For Rebecca Best, project management is first and foremost about people. Tools, frameworks and roadmaps all matter, but they work best when teams feel supported, trusted and able to bring their best selves to the job. As a project manager on one of Netcompany’s biggest UK public sector accounts, she leads multidisciplinary groups through complex, often highly technical work – but measures her success in how it feels to be part of those teams as much as what they deliver.
Humanising delivery in a technical world
Putting people first
»Could I deliver it without them? No. So I take the approach of ‘I work for you’ rather than ‘you work for me’.« That mindset underpins the way she structures delivery – from sprint planning to retrospectives, backlog refinement and reviews – but in the process, she always ensures the format serves the people in the room.
Her job, as she sees it, is to create the conditions for experts to thrive. »Some people on my teams have 20 years’ experience; I’m knocking on five. So, I want to hear how they want to work.« That means adapting to different personalities – from colleagues who only want to talk dates and business to those who enjoy a bit more chat.
Rebecca’s instinct for people has deep roots. She studied at the University of Lincoln, but it was the social side of student life that really shaped her career. »I was working for the students’ union as a bar and events manager,« she recalls. »I loved organising events and putting things on for people – the planning and the admin behind it all.« Outside term time, she worked behind bars at music festivals, slowly realising that what she enjoyed wasn’t just the events themselves, but orchestrating all the moving parts. »I thought, what can I do with this? Project management – let’s give that a go.«
»Whatever way the team wants to do things, I’m all ears. It has to work for the people doing the work.«
From apprenticeship to leading large teams
A project management apprenticeship in the civil service followed, giving her a grounding in governance, planning and stakeholder management. »The apprenticeship really did set me up for success,« she says. »It was very supportive and came with a lot of training.« But when she qualified and asked for more responsibility, she hit a ceiling. Progression meant leaving the team she’d grown in for several years. »I thought, if I’m going to be out on my own, I’ll go truly out on my own and look for a new challenge,« she says. A conversation with Netcompany – at a time when the company was looking to expand its work with her department – led to an interview and eventually to her joining.
At Netcompany, Rebecca has worked across multiple projects. She now focuses on one of the company’s largest government clients, leading teams from early discovery through to full delivery – often scaling from small squads of researchers and designers to groups of 15–20 specialists as projects mature.
Over time, her style has shifted from traditional, process heavy project management to something far more human and authentic. Early in her Netcompany career, she worked under a manager who showed her a different way of leading. »He was very bubbly and showed a lot of himself in calls,« says Rebecca. »I could see how well the team responded and what a nice environment it created.«
At the start of each engagement, Rebecca now runs a workshop to define shared expectations: how people like to communicate, what behaviour is acceptable, and how they want to handle disagreement. »No question is a stupid question,« she says.
Conflict, when it arises, is treated as a natural part of bringing experts together. »There will always be differences of opinion when you have specialists,« says Rebecca. »We explain things as much as we can, we look at each other’s perspectives, and we come to an agreement.« Her job is to make sure everyone is heard, that decisions are clear, and that stakeholders maintain confidence in the work without the team feeling micromanaged.
A trusted sounding board
As she steps into a manager role at Netcompany, Rebecca doesn’t expect her core approach to change. For years, she’s been holding herself to that standard anyway. »I never looked at ‘senior’; I always looked at ‘manager’, because that’s what I wanted to be.«
What excites her most is the chance to mentor more people formally. Through regular onetoones, she’s already become a trusted sounding board, mixing conversations about career development with time to talk about life outside work. It’s another way she makes tech human: by remembering that behind every user story and every delivery milestone are people, with their own ambitions, pressures and lives.
»Tech projects aren’t just about code or methodology,” says Rebecca. “They’re about collaboration and trust – enabling experts to solve real problems. My job is to make that as easy as possible for them.«
