I'm very much a generalist. I've always been used to fill the gaps.
“I'm a fairly quick learner, so I tended to be the person picked to learn something new. I've done everything in this company from being one of the first employees dealing with Windows servers through to now DevOps automation. Looking after end-user services and being operations manager for end-user services and things like that. So lots and lots of roles."
At the time, an opportunity to take part in the Corndel DevOps Apprenticeship arose, which proved to be a pivotal moment in their career. This was a chance to upskill in line with key projects and helped scale Capita’s DevOps capability by building on existing in-house expertise.
At the point the opportunity came up, we had been working with providing automations via code for a customer and a product that we were developing at the time. We had embedded some pipelines in and had begun to use Scrum and all that kind of stuff, but it was very much our own flavour of what we'd learned by trying to do it.”
And then this opportunity came up, and I thought this just aligns perfectly with everything we're trying to do, and we can learn to do it properly – formalise our knowledge and fill in the gaps”
It saved countless hours of engineers remotely connecting and installing software.
The DevOps Lead at Capita has certainly seen efficiency gains since starting the DevOps programme, especially with a workflow for software installations that reduced engineers' manual work significantly, improving user experiences without constant remote connections:
“The DevOps programme has saved Capita hours and hours of engineering time. We implemented a process to trigger a workflow when people within the organisation wanted software installed on their machine, and it significantly improved the user experience. It saved countless hours of engineers remotely connecting and installing software, which was massive."
