London, England, United Kingdom
At SoftwareOne, leading strategic HR initiatives has become a cornerstone of my professional journey, with a focus on enhancing processes and aligning them to our organizational goals. Our team has successfully implemented optimizations that have substantially improved business efficiency and effectiveness, contributing to the company's growth trajectory. My role as Chief of Staff - HR at SoftwareOne capitalizes on my expertise in talent strategy, people management and system thinking, ensuring a 'people-first' approach. In collaboration with the HR Leadership Team, we are redefining how we innovate our HR function to drive business goals, significantly impacting our high performers and fortifying the company's talent pipeline.
Leading strategic initiatives and system enhancements, resulting in improved HR processes and alignment with organizational goals. • Working alongside Chief HR Officer to drive HR Leadership Team focus on strategic vision. • Implementing business process optimizations to enhance efficiency and effectiveness. • Leading HR PMO in successful execution of key initiatives to drive business growth.
Having successfully implemented and grown the SoftwareOne Academy from the ground up over the last two years I am proud to be expanding my role now to include the definition and implementation of the SoftwareOne Talent Strategy. Liaising directly with our Executive Board and across the People and Culture leadership team I am ensuring that we are driving a people first strategy on Talent. I have defined our succession planning strategy and am now implementing this across our critical roles. Working with our talented team, I am leading the strategic workforce planning initiative and reinvigorating our performance management approach to better support our high performing individuals across our complex organisation to - provide Career Mobility and Progression opportunities, - ensure continuous development and growth on critical skills in an ever changing technical landscape remains relevant for both our people and our business.
Defining the strategy and implementing the operational requirements of the SoftwareONE Academy (Global Corporate University). Providing strategic consultancy to SLT to identify, quantify and track growth opportunities for the business, supported by investment in young talent. Building the Academy from “Start Up” to “Scale Up”, driving the operational capabilities towards stability on a global scale.
I directed and led the delivery of transformation initiatives and global project management, implementing an end-to-end process organisation wide, providing strategic leadership across Professional & Managed Services. I collaborated with the Leadership Team to identify gaps in the new operational model and implemented cross-functional, scalable processes, defining and implementing governance protocols and policies to improve security, lower cost, and simplify operations following our merger. Streamlining operations, I improved Statements of Work (SOW) templates, capturing complex scope and acceptance criteria. ● Created full suite of business intelligence (BI) reporting to C-level board on project status and customer happiness. ● Managed 10 senior programme and project managers across EMEA, responsible for extended team of more than 60 project managers globally. ● Oversaw management of key systems and processes, optimising technology and lowering risk of security breaches, increasing visibility of profit, and enabling long view of upcoming pipeline. ● Championed improved reporting on key performance indicators (KPIs), service level agreements (SLAs), and single view of Order to Cash lifecycle, tracking and reporting relevant metrics. ● Supported Delivery and Sales functions, bridging gap between opportunity and capability to increase revenue, improve retention, lower risk, and deliver quality products. ● Led process improvements, reducing costs by introducing flexible resourcing/capacity model in line with “burstability” and sales pipeline
I was promoted to the Head of Project Delivery in 2016 to manage a cross-functional, geographically diverse project team in the delivery of technical projects for a portfolio of more than 30 clients. Growing the delivery capabilities of the Service Desk through operational improvements, I provided weekly reports, cost tracking mechanisms, and governance controls. I spearheaded a consistent project process from set up to resource allocation, and I tracked, reported, owned, and managed revenue, costs, and margins for all projects within Managed Services. ● Boosted project delivery capabilities, enabling team to deliver projects of more than six months duration and £500k+ revenue (from average of two weeks and less than £100k). ● Standardised project onboarding and initiated earlier transition to overlap with Professional Services delivery so that services could become chargeable sooner, increasing revenue for new accounts.
I managed digital transformation programmes for key clients, including a pitch for Formula One, successfully winning a portfolio worth £10m per annum. ● Took over failing National Trust account, delivering website with 57% profit and mobile app at break even with overall profit margin of 22% across programme. Retained account. ● Led Formula One pitch, landing account with £1m revenue for first year, building revenue to more than £10m through brand redesign, website redesign, new mobile app, race data, and infrastructure. ● Re-vitalised and retained Carnival account, re-setting scrum team and re-building relationship with client, reducing creative and increasing technical team members to deliver customer requirements.
I spearheaded a change programme to devise and implement bespoke project management methodology based on Agile practices to meet business needs, managing a team of 40 project managers and project executives. I rolled out a global training programme, and I rebuilt the account team structure, splitting out the account management and project delivery function to better support customer relationships and delivery. ● Boosted employee retention, reducing staff turnover from 27% to 5% in nine months. ● Improved reporting through control of project documentation and financials, enabling more accurate forecasting and resource management agency wide. ● Flattened time utilisation across client services, improving cost-to-time ratio and decreasing resource downtime. ● Increased efficiency by introducing project management best practices within Client Services team via delivery of workshops and training programmes.
I was recruited internally to manage the portfolio of Global Banking & Markets infrastructure and change projects, resourcing and leading project teams within a matrix environment. I represented 3,500 employees on the HSBC European Council, providing input into a pan-European strategy, including HR business systems, training programmes, and IT strategy development and implementation. ● Delivered first cloud systems project in under three months (normal infrastructure projects typically took nine months) - Managing scheduling, costs and resource allocations - Liaising with different technical departments throughout the organisation across multiple teams - Running workshops to identify key deliverables - Communicating complex technical issues/solutions to non-technical team members - Implementing complex IT Infrastructure projects on time and in budget. - Working with stakeholders and programme managers to understand the requirements of the project
I identified business needs and devised a training strategy for approximately 100k users targeting the EMEA region of HSBC Bank plc.