Welwyn Garden City, England, United Kingdom
As a versatile, resourceful and results focused Senior Project Manager and Product Owner, I have gained extensive experience in end-to-end technical project management, underpinned by business analysis and organisational change. During my career, I have been effective and meticulous in planning, scheduling and governance of multi-million value projects as a project lead, managing multiple projects both simultaneously and concurrently, primarily focusing on infrastructure and technology. I have been recognised as an influential manager of global teams, with drive to keep projects on track through early identification and resolution of bottlenecks. I share knowledge in agile techniques and have acted as a product owner in software development to create the product roadmap through to release management. I am strong communicating at all levels, including negotiation with stakeholder management and direct liaison with customers using interpersonal abilities. My continual focus is to achieve high quality output in project management and product development to exceed stakeholder and client expectations and realise positive results.
Primarily, I led the lifecycle delivery of GTSuite financial messaging solutions into 20+ multi-national companies and banking institutions with full responsibility for solution design, project scheduling, resource allocation, deployment, test and project delivery. With precision, I executed project plans for upgrades or full replacement of existing financial messaging systems on site and in a central hosted environment. I was effective in streamlining, automating and managing processes involving payments, compliance, global cash management, reconciliation and access to financial networks. Solutions enabled global companies to transition from on premise to a hosted environment, which reduced IT spend and dependencies on local resources. I subsequently completed all projects within set deadlines and set budgets with no issues identified post-delivery, which led to a request to extend my contract and manage hosted systems on site.
In this key leadership role, I managed technical programmes and agile software development projects across a global engineering product portfolio, requiring liaison with product sales and marketing teams to define functionalities and infrastructure. I directly managed the ‘Relay’ programme to introduce a global SaaS platform, AWS security infrastructure and financial/health industry compliance. This required understanding and translating requirements into user stories working with product engineers for implementation by agile developers. I led on business continuity planning for multiple global engineering centres and defined detailed recovery plans with local management teams to create a deep understanding of actions necessary following any incidents. I also led a review of product accessibility against WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) liaising with a specialised third party agency. Ultimately, solutions were designed to enable clients to take control of production print workflow and migration to digital delivery without on premise IT infrastructure or investment. I enabled products to be placed within core government departments by achieving v2 ‘AA’ level compliance. Part of the development team included 3 Polish team members who were looking to return home and therefore I worked with the Test Manager to set up a new office in Poland, a project that guaranteed retention of the developers, whilst also expanding the business in a new market, with further increases in team numbers. Within the UK, I drove a change initiative to transition from waterfall to agile methodologies in software development, resulting in training provision to educate the sales and product teams.
With full accountability for specifying and delivering software development, I led on ongoing support, technical project management, business analysis and technical consultancy services to a range of XGS customers. I managed all aspects of HR and P&L performance whilst undertaking reporting responsibilities for the global program delivery team. I selected, managed and drafted legal contracts with numerous external suppliers and Fuji Xerox, whilst developing a strong relationship with the Xerox Research Centre, based in Grenoble, France. Working in partnership, I helped promote and enable the transfer of cutting edge linguistic technologies into production. I also provided pre-sales business consultancy to support external customer bids and tenders.