About
Career History
Since 2005 I've been working in higher education, primarily in the areas of timetabling, exam scheduling and student record systems. I began as Timetabling Officer at Durham University, before progressing to become Timetabling Manager. The university had recently experienced a significant timetabling incident which made national headlines and my time there helped the university recover, establishing confidence in the process the university has followed since.
I then moved on to be Examinations & Assessment Manager at Durham, responsible for the exam timetable and associated processes. I then became Student Systems Development Manager where I oversaw the development and introduction of online enrolment and registration, and the adoption of Ellucian Workflow for paperless processing of registration changes.
In 2014 I joined the University of Manchester to become Timetabling Manager for the largest single site campus in the UK. The newly established team has overseen improvements to user training, scheduling processes and reporting. This includes the introduction of new systems for room booking and timetable publication from TechnologyOne. Current projects include exposing timetable data for staff through Power BI.
But I haven't always worked in higher education. Before moving into HE I was an analyst at Accenture, and before that I worked in retail for the John Lewis Partnership... and through my student days I worked for Boots as a healthcare assistant and photo assistant.
Technology Interests
I've been fascinated by technology from a young age. My first introduction to computing was writing BASIC code on a Commodore Plus/4 whilst at primary school, after which I learned assembly language on an Amstrad CPC. These days I like to develop software using Swift on iOS, and have published a small number of apps to the App Store.
Over the years I've found that the programming skills I've picked up are hugely useful in the world of scheduling and timetabling. That may be to write VBA code to automate a process, SQL to extract and manipulate data from databases or more esoteric things like using Node.js to create a timetable chat bot. I've recently become really excited about using Power BI for timetable reporting and this is an area I'm actively exploring and developing.
Public Speaking
Over the years I've delivered a number of talks at conferences in the UK and abroad. I've spoken at multiple Scientia Conferences, ARC Timetabling Practitioners' meetings, Ellucian European User Groups, Ellucian Live in the USA and HO Link in the Netherlands.