Assume ownership of the monthly risk reporting pack from the outgoing lead.

I took ownership in March after a six-week handover. The pack had been assembled by hand from eleven sources, so my first step was to document each one and who relied on it. Automating the reconciliation step reduced preparation from four days to two, and every pack since has gone out on schedule with no restatements. I also added a short commentary page, which the desk heads now read first.

Establish working relationships with the three groups that depend on our data.

I set up a monthly review with each group and published a shared change calendar. Two of the three now raise schema changes with us before release, which has eliminated most of the late corrections we were absorbing. The third relationship is still more reactive than I would like; I have agreed a quarterly planning session with their lead to address that.

Reduce the number of manual interventions in the overnight batch.

Interventions fell from an average of nine a month to two. Most of the improvement came from fixing three recurring data-quality issues at source instead of patching them downstream. The remaining interventions are tied to a legacy scheduler, which is why I have proposed its replacement as a goal for next year.

The accomplishment I am most satisfied with is redesigning the reconciliation process, which was outside my original goals. It had been a known weak point for some time, and I was able to make the case for fixing it by quantifying the hours it cost each month. I then trained two colleagues to run it so that it no longer depends on me. Separately, I covered the team lead’s responsibilities during the autumn planning round, which gave me a first experience of setting priorities across the group rather than within my own work.

I would particularly value feedback in two areas. The first is how I present trade-offs to senior stakeholders: I suspect I give too much detail before the recommendation, and I would like to know whether that is how it lands. The second is how effectively I delegate under deadline pressure, since my instinct in those moments is still to take the work back.

First, I stay too close to delivery detail once a deadline is at risk. I need to set clearer checkpoints up front so that I can step back without losing sight of quality. Second, I am slower than I should be to raise a concern when it involves another group’s work; agreeing escalation routes at the start of a project would make that easier. Third, I have not yet invested enough in understanding the trading context behind the reports we produce, and plan to spend time with two desks next year to close that gap.

My main project goal is to lead the migration of the risk reporting pipeline to the new scheduling platform, with the cutover complete ahead of the Q3 control review. My development goal is to bring the two analysts joining the team to the point where each owns a workstream independently, which will also test whether I can delegate properly. I would additionally like to take part in one cross-group planning cycle from start to finish.

I am grateful for the latitude I was given to redesign the reconciliation process, and for the time my manager spent helping me frame the case for it. I would welcome more exposure to the planning discussions that set our priorities, as I think I could contribute to them and it would help me explain the reasoning behind those priorities to the team.