Keywords
Skills
Profile
A business focused Programme Manager / Senior Project Manager with a particularly strong commercial background and more than 25 years’ risk and change management experience in the highly regulated digital, finance, defence, and aerospace sectors. Holding senior positions at leading consultancies specialising in digital transformation and application development, IT infrastructure, and outsourcing on enterprise scale transformation, divestment, integration, ERP, HR and security programmes. A strong C-level stakeholder manager, experienced in working with clients from both the private and public sectors. An advocate of the judicious use of technology to support business strategy who understands complex situations and can work with emerging requirements in politically dynamic environments. Equally comfortable using agile and structured project methodologies and well-practiced in the adoption of DevOps principles.
Key Skills & Capabilities:
Full Lifecycle Programme Management
Regulatory Compliance Assurance
Business Case Development
Translation of Business Needs into Strategic Solutions
C-level Stakeholder Management
Programme Recovery and Benefits Validation
Full SDLC Management (Design – Retire)
Enterprise Infrastructure and Systems Security
Technology Driven Business Transformation
Matrix and Offshore Resource Management
Commercial Management of Tier 1 Suppliers
Multimillion Pound Financial Responsibility
Enterprise Risk Management
Strong Analytical and Statistical Skills
Risk Mitigation and Change Schedule Management
Certified PRINCE2 Practitioner
Agile, DevOps and Lean Six Sigma Experience
Excellent Team Building and Leadership Skills
P3O, MSP, MoR
Project history
Digital Infrastructure Portfolio Programme Manager (June 2011 – ongoing)
Management of a team of project managers and all associated planning, scoping, reporting, resourcing and risk management activities within the portfolio; responsible for delivery of a diverse portfolio of very high availability time-sensitive change programmes within Regulatory guidelines. Recent projects of note include:
- Delivery of the Fraud Operations, Cross Channel Transaction Monitoring super-scaling programme tasked with increasing production capacity on the Actimize fraud platform to cope with 18,000 customer logins per minute / 700 transactions per second.
- Leadership of the DevOps tooling programme introducing new efficiency products such as Urban Code, Splunk and Jira to the Bank.
- Responsible for the Cost, Pace, Quality programme tasked with introducing Open Source platforms, such as Liberty Core to the Bank.
- Digital transformation programme to migrate the Business Banking’s implementation of Actimize onto Amazon’s cloud servers, AWS.
- Successful delivery of a SOA Services programme and a new Bank wide API Library.
- Changes to the Packaged Bank Accounts digital offering.
- The implementation of a Unisys static code analysis tool for use on the Bank’s Core Banking System.
On internal secondment from Digital. I was the Infrastructure Lead in the senior management team that established and ran the Bank’s Enterprise Release Management capability with oversight responsibility for the delivery of circa £900m of annual change to strategically important, high-integrity business systems. The primary function of the ERM team was to identify and manage risk within the individual projects and programmes in the releases and to de-conflict the change schedule where clashes occurred.
- Worked with the enterprise release management team from the very start to define the objectives and build the group capability from the ground up.
- On behalf of the Business, carried out regular gateway audits of all projects in each release to ensure that the Business’s expectations were being met by the projects and that cost, quality, time and risk metrics were within acceptable tolerances.
- Direct responsibility for over 12,000 man days of resource per annum, typical delivery team size of between 70 and 100 resources. All resources sourced from a matrix managed pool of global (onshore and offshore, in-house and external) resources.
- Group Release system integration testing carried out on £38m of dedicated infrastructure.
- Clash management and risk reduction of infrastructure change on circa 130 projects in five enterprise releases per annum.
- Management of multiple concurrent enterprise releases, each release averaging nine months’ duration.
- Ensure all projects in the enterprise release comply with legal, regulatory and mandatory policies.
- As a team, we, the Group Release Management Leadership Team won the IT Team of the Year award at the Banking Technology Awards 2012.
On internal secondment from Digital. Responsible for the rapid delivery of new infrastructure to enable the Bank to rectify potential PPI mis-selling.
- Working closely with, and co-located with, the Business and within a tight regulatory framework delivery of the PPI mis-selling repayment database and application against emerging requirements.
- Design and build a full scale PPI customer accounts database scaled to securely accommodate all current and historical PPI customer data.
- Management of a team of Oracle DBAs tasked with modelling potential mis-selling scenarios and identification of customers who were potentially eligible for a refund.
- Complex analysis of linked accounts and the impact of PPI payments on customers’ non-ability to meet other financial commitments.
- Secure external connectivity between the Bank and the third party companies responsible for customer contact and repayments processing.
- Identification of customers in the database who had contacted the Bank directly, or had engaged a claims management company, for prioritisation their claims in accordance with regulatory time limits.
Management of a team of PMs, technical architects and support staff with responsibility for the infrastructure platforms used by the retail product sales / business rules engine applications.
- Senior Infrastructure Lead on eleven muti-project sales platform releases per annum.
- Proactive management and system configuration of a large, 600 plus LPARs, AIX, WebSphere, IHS estate.
- Ensuring that Production and route-to-live infrastructure within the sales estate was always current, patched, secure and working within agreed tolerances.
- Management of offshore based, matrix managed, resources.
- Originally recruited into a specialist team of Recovery Project Managers.
- Recovering in-flight projects at risk of adversely impacting the LloydsTSB / HBOS back-end-systems merger.
- Working on a wide range of projects including infrastructure, application development and process change.
- Recovering projects across all the Bank’s technology platforms including Z-Series, P-Series, Unisys, X86 infrastructure and using a wide mix of programming languages including SQL, Java, C++ and Python.
