Meet Claire Turner - Deployment Manager at ai

Tell us about your journey with ai and what led you to choose this area of work? 

I joined the Support team as an L2 Analyst, having moved from another company where I'd been Application Support and then SQL Server DBA for the previous few years. IT and Application Support in general just came to me by accident, naturally. I'd always been tech-minded (read: massive nerd) and this kind of work absolutely resonated with how my brain works. Jumping into supporting new systems using familiar tech was really fun, and I found that my new Support team were highly skilled.
Soon after I started, I did a “Meet the Team” blog! You can read it here.
As The ai Corporation expanded, so did my remit of work - I was involved in supporting our newly acquired product aiEazyFuel^® from the start and collaborating with our Irish colleagues. Soon after, I moved to the Deployment team as a Technical Deployment Consultant, which gave me brand new insight into the nuts and bolts of how our products are put together and work on different systems. I got to be involved in the onboarding of some exciting new customers, and building their Test and Production environments was a collaborative process that really got the Deployment, Infrastructure, and Support teams working in sync.
After a few years, the Deployment Manager role became available, and I was excited to apply to manage my awesome team. More recently, we have expanded to include the Implementation team, who are our experts in migration, configuration, and onboarding new customers. We're looking ahead to some brilliantly busy times.

How has your role changed over the years at ai?

Some things have remained consistent, like the motivation to find and fix problems together, the teamwork, and camaraderie.  The change now for me is getting to look at the larger picture as a manager and see what's coming up ahead for my team, rather than just thinking about my own workload. It's a fun challenge, but I've thrived under excellent managers throughout my career, and the best way for me to give back to them is to try my best to pay it forward to others.

What does a typical day look like for you? 

All being well, I’ll have planned what three things I’ll want to achieve the following day at the end of the previous working day, to help my focus and momentum. Each day will have daily team stand-ups, sometimes with temporary teams when it's close to project go time, but always with the Deployment/DevOps/Implementation teams. This is where we talk about our current work and try to facilitate progress and shift blockers. Talking about your problems out loud invariably helps when you get stuck! Then there are usually internal and external meetings relating to ongoing projects that my team is involved in, and Change Advisory Boards a couple of times a week. The rest of the time can be spent working on new environments, deploying to internal test environments, or troubleshooting with support. Often, we will have some overnight deployments to prepare during the day to ensure the out-of-hours work goes as smoothly as possible.

What is your team like?        

Resourceful, quick and collaborative. We're always helping each other out and finding different ways to solve problems together. Each individual will also be part of other virtual teams depending on which projects they're working on, and they're always seen as invaluable and hard-working across the business.

How do you ensure you keep your training and knowledge up to date?

We're constantly encouraged to improve our skills and learn about areas we're interested in as part of our regular reviews. I'm always interested in learning more about developments in SQL Server and how these can help improve our products, so I follow online learning with a view to obtaining my Azure DB Admin Associate certificate.

What is the best part about your job?

Variety and innovation. Trying to improve everything we do, every day, makes each week interesting.

What is your proudest moment at ai so far?

I've been part of teams that have coordinated and completed some interesting and complicated environment migrations. A lot of things to think about simultaneously, planned meticulously, and executed well by a group of people working together, taking so much into consideration.  

How would you describe ai in 3 words?

Aspirational, diligent, honest.

What do you enjoy most about working for ai?

The people we work with are such a great mix - everyone here contributes to the culture, both in and out of work, and they're just awesome to be around.