The Bottom Line Aug 2022

People

Meet the team

This month we met with Rachelle Savage, Project Manager, to find out all about her... Hi Rachelle! First of all, how about an introduction? Hi, I’m Rachelle and I’m originally near Bournemouth, via Portsmouth, London, Watford and now Atherstone, 10 minutes from T2.

Super! Can you tell us about your career history? I started off with a role in Customer Services post university, which was definitely not for me. I then spent five years in various roles in HR in Financial Services in London before I moved into Retail HR, and after a year was offered an internal move as an Operations Manager looking after Franchise Owned branches. Nearly four years later the 40k miles a year got a bit much and I made my move to LKQ Euro Car Parts and a new role as a Project Coordinator in February 2016. It didn’t feel like a new job – there were eight people from my previous workplace there, so I knew more people on my first day than I did on my trip into the office on my last day at my old job! Once here I moved from Project Coordinator to Junior Project Manager to Project Manager – the PMO was originally part of IT, initially only undertaking IT Projects, until we moved to Finance. Describe a typical day in the life of your role… Twice a week we start off with a Team Meeting. As Project Managers we don’t actually spend much time together so it’s good to hear what other people are up to, their successes and challenges and whether what they’re working on impacts our own projects. Unless we’re working on a huge project we generally work on multiple projects – I currently have four, so each day involves checking in on each project and, where appropriate, with all the people who are working on each project. We hold Steering Meetings monthly to update Senior Stakeholders, who get a special pack because they’re very important, and have weekly, or even daily at critical points, team and/ or supplier meetings. Time will also be spent on the fortnightly Highlight Reports through the week as updates come in. One of my first projects was the upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7. We went through everything tech in the business and found some very old and crusty stuff hidden away. It was a huge spring clean and really brought LKQ Euro Car Parts’ tech up to date. Not bad for a first project! On a funnier point, back in the day when we worked with the IT team out of T1, one day there was a bit of a commotion by the windows that looked down onto the car park (if you haven’t been there, the building houses the branch downstairs and had IT upstairs and both floors of the building have windows all along). A colleague called my name and said someone was trying to break into my car. I went over, realised what was happening and opened the window. The windows are wider than a standard door and square so it was a very big window to open and called out “that’s my car, what are you doing?” The guy looked up, saw about 20 people looking down at him, ran off and was swiftly caught by security. So far so normal … However it turns out the guy was at T1 for an interview, through the agency we use for warehouse staff. So he’d given all his details, including his passport, had his interview and then decided on his way out to attempt to break into my car. Unsurprisingly he didn’t get the job! Tell us about a funny, memorable and/or proud work moment!

Continued on the next page…

I once tried to buy a football club … It didn’t end well!

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