Gillian Attard

In my role as a BRM I cover the account management of the different customer service organisations in Amadeus. As part of my portfolio I cover corporate contact centre solutions, Customer Relationship Management tools, Workforce Management and Learning solutions. Taking on such a radically different role in a completely new department was another challenge but I guess you have you understood by now that I love them. A smile and loads of curiosity go a long way.

When the chance to create a third level maintenance team from scratch in my department opened I felt the job was made for me. I love challenges, creating things, solving problems, creating relationships with stakeholders and seeing people grow. Besides reducing our department backlog by 95% I count as my achievements a positive recognition from our internal customers and a rotating team that was happy to come to work every morning.

With my previous experience in development and my newly acquired skills in Product Management and Ownership I felt I was in an advantageous position to take on a Functional Expert role and merge the best of both words. It is very rare to go from Product Management to R&D in Amadeus and I would like to thank my management for giving me this opportunity. I consider gaining the trust of my technical counterparts to build our products as my biggest achievement in this role.

As part of the Amadeus permanent team I was involved in working on a replacement for SELL Classic & developing our new flagship product SELL Connect. These enhancements were run in scrum mode & with this method & together with my hard-working teams we were able to successfully deliver the first version of the Command Page, Cryptic Magic & Productivity Suite. Implementing agile methods in a big company came with its own challenges & also several learning opportunities on how to interact & work across teams.

Following my MBA, Amadeus gave me a great opportunity to practice my newly acquired skills in Product Management. During this role I was responsible for managing a handful of technical components for our previous flagship product SELL Classic. During this experience I was challenged with consolidating the different regional and segment requirements and turning them into functional solutions in our product. Working with such a diverse client base has given me a great opportunity to widen my horizons.

When Boris Gloger gave me the opportunity to head up his training department and work remotely while changing countries I gladly took up the challenge. The position was a steep learning curve: creating a training portfolio, a pool of reliable trainers, finding customers and I enjoyed every single second of it. In parallel to this opportunity, I was in my final stages of my MBA and I made the hard choice to focus on it as the expense of my job.

This position, as a telecoms billing expert has helped cement my experience in the telecommunications industry. My position as an (Amdocs) functional billing expert was my first experience working with remote teams, acquiring and merging foreign telecommunications companies into our billing sytsems and working external providers. It was hard to leave such a rich experience but when the opportunity to move to France and take on a new role came up I had a hard time saying no to a new challenge.

During this position, I was lucky to have been exposed to a manager, who was looking for new ways to run development teams. I was one of the first developers to be exposed and trained as a Certified Scrum Master in Europe by Ken Schwaber. This exposure to agile methods made me an avid believer and follower in my professional and personal life. A year in this position the company was acquired by Orange. Echoes of my experience in my first job were too loud and I proactively decided to pursue a new challenge.

This was my first real job after my studies. I was hired as a junior consultant to work on diverse development projects. Unfortunately I was very quickly made redundant when the company was impacted by the 2000 dot-com bubble. Rather disappointing to have such an experience from a first job however this experience has definitely made me a more resilient person.

I completed my MBA by correspondence in 2 years while living in Austria and France. As part of the the MBA I took the following courses: Fundamentals of Senior Management, Strategy, Financial Strategy, Innovation, Creativity & Change and Making a Difference.

During my studies I was a student representative for the Board of Studies for I.T., I took part in a traineeship (2001) in Zagreb, Croatia working at the University of Zagreb on Mobile Agents and a traineeship (2002) in Vienna, Austria developing a website for the Technical University of Vienna.