planning, in order to help the team consider alternative approaches or to help optimise their delivery roadmap. Off the back of this I managed the progress against the delivery plan and took any proactive actions needed to stay on track, through a structured agile cadence which involved RAID, refinement and retrospectives.

It was my responsibility to lead the teams through all planning activities, ensuring all risks, dependencies and associated costs were prioritised and considered whilst ensuring the squads were planning within their capacity. As both of my business areas worked closely with their US counterparts, dependency management was an integral part of my team’s success.

Analysing data, was something that I had been able to use as a powerful tool to make key decisions. This enabled me to have powerful data driven conversations to make meaningful decisions and drive change where required. I have become proficient with analytical tools such as PowerBI and Tableau.

To call out some of my notable achievements within this role, the combined cycle time of a product from ideation to launch, had reduced from 107 to 78 days. Along with a CAPEX reduction across both business areas by close to 11%.

In April of 2021 I was offered the position of the above titled role within Digital Engineering. My day to day responsibilities consisted of:

• Managing and maintaining a variety of software applications and tools.
• Owning specific change processes.
• Being a consultant to the wider business for guidance on said applications and tools.
• Within this role I had to manage several third party contracts for Capital One.