Programme Manager (May 2010 – October 2010)
Re-hired by DSTL’s IT Division to improve overall programme delivery performance of, and restructure, the “Web Technology Team”; the DSTL team responsible for all in-house digital application development and maintenance including: application development in Java, Python, C# and C++, administration of a large SharePoint based intranet / knowledge management repository, management of the Remedy incident management system, and, for DSTL’s public and private websites.
- Conducted a top to bottom review of the team’s competencies and structure.
- Completed a full audit of all in-flight projects to ensure that planned deliverables met customers’ expectations and that cost, time, quality metrics were being effectively managed.
- Introduced a unified approach to the prioritisation, management and delivery of the department’s portfolio.
- Restructured the team to reduce single points of failure and to create clear management responsibilities.
- Enhanced the department’s capability to support, and delivery time for, Urgent Operational Requirements projects.
- Established a number of identifiable career paths tailored to the needs technical staff and their career development offering both technical and managerial routes to progress.
- Recruitment of additional, and reduction of excess, resources to rebalance and strengthen the web technology team.
Recruited to the Commercial Strategy Division to work initially with the Land Battlespace Department negotiating and structuring the delivery of outsourced technical projects and research programmes, before ultimately extending my portfolio to include projects and research from the Naval, Joint Systems and Security Sciences Departments.
- Development of customer requirements and the full lifecycle management of the outsourced delivery of those programmes.
- Outsourced development of very high availability, business critical software.
- Competitive and single-source supplier selection for the development of software, mathematical models and prototype new technologies in a highly regulated environment.
- Commercial management of Tier-1 vendors and suppliers.
- Wide range of project methodologies used (including PRINCE2, DSDM and the IBM ‘Vee’ Model) and commercial approaches (including FATS, DCB, OJEU and Green Book).
- My commercial negotiation and project management work was described as “excelling” by an independent MoD-SPR audit review.
Programme Manager
Responsible for programme management on client sites, with particular emphasis on large scale IT programmes involving business change, ERP implementation and service delivery management.
Client assignments included:
Research Councils (RC)
A business transformation programme to establish a £72m in-sourced shared services centre (SSC) to deliver an integrated HR and back-office functions to all UK Research Councils. The SSC was built from the ground up using Oracle Financials R12 ERP platform.
- Technology and Infrastructure workstreams Programme Manager: responsible for the planning, management and delivery of the Oracle ERP technical solution, new datacentre and infrastructure, TUPE mapping of technical staff migrating to the SSC, their Oracle training and development of the service delivery processes.
- A permanent member of the ‘IS/IT Steering Group’; the C-level steering group with overall responsibility for technical delivery.
- Personal Advisor to the Senior Responsible Owner (Technology) - providing candid advice on programme management to the Senior Civil Servant seconded into the role of Senior Responsible Owner (Technology).
- Managing the system integrator’s delivery against the master contract, signing-off satisfactory deliverables and resolving areas where delivery did not meet expectation.
- Development of ITIL 3 compliant support structures and processes.
- Personally negotiated the master contract with Oracle University; ultimately achieving the highest discount negotiated by a Public Sector client with Oracle University.
Commercial Manager
Responsible for the commissioning and delivery of outsourced projects.
- Recruited on a contract basis to tender a backlog of contracts for outsourced research projects.
Company i /Symantec Professional Services January 2012 – June 2007
Programme Manager
Responsible for mapping the data centre migration strategy and producing a five-year high level (Level 1) programme plan to migrate three centres into one highly secure data centre at JP Morgan Chase.
JP Morgan Chase
- Recruited by Symantec to lead data centre migration planning programme at JPMorgan Chase.
- Managed the design and development of a bespoke ‘data-centre migration risk model’ that looked at both business and technology risk.
- Prioritisation of infrastructure migration based on business needs and application change lifecycles.
- Level 1 programme planning for the physical relocation and consolidation of infrastructure from three data-centres into one.
- The formal presentation and written publication of a detailed risk analysis of all applications owned by the T&SS and WWS Bank’s divisions, level 1 migration plans and a constraint map.
Management Consultant
Working within the Corporate Strategy Division on two separate projects:
Supply Chain Strategist: SKIOS (Sea King Integrated Operational Support) Agreement
Development of a new supply chain strategy and revised supplier contracts framework for a £150m annual contract to supply serviceable and consumable parts.
- Negotiation of new agreements based on Lean Six Sigma principles.
- Negotiation with multiple suppliers from Tier 1 through to specialist single part suppliers.
Appointed as the AgustaWestland Lead on a joint, BAE Systems/AgustaWestland, pre-contract bid development team based at RAF Wyton, working with the AV/EW and AS IPTs to framework a new £4bn contract to supply commodity parts for all RAF rotary and fixed wing aircraft under one agreement.
- Responsible for tripartite negotiations (between the MoD, AgustaWestland and BAE Systems).
- Appointed as an independent member of the RAF’s People Taskforce to manage TUPE transfers.
- Development of partnering arrangements between AgustaWestland and BAE Systems.
Earlier Career Includes
Programme Management Practice Director (Europe)
Proxicom Inc / Dimension Data
Programme Manager
ABN-AMRO
Cazenove Bank
Deutsche Bank
Royal and Sun Alliance Insurance
Project Manager
Australian High Commission
Irontrades Insurance / QBE Insurance
JP Morgan
WestMerchant Bank
Education & Professional Memberships
University
Postgraduate Diploma in Management Studies (PgDipMS), Kingston University (2001).
Postgraduate Certificate in Management Studies (PgCertMS), Kingston University (2000).
Technical Courses
PRINCE 2 Practitioner
Managing Agile Software Development
DevOps Fundamentals
Lean Principles and Six Sigma
Fundamentals of Security
Oracle R12 for Implementers
Professional Memberships
British Computer Society (BCS)
Chartered Management Institute (CMI)
Project Management Institute (PMI)
Chartered Institute of Purchasing & Supply (CIPS)