Ashford, England, United Kingdom
So, despite always being of a curious and inventive mind, I nevertheless failed to apply myself in my teenage years, the result being that I spectacularly failed my A levels so my parents told me to find a full time job! I found myself working in telesales for British Airways in Newcastle taking over a hundred calls a day for the best part of three years. This honed my customer service and problem solving skills as from call to call I could be dealing with anything from a sale for the cheapest possible fare to Paris or helping to find lost luggage, to helping a grieving relative get home ASAP. I decided that progressing into call centre management wasn’t for me so I answered an ad the BA news (back in the days when BA had its own newspaper) interviewed and found myself in London, doing global second line support on BA’s reservation, ticketing and check-in systems. These newly acquired technical skills built on my customer service, problem solving and delivery skills and I moved into project management and (other than an 18 month folly into retail operations management which I hated) I’ve been here ever since. I’m a now a highly successful interim project manager, proficient in both Agile And Waterfall methodologies, with a proven track record in providing excellent customer service in project management, delivery and implementation, working for some high profile clients such as Virgin Atlantic, ATOS, British Airways (again), TUI, The Economist newspaper and First Group to name a few. What I bring to my clients is expertise in Transport IT Systems/Channels, creative thinking and both pragmatic and innovative solution providing to their problems. I’m an experienced PRINCE 2 practitioner, a creative thinker and very delivery focussed. I’m determined, I don’t give up and l love a new challenge. I’m also extremely good at what I do (though I say so myself), but don’t take my word for it – read my recommendations! If you’ve got this far, thank you for reading this and I hope it gives you some idea of who I am, where I have come from, and what I can bring to your organisation, which is making an immediate difference, adding value, and getting the job done. Which is whatI love to do.
Provision of project and programme management professional services, delivering projects successfully to a number of clients, including: ARINC ATOC Atos British Airways c2c (Trenitalia C2c Ltd) FirstGroup Gatwick Airport Ltd IQ-EQ National Energy System Operator SITA Tecknuovo Thames Water The Channel Tunnel Group The Economist Newspaper Tui UK Virgin Atlantic Airways Whitbread
Providing programme management professional services into the Strategy & Architecture leadership team within NESO - the National Energy System Operator on behalf of Tecknuovo.
Contracted to provide project and programme management professional Services to the Channel Tunnel group (LeShuttle) in order to deliver a new fare structure for their LeShuttle customers, and a new reservation system capable of delivering their future business requirements. I successfully delivered: • A New Fare Structure, a major business wide change impacting all levels from legal, to IT, to frontline staff and associated system and complex business (shared service centre processing) and system focussed changes, including Reservation System, Web/App, Check-In, Revenue/Yield Management, CRM and Finance. Delivered benefit realisation target. • Migration of travel trade customers onto a new JSON API connection. • RFP with full and detailed functional/non-functional requirements to support the selection and procurement of their new reservation system/PSS. Included consultation on negotiation points in the clients favour. • RFP to select and procure a system integrator to deliver the new PSS/Reservation system, delivering API builds, GUI, Test Automation and Data Migration. Included details SoW and contractual negotiations. • Provision of SME consultation on reservations system implementation and industry best practices.
Contracted to provide project management professional Services to IQEQ, a Financial Services company, managing the development, build and global rollout of a new Citrix platform to approx.4000 users and to also. Deliver role migrations (Fund Accounting, Private Wealth, Company Secretariat) from Europe to Asia through the delivery of Citrix desktop and applications, removing need for VDI/Remote desktop access in new offices. Budget circa £3m. I successfully delivered: • Delivered a Citrix deep dive into IQEQ’s global infrastructure, delivering quick wins and setting up a long term Citrix target operating model • Delivered infrastructure and a new platform to provide a hybrid Citrix solution (Apps hosted on prem, users access via Azure) to users to enable increased user capacity and reduced latency • Successful global rollout/migration to all 3000 users over an aggressive 3 week period. • Provision of technical solution to migrate various role migrations from Jersey, Amsterdam and Luxembourg to Manila, Mauritius and Hyderabad, across various business functions. • Solutioning and delivery of user desktop application requirements through Citrix, Virtual and remote desktop solutions • Delivered a shared document solution PoC with Peer Software, a third party allowing users to access document copied locally onto servers, to reduce latency when downloading for customers.
Contracted to provide programme and project management/Delivery Lead professional Services to Tecknuovo's utility client as part of a major company wide data transformation. Managing third party delivery providers incl. EY,TCS,IBM, Accenture and Cognizant. Successfully delivered: • Digital Boardroom: A project to replace a manually produced PDF board level report for executive level KPIs onto the SAP Analytics Cloud. • Discovery and audit into the health of 15 Asset cohorts of the utility including; Water & Sewage Works, Slow Sand Filters, Pumping Stations, Water mains and sewage systems. Key Outputs: o Asset Data Catalogue and Health Map o Plan to deliver tactical quick wins, including £Ms in efficiencies o Data Architecture As Is/to Be o High Level Data Models o Detailed roadmap to deliver improvements, including Target Operating Model o Value identification Assessment/Benefit Realisation plan across 15 key Asset cohorts • Programme managed several projects across Finance and Property (covering long term sickness) providing coaching and direction to junior PMs, managing third party suppliers, and internal stakeholders up to C suite. • Parachuted in to lead an emergency datacentre migration following supplier administration. Successfully migrated key production apps (incl. key business and billing systems, operational technology, and security), virtual servers, VPNs and networks to an alternative site within a 4 week period, to mitigate C-level risk of immediate switch off of datacentre by administrators and the consequence of loss of service and supply to customers.