Victoria Noble

From IT to champagne, and back again

Part of the Tech Women Celebration 50 – a curated list of some of the most inspirational women working at all levels of tech

Vic Noble has grown her technology career through a diverse spread of IT client and service management roles (British Airways, Accenture, Rackspace, Brakes and Lloyd's), reflecting the evolving commercial and technical nature of large-scale IT service delivery over the last 20 years.

She has moved through consultancy, managed service and infrastructure provision positions holding increasingly senior roles and influence across the industry, culminating in her current role of IT Operations Director for Lloyd's of London; the world's most prestigious and commercially significant insurance market.

Her IT career has only been interrupted by a passion project of a horsebox-based champagne bar, which gave her an outlet for her more creative side!

What does the nominee consider her biggest achievement to date?

Vic Noble has taken on the very significant role of delivering all of the underpinning IT operations for Lloyd's of London insurance market. This is the oldest and arguably the most significant insurance market for the UK and globally.

Following a pivotal role in designing, integrating and transitioning a highly traditional in-house IT delivery to a managed service, Vic now runs all of IT Operations for Lloyd's while undertaking a transformative technology and service delivery agenda with a diverse mix of in-house and external service provision. Her role is vital to enabling the overall business transformation agenda that is shaping the future of insurance and commercial risk management globally.

The role of IT Operations Director has required Vic to bring the organisation on a significant cultural journey over the last 18 months to provide efficient delivery of all underpinning IT, but also allow colleagues, both new and existing, to focus on their sweet spot areas of capability and passion with a single goal of giving the end customer what they actually want and need rather than what IT want to give them. Her pivotal redesign of service management to focus efforts onto customer experience rather than traditional 'IT plumbing' is a bold and visionary approach that is simplifying the governance and delivery of IT to the business.

Vic has developed and promoted a highly integrated governance model that closely links offshore supplier teams into the core of the UK and global businesses. She operates her management activities extensively from the offshore locations and ensures her management team are seen and heard on the ground, which has significantly promoted engagement with geographically disparate delivery teams; a notable achievement in a first-generation managed service model.

Her focus on the development of women in technology within her own teams continues with the 'by design' approach of having people in roles because they are built up to be the best and not solely because of gender. This considered approach allows development on merit and a diverse and high-performance delivery team who have all earned their place at the table.

Tell us something about the nominee that people would find surprising?

Many of Vic's battle scars in outsourcing and IT came from earning her stripes as an Analyst at Accenture in the early 2000s, walking into highly emotionally charged Offshoring TUPE environments where local staff were told at 9am and their knowledge transfer commencing at 10am were entirely normal, and are thankfully a thing of the past. But Vic did, then latterly led, lots of them. Still, navigating people, emotions, seriously challenging situations and yet delivering and creating motivation became a hallmark of Vic's 'getting things done' and 'fixer' reputation.

Her baseline approach evolved to be "appearing confident, even when it's the last thing you feel" – treating people with respect, empathy and unlocking their motivation. Vic is all about building and maintaining relationships, quickly and with ease, with every group at every level.

More personally, Vic describes her biggest challenge as returning to work after maternity leave in 2015. The challenge of trying to climb the ladder of succession, with a high pressure job, lots of travel and a giant commute is not easy. Vic describes the 'mum guilt' that both pulls on her heart strings as well as drives her forward to achieve more, do more and deliver more to make her son proud.

"He's watching everything I do, everything I achieve, it will make him believe he can achieve anything.”

Vic has achieved her impressive rise in both seniority and market influence at a notably young age during each stage of her development. This is an often 'invisible' challenge faced by many in the industry and particularly young women of emerging talent. Adding this to her maturation as a significant and recognised industry leader in often highly traditional sectors - while delivering complex change and reform agendas - demonstrates her ability to overcome multiple and often competing challenges.

Tell us something about you that people would find surprising?

Vic abandoned IT and spent a year doing good works delivering champagne to the thirsty as CEO, Operations Director, Bartender and bottlewasher of the Fizzy Squirrel mobile horsebox bar.

A real passion project that provided a brief career sojourn away from ITIL, CSat and SLAs that was enormous fun and hugely entertaining it became clear that IT was where she was destined to end up, with the champagne relegated to the traditional end user experience rather than one of service provision.