After digging deep at BT Liz Garfield is poised to make a splash

The BT-patented, steel-tipped shovel in the corner of her office next to pictures of her family reveals something of the priorities of Liv Garfield, the outgoing chief executive of BT's Openreach network division.

It is no surprise that she often jokes about having three babies in her life: her two toddlers - of course - but also the monster project rolling out 50,000km of fibre cables for high-speed broadband across the UK.

Ms Garfield, who is leaving BT to become chief executive of Severn Trent, can scarcely complain about taking on the challenge of one of the UK's largest ever civil engineering projects given it was partly her idea as the previous head of strategy.

She helped persuade the BT board that a £2.5bn investment in a national high-speed broadband network was right for a company undergoing heavy cost-cutting.

The 2012 Olympic Games, which BT sponsored, made her certain that this would be a "game changer" given the large numbers watching sporting events over the internet for the first time.

Ms Garfield is conspicuously blonde and animated in a predominantly male industry where grizzled grey hairs are more usual. But she won over the 34,000-strong engineering corps with unlimited enthusiasm, fierce ambition and a manifest desire to improve the lives of those digging ditches in often relentless rain and snow.

She spent one day a week on the road visiting staff in the nine regional divisions. Out of regular meetings came an early decision to improve efficiency by replacing laptops with tablets and smartphones.

Even without her habitual can of Diet Coke - which she gets through by the case every week - she is a notably rapid talker, mentally compiling multiple questions into bullet-point form and firing answers back at a ferocious pace, loaded with numbers on speeds and fibre connections.

And these numbers - from a division with annual revenues of more than £5bn - have kept the BT board happy. Openreach has a balance sheet bigger than many in the FTSE 100, with earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of £2.5bn last year.

Although she will soon become only one of three female chief executives in the FTSE 100, boardroom gender politics has never become a campaigning issue for Ms Garfield, who has said that people respect work rather than a skirt or a pair of trousers.

The Yorkshire-born 38-year-old graduated from Cambridge with a degree in modern and medieval languages. A management consultancy job at Accenture led to a move to BT first as general manager, and then strategy chief.

With the government's BDUK project, Openreach will help take broadband coverage to more than 90 per cent of the UK. The end result will be the delivery of the government's lofty ambition for the UK to offer the best broadband in Europe within three years.

The nature of such a project means, however, that complaints are unceasingly regular. Phone and broadband users irate at delays to their repairs or installations complain directly to her, on average, between 30 and 40 times a day.

Complaints are unlikely to end at a water utility group at the centre of government scrutiny over pricing, even if she may not need to don the high-visibility jacket as often as at BT.

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