Meet me at The Milk Bar - Jacqueline Barr Speaker Profile

In the lead up to our very first Milk Bar Meet Up on 22 April, we’re delighted to introduce the great speakers who will be presenting their ideas about Methods of Innovation.

In the second instalment of our speaker profile series, we’d like to introduce you to Jacqueline Barr, who is a Programme Manager for Lloyd’s Banking Group. Jacqueline has been a change leader at Lloyd’s for 13 years and has been involved in many change programmes, including launching intelligent finance and an Internet bank. In 2014 and 2015, she won the award of Programme Manager of the Year for her division for taking the brave first steps into scrum. Now on their third scrum, Jacqueline’s division has coached and encouraged many other areas to make the move to agile.

We asked Jacqueline a few questions:

What brings you to the Milk Bar Meet Up?

I want to share my experiences, but most importantly, I want to hear from like-minded people about what they are doing and how we can learn from each other.

You will be talking about how to bring innovation to large organisations through scrum. Can you tell us a bit about why you chose this topic for the Meet Up?

At the start of 2015, I got an exceptionally high quote for a piece of change we needed to deliver, making it unachievable. So we looked around for alternatives. By using scrum to deliver the change we managed to deliver it for a fifth of the cost, but most importantly the collaborative way of delivering through scrum gave everyone involved such a buzz. We're now on our third scrum, bringing in more and more people on the journey. Lastly, I want to discuss the importance of the out of scrum team in implementing the change.
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Could you tell us about a time when you experienced successful innovation, in any context?
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My team inspire me every day. Over Christmas, the people who were not on holiday redesigned a small corner in our Edinburgh office to make it an innovation space, including a recognition wall, giving everyone an avatar, and a suggestions space. We now do learning lunches, breakfast brain storms, and use the space when we need to think a bit differently (there are mad things on the walls like wooden spoons, paper airplanes etc). Small things make a difference. They could have caught up on emails, or done boring/necessary things... instead they mixed things up!

Meet Jacqueline Barr at the Milk Bar Meet Up on 22 April, 3-5pm, Orkney Street Enterprise Centre.

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Keep an eye out for our next Milk Bar!

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(Blog first published 04/12/2016)