Meet Louise

Hi, my name is Louise and I work at AstraZeneca in the Project Delivery Team in Operations IT.

I am currently working in the Project Delivery Team in Operations IT. I have a background in Industrial Engineering and Management with a M.Sc. in Supply Chain Management. I am from Sweden but have conducted three of four rotations in Macclesfield, UK, close to Manchester.

When I started this programme I started working in a new country, new industry, new company and did not know anything about how IT operates. I was faced with the challenge to learn a lot in a short time to be able to contribute and start delivering. Since then my experiences from the programme range from working with event planning and marketing to improving the user experience of our installation process of our corporate operating system.

In my first rotation, I was working in the team responsible for diagnosing and implementing changes to AstraZeneca IT’s operating model of and our process framework. I also started working with change communication related to the organisational design where I lead the production of a short animated film with an external animation bureau, never thought I’d do that while working in IT!

I had another great role in my second rotation where I had the opportunity to work with the service introduction for the new corporate operating system. I also helped initiate and develop a process to manage the new innovative way we manage updates to our operating system, Evergreen. I developed a lot in this role as I was exposed to both the technical constraints as well as the business impacts of introducing Evergreen updates, which I had never even heard of a year ago.

In my current rotation I am working in the Project Delivery Team in Operations IT. I am working with a super exciting project where AstraZeneca is building a new highly automated warehouse system complete with robots and other exciting technology. My role is to map out the new business processes to design how the warehouse is going to operate for the system's lifecycle, potentially for 30 years!

Within my rotations I have been able to test and learn many of the new methods which are buzzwords in the tech world, such as User Experience Research, Lean Innovation and Agile Project Delivery. A place like AstraZeneca IT is a great place to learn how to use concepts like these as you can try them out in a live environment with colleagues and stakeholders who want to see you succeed. I encourage anyone who is interested in technology and want to get insight in how to manage a global business to apply to the Global IT Leadership Programme!