Alison Swinscoe worked as a Agile Delivery Manager / Scrum Master for Lloyds Banking Group throughout the pandemic. The lab where Alison was working at the start of Covid restrictions, supported the role out of facilities to increase home workers. This was a key activity to help more of our colleagues work from home, where they had not previously done so. This enabled us to continue to meet desired Service Levels and support our customers through this difficult period.
The lab also supported workforce management system upgrades, enabling timely and accurate views on workforce availability. This was critical to enable us to track an ever changing workforce position, and ensure colleagues were available to provide customer support in an ever changing landscape.
Alison moved during Covid on-going restrictions to a new lab, which was heavily involved in supporting our customers through financial hardship situations, delivering the Covid driven regulatory changes to customer processes, and supporting the systems that facilitated these processes.
Alison being an apprentice during Covid, her role was impacted in a similar way to the majority of colleagues. The biggest impact being to her working location and the change in focus to support customers in financial difficulty. As Lloyds Banking Group focus is on continuing to support all our customers and ‘Helping Britain Recover’, Alison hopes to be able to continue utilising the skills she acquired on her Digital & Technology Solutions Cybersecurity Apprenticeship, to support the lab in achieving their goals.
From an academic study perspective, Alison moved to on-line learning during Covid. This position was established quickly by the University to ensure there was no impact to our ability to continue with our studies. Being able to leverage the experience they had already gained in their role working on Teams, Alison was able to transition easily to on-line learning. She also had to adopt a new approach to studying modules in a shorter period of time but both the University and LBG supported this transition to ensure everyone had enough time to study and submit assignments in a timely manner. This was an intense period, where she was able to show great resilience adopting these changes to their learning, at the same time as managing considerable work pressures to deliver required system change through Covid.