York, England, United Kingdom
As a Strategic Project Manager at the University of York with nearly twenty years of experience, I’ve successfully delivered a diverse portfolio of projects, including organisational transformation, digital initiatives and externally funded research. With an APM Project Management Qualification and a track record of leading complex projects, I bring a blend of strategic oversight, high-level organisation, and strong stakeholder engagement skills. I thrive in purpose-driven organisations and am passionate about driving meaningful change. Highly collaborative and adaptable, I embrace innovative ways of working to deliver impactful outcomes. My goal is to continue refining my project management expertise, particularly in change and transformation spaces, where I can contribute to sustainable growth and operational excellence.
• Managing a portfolio of major transnational education developments and partnerships. • Serving as the primary day-to-day contact for senior university sponsors and international partners, matching the actions and balancing the needs of both parties to ensure successful delivery. • Leading partnerships through scoping, formation, and business as usual phases, ensuring all processes align with global regulatory and professional standards. • Coordinating complex activities across academic and professional service areas to track progress and resolve issues against multi-year strategic objectives.
• Led high-impact, cross-functional projects to align with the university's strategic goals. • Managed the multi-year establishment of the York School of Architecture, including curriculum design, workforce planning, coordinating stakeholder engagement and multi-million pound estates development. • Directed complex departmental relocation's, ensuring effective communication and smooth transitions for staff and students. • Streamlined international student recruitment processes, enhancing efficiency and stakeholder collaboration. • Contributed to the development of the University's change maturity and capacity, managing projects involving significant process, organisation, and culture change. • Managed project governance through boards and steering groups, overseeing RAID logs to ensure timely resolution of risks in uncertain and volatile environments.
Working across change and digital teams, I currently manage activities that cross-cut University operations. This includes the creation of a new academic department, including teaching programmes, research strategies and associated estates development; digital activity aimed at improving ways of working for all staff; and structural changes to teams (with HR implications). To deliver these projects I have focused on a broad range of project management activities, including: • Detailed project planning through the different phases of a project to align to different delivery methodologies, including Agile and more iterative approaches. This includes setting and monitoring key milestones through the project lifecycle. • Risk and issue identification, management and escalation, to ensure the timely management of potentially negative implications for both the project and the organisation more widely. • Stakeholder management; including mapping and coordinating approaches with internal and external stakeholders to help bring them on the change journey. • Setting up and managing project governance and reporting, from organising and leading project board meetings to writing and coordinating project reporting as appropriate. • Managing engagement with HR, and Trade Unions where necessary, to ensure changes to people’s ways of working is managed legally and sensitively.
I managed external research collaborations across the Business School working with academics from diverse backgrounds across six themed divisions and fifteen interdisciplinary research centres. This included leading on topic and speaker development for external engagement events, as well as managing the input from senior industry leaders through the Research International Advisory Board.
Based at Leeds Social Sciences Institute, I managed the delivery of the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account Doctoral Training Partnership Business Boost project which had a central aim of increasing business engagement in social science research. I collaborated with counterparts across Yorkshire to deliver cross-institution support.
I worked as part of a team of fundraisers based at the National Railway Museum tasked with securing vital income to deliver the groupwide vision of inspiring futures, especially in the areas of science, technology, engineering and maths.