Chris Ratcliffe Email & Phone Number

Bolton, Gb

Homeworker

Main interface between the activities of the Transformation Change function and the Exec, reporting KPI and financial data and continually maturing a dynamic, tailored Change Framework to support successful delivery of a multi-year, multi-supplier roadmap. PMO Position / Change Structure: Enterprise / FederatedFinancial Accountabilities: Portfolio Cost and Benefits PlansAnnual Change Plan: £50m-£65mChange Focus: Business, IT and LogisticsManagement Accountabilities: Matrix / Task Management – 2 ePMO AnalystsDelivery Models: Waterfall, Agile and Dev Ops3 Key Achievements• Detailed key principles for Agile Tribes (Domains) in relation to forecasting, benefits capture and backlog prioritisation, all with the view of establishing the highest rate of value returned across all areas of the portfolio. • Acted as key point of contact for all portfolio level risks, dependencies, issues and pipeline activities with our outsourced IT Prime. • Designed and implemented a robust and flexible cost management framework, facing into a multiple supplier environment with a key requirement to obtain consistent and accurate data, enabling effective steering of the portfolio at an Exec level.

Portfolio responsibilities for a delivery Domain, including all financial (cost and benefits management) and governance activities. Supporting the change leaders and Director to continuously improve the governance framework and the supporting tooling. Line management responsibilities for a team of 3 Delivery PMO Analysts that embed within key programmes. PMO Position / Change Structure: Delivery / CentralFinancial Accountabilities: Cost and Benefits plan of Delivery TowerAnnual Change Plan: £10m-£15mChange Focus: Business / ITManagement Accountabilities: Line Management – 3 Delivery PMO AnalystsDelivery Models: Waterfall and Agile3 Key Achievements• Accountabilities for RAID, Milestone baselining and tracking, (inter)dependency management, cyclical project financial activities, funding / drawdown processes, resource supply and demand, conflict management resolution, and governance adherence. • Led on deep dive activities across the portfolio with the aims to stabilise reporting, understand current lay of the land and strategize delivery of a financially complex portfolio. • Supported a colleague through a difficult transition from a previous team through to my team. The difficulties arose from a large programmes’ dependence on the analyst vs the analysts development objectives to broaden her experience. Worked with the programme manager to understand how the dependencies were removed and agreed a longer but supportive handover period.

Widnes

Responsibilities for financial delivery across the CMCs of Sainsburys, Argos, Nectar, Habitat, Tu, Argos Financial Services and Sainsburys Bank. Scope covers CAPEX, Opex and Savings. Key deliverables have been to set up processes and governance for tracking all spend and savings across the brands. Each element (CAPEX, Opex & Savings) has had a bespoke process delivered to ensure the right engagement at the right levels and to ensure outturn is delivered as expected. Rigorous Change Control practices in place to ensure each metric is managed correctly to the board to give a long-term view of financial health and performance.Have built up the coming years budget takign a bottom up appraoch to rightsize the operation and budget based on requirements rather than just rolling forwards what we spent the previous year.

Leeds, United Kingdom

Since joining Equifax, I have been focused on bringing alignment to financial practices and understanding across a European portfolio of IT projects utilising guiding principles and ways of working whilst acknowledging and respecting cultural differences from differing EU regions. Moving into 2019, my main focus is transforming the current waterfall approach to project funding to suit the Dev Ops agile model currently adopted in Equifax. Currently $M's are written off each year in sunk costs as failed projects are seen through to completion. I will bring in a smaller time box funding model with projects having to prove continued viability and success benchmarked against bespoke KPIs (or benefits realisation if project has moved past its MVP phase) before additional funding can be released. This mitigates significant risk around the financial portfolio health and gives the Exec more control to steer the whole portfolio where most value can be realised. I have developed a suite of Excel tools for monitoring, analysing and managing the financial health of the portfolio. These include an IT Pipeline view, a rigorous Change Control view, Burnrate / Outturn charts, Accurate forecasting models and a set of dynamic analysis reports. All have to be adaptable to the various currencies used; £, $, €. Set up monthly steering meetings with senior IT leaders to review the portfolio broken out into smaller segments owned by each regional unit. This has allowed for steering decision to be recommended and submitted to the Exec for approval and implementation. Recommendations include the stopping and mobilising of projects, funding allocations and reductions and risk mitigations strategies. All outputs have been documented and circulated both pre and post decisioning. This is an additional layer of maturity to portfolio management I have implemented since joining and supports the unification of the EU portfolio.

Nottingham, United Kingdom

I have provided project support to 4 distinct project areas including digital solutions, infrastructure / new business area set up and debt resolution with my personal support portfolio totalling £35m.Utilised Excel VBA to automate weekly cyclical analysis, releasing 10+ hours per week of capacity within the PMO allowing the Head of PMO to increase the service offering across the Project teams and Change function. My PMO portfolio consisted of projects working in an Agile, Waterfall and Hybrid environment and utilised these insights to steer our change function on its transformation to Agile working by setting out new sets of governance and framework documents. Working with Change Leads, Heads of Department (IT, Change, Finance and Strategy & Transformation) and Board members, I have led the process of setting the 2018 change budget (£100m+ submissions) and the careful in year reviews of 2017 budget (£62m) across 160 separate projects to ensure year end outturn meets sanctioned budgets. Defined a new strategy for setting out the yearly change plan (MTP), utilising themes of change (Run/Transform/Grow) to ensure there is as much focus on customer centricity as there is on ROI / Growth.

Bolton

Ran multiple business / operational led projects to enable the start up of a new functional business unit; Pay As You Go which allows energy customers to pre-pay for their energy via new digital smart meters. This involved working closely with Project teams, Regulations, Finance and 3rd parties such as the DCC (Capita) to ensure our internal functions meet standards and requirements for customers to benefit from the new service. Utilised early adopter customer feedback along with project dependencies and backlog to shape and prioritise different projects and functional requirements.

United Kingdom

Managed the daily performance of the contact centre across 4 distinctly different contact types plus 1 back office area. Performance had to be balanced across 450+ customer service advisors and 26,000+ customer contacts per week. This role was very data analysis heavy, utilising trending and tracked data to support recommendations varying from high level strategic decisions such as service offerings and resourcing decisions to lower level operation support such as improving Team Leaders coaching sessions through targeted advisor performance metrics.

Eon Uk

Managed a team of 14 advisors in a complaints resolution environment with a significant focus on compliance. In the first 2 months I took the team from 14 compliance breaches per moth to 0 by utilising positive reinforcement and open, group coaching sessions to understand common mistakes and celebrate success. Undertook analysis on various fulfilment being sent out and was able to reduce customer demand by providing suggestions on better wording on the letters that was driving demand.

Eon

Achievements•I spent the majority of my time floorwalking. Whilst doing this I looked into ways of improving the process. I developed a form for recording floor walker use covering areas from access restrictions to knowledge gaps.•Utilised data recorded to implement feedback, upskilling and process changes. •Reviewed the current workings of the newly formed complaint handling team trialling the set up of a dedicated access restriction line. This reduced floorwalker usage by 30% and shrinkage by 5%

United Kingdom

I spent my time as a CSA learning and understanding the Energy Industry, its policies and regulations. I also consistently asked for feedback and reviewed my working practices to better my customer servicing abilities and deliver best in class customer service in line with wider market strategies. I also spent time reviewing processes and practices, identifying waste and inefficiencies and providing solutions to improve the customer experience to my line manager.