Brian Johnston Email & Phone Number

Edinburgh

Owner and director of firstJohnston Consulting Limited. I specialise in successfully delivering complex business, regulatory and IT change programmes. A summary of my experience is set out in the profile below.

Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom

Deputy programme director appointed to lead day-to-day delivery and turnaround of a national programme with budget of £140M, reporting to the Programme Director and CEO. Responsible for managing team of 200 to: design, build and test Scotland’s first digital Census and all associated operational solutions; design and standup a nationwide operating model to deliver the Census; and manage operational readiness and implementation planning to ensure the organisation was ready to cutover to the live operating model and operate the Census. Led the PMO and strengthened governance, planning, change and risk management standards to improve control of the programme. Following agreement to extend the programme by one year, owing to Covid, I led a full-scale re-plan of the programme gaining the support of the Executive Management Team and Programme Board for the revised plan and associated costs and subsequently led the day-to-day delivery of all work against this plan.

Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom

Programme lead for migration of the Virgin Money current account book of customers to the Clydesdale Bank platform. Led development of requirements and high-level design and review of options for delivery to reduce original business case costs by 40% and agree business case with COO and CIO.

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Interim Programme Director responsible for review of NHS Scotland’s Business Systems Programme and development of a Programme Roadmap to support the Business Systems Vision agreed by all NHS Chief Executives and Scotland’s Digital Health and Social Services Strategy.

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Business programme manager and member of programme leadership team responsible to all core business functions for delivery of new credit card platform and migration of c. 1M legacy customers. Responsible for delivery of all solutions across Operations, Customer Services, Finance, Payments, Commercial and Trading functions.

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Programme lead responsible for oversight of testing critical defects and for proving the target operating model for new Savings platform. Programme managed delivery of key regulatory changes to solution immediately after going live.

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Workstream lead responsible for the establishment of all core Management Information for Williams and Glyn bank - one of the largest ever transformation programmes in the UK Financial Services market.

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Established UK-wide quality control and quality assurance function and supporting governance framework for retail banking operation responsible for responding to data subject access requests (DSARs). Subsequently delivered complex operational restructuring programme to re-engineer end-to-end business processes and implement a new target operating model across the UK DSARs operation. Key drivers of success involved outsourcing core operations to India and establishing a consistent end-to-end process across mortgages, credit cards, loans, retail and debt management operations in the UK.

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Conducted rapid review of the IT function's readiness to support the business - particularly the effectiveness of the PMO and overall programme governance and delivery, following the board’s decision to insource all IT service delivery.

Edinburgh

Management and delivery of complex client business and IT programmes to financial services and public sector clients.Responsible for KPMG’s IT advisory services to the public sector in Scotland over 7-year period.Significant business development and account management activity in Financial Services and Public Sector.

Edinburgh

Project and programme management; major project reviews and risk assessments; IT departmental effectiveness reviews; IS strategy definition and implementation; major system implementation; data warehousing and business analytics; service definition and development; development of 3rd party strategic alliances; operations management; account management; management of business relationships; business planning and development; team building, staff development and coaching; recruitment of staff; methodology development and training.

London, United Kingdom

Project leader on 2 highly complex pan-European bespoke systems projects for the MoD delivered to time and budget.Scicon was Europe's second largest software house at the time, ultimately becoming part of EDS following a number of takeovers.