Stephen Askew-Ives
Problem solver, builder and continuous-improvement analyst — I turn messy processes and raw data into systems that quietly run themselves.
Career timeline
A career built on problem solving, technology, and service — from call-centre workflow optimisation to SaaS customer success to continuous improvement and institutional data analytics.
Independent builder — own tools & client sites
Building software end-to-end: a volleyball match analytics app (live rotation tracking, lineup management, stat capture), mockup sites for local businesses, and an AI-assisted, multi-model development workflow.
Quality Analyst / Continuous Improvement Analyst — University of Otago
Process mapping, automation, and continuous improvement across university teams; then division-wide analytics — trade performance against SLAs, workload trends, costs vs budgets — delivered as regular Power BI reporting targeted at each management level, plus internal audits against policy and legal requirements.
Head of Customer Success — GetHomeSafe
Took key clients from discovery to implementation of customised safety-software solutions; worked with product, dev, and testing teams to scope and ship features in Agile; owned customer support across all channels and built the metrics and processes that fed customer feedback back into the roadmap.
National Contracts Manager — CrestClean
Managed national contractual obligations across franchised operators for major clients; collated regional data for RFQs and tenders; assisted a migration to Microsoft Dynamics CRM including cleanup and validation of dated contract data.
Workflow Optimisation Specialist — Contact Energy
Used call and task workflow data to build projections and reporting for senior management, and rostered 400+ call-centre staff from those projections. Helped implement PureCloud workflow management, which drove an organisation-wide customer-service quality assurance initiative. Won the 2019 Curiosity Award for taking ownership of folding LPG sales into existing electricity portfolios and streamlining AoG tender document processes.
Skills
Continuous improvement
- Process mapping & automation
- Stakeholder engagement — pain-point discovery through conversation
- Policy, best-practice & internal audit
Data, insight & storytelling
- Data analysis & insight — finding the story in the numbers
- Visualisation & dashboards (Power BI, live web)
- SLA / workload / cost-vs-budget analytics
- Turning data into a narrative decision-makers act on
Automation
- Process automation & hand-off removal
- Workforce projections & rostering from workflow data
- AI-assisted, multi-model build workflows
Building software
- Web development (HTML/CSS/JS, React/Vite)
- AI-assisted, multi-model development workflows
- SaaS product sense — Agile delivery, customer success, CRM
Project & change delivery
- Project management — scoping, planning, delivery
- Change management — bringing people with the change, not just the system
- Implementation management — from decision to live, with the details handled
Beyond the desk
I'm based in Ōtepoti Dunedin, down the bottom of the South Island — big skies, a working harbour, and the Otago Peninsula on the doorstep. Away from the keyboard I play volleyball, which is where SideOut came from: I got tired of tracking rotations and stats on scraps of paper, so I built the tool I wanted on the bench. The best projects tend to start as your own itch to scratch.
Discover · Plan · Build · Improve — from the deep south.