Helen Smith

Background

About Helen Smith

Working at JBA gives me the opportunity to build on my love of geography and the natural world and use it to create datasets that help others in their business decisions. A lot of the work we do is research and development and we are continually pioneering new approaches; the opportunity to contribute to scientific advances as well as the success of the company is very rewarding. There's the added bonus of JBA's office location too - situated in the grounds of Broughton Hall it's an idyllic place to work, if a little unconventional. I started out working on catchment-scale hydraulic modelling projects and, over the past fifteen years, gradually increased the scope and ambition of the work until I was leading the development of JBA's Global Flood Map, a revolutionary dataset providing flood information for every country of the world. I have a hydrology background and extensive GIS experience, which forms an integral part of our hazard mapping work. JBA's flood maps are developed using traditional engineering approaches, adapted to work at national scales, and are widely used by the re/insurance industry. As I gained technical skills and experience, I also branched out into project management and team leadership. I've evolved from using a traditional waterfall approach to project work, to adopting Agile methods and helping JBA to develop a new mindset to collaborative product development. I've helped to introduce Scaled Agile to the company, improving our ability to manage dependencies between the complex product backlogs that exist in our super-ambitious and technical product development group. I'm involved in the day-to-day management at JBA as well as helping to set strategic direction and plan technical innovations. Outside of work I'm an animal lover, owning a dog and a horse. My partner and I have a young son and, if time allows, I also enjoy growing fruit and veg in my allotment and sampling the craft beers from my partner's bar.