From Graduate to Product Owner- My Journey Over 20 Years at EDF

One of the many great things about working in the Central Engineering team is meeting lots of the new graduates and watching how Steve Bowerman and the team look to integrate them and develop them during their placement, its great to see the progress they make and even though my own experience of joining this company as a graduate is a very long time ago it does remind me of that period of my life (back in the 90’s!).

I successfully applied for the London Electricity graduate scheme in early summer 1996 after completing a Masters in Information Systems. This masters was intended for graduates with limited IT experience and suited me as my degree had been in Quantity Surveying with no IT content at all. The recession in the building industry at that time meant I needed to try something different. I was part of a cohort of 8 IT graduates, in addition to graduates in finance, HR and other areas. The 8 IT graduates were split into 5 Analyst Programmers — including me, and 3 Production Support. The analyst programmers started our London Electricity careers with an intensive 10 week off site training program learning Cobol, CICS and DB2 based in Mandela Street which was a London Electricity training facility. This was a good chance to bond as a group and really learn some IT skills since, like me, none of the others had IT backgrounds. The company also did a good job of ensuring we were invited to social events while we were on the training course so that we could start to make connections before we joined our teams post training. We did also have a number of events with the other non-IT graduates which continued for the first year, including a memorable week in the Lake District.

Unlike the modern graduate intake, we already knew what teams we would be working in. The Production Support team would be based at our Elephant and Castle data centre looking after the mainframes, whilst the Analyst Programmers would be joining the CIS team, at that time based in Holbrook House in Holborn. The electricity market had been privatised recently (1990) so London Electricity had changed from an Electricity Board to a regional electricity company (REC), and as a result was in the process of adapting and implementing a new Customer System (CIS) brought from the US to allow us to win and lose customers from the other REC’s. This was a huge undertaking and we joined at an extremely busy time; I think the intention was that we would be able to pick up some of the work, but in fact the effect was colleagues were so busy they had little time to bring us up to speed. Nevertheless, despite the chaos (or maybe because of it!), there were a lot of social events, and we were always welcomed, and I made many friends that I still see regularly today.

This was a very different era. There was no email when we joined and there was no online presence for London Electricity (The CIS system was mainframe). All customer interaction was via telephone or letter, plus in those days there were shops where customers could buy appliances but could also query or pay their bills etc. More significant changes came quickly after that. London Electricity was bought by American company Entergy in 1996 and then by EDF in 1998, in 1999 EDF bought SWEB and in 2002 we bought Seeboard as well. During this period, I had spent two years working with CIS before getting involved with both the early attempts at presenting an online acquisition journey for customers plus taking the disparate intranets that were still being used across the estate due to the rapid evolution that had taken place, with a view to creating a content managed system with a consistent look and feel across the whole site.

Still as an analyst programmer in the early 2000’s, I went on to work on the Siebel CRM solution which provided a unified front end for agents as Gas and Electricity accounts were at that time held in totally separate systems. I then spent time as part of the initial trial deployment of Smart Meters across a range of EDF Energy customers which was intended to provide an insight into the challenges of a full-scale mass deployment. By 2010 I had become a technical Architect and had spent 5 years working with NNB (Nuclear New Build), working to ensure the necessary IT systems were in place to support construction of the Hinkley Point C Nuclear Power Station. When the NNB project moved to Bristol, I was able to get a role back in the Customer’s business area, where I have been since — still changing and evolving as the technology, the company and the industry continues to change and evolve. I am now the Industry Solutions Product Owner working with the Central Engineering Services team and I am still expanding my knowledge and learning a whole new set of skills.

I envy the current graduate scheme where the graduates are given an opportunity to experience so many different functions as part of the scheme with a commitment to develop them, but looking back on my own career I would say the great thing about working for a company like EDF is that there are so many opportunities to try different roles in totally different areas of the company, and to learn new skills and meet new people along the way, meaning there will always be many opportunities for professional growth and personal development.