Thought Leadership | Consulting | Facilitation

Leading Organizational Change and Digital Upskilling/Reskilling strategy and execution across industries in Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

Chris served as Governance Executive, leading a team of 11 consultants in 5 different countries to deliver a comprehensive digital transformation program for a large national telecom provider. Here, he established project charter, communication plan, and all program processes including Scrum, Kanban, risk and issue management, reporting cadence, change control, risk and issue management, integrated master plan, and action capture and follow-up. He also introduced new digital tooling, including Slack, Box and MURAL, and drove teams to manage all project communications through Slack. Chris created the program’s stakeholder ecosystem map and stakeholder management plan in MURAL, a digital workspace for visual collaboration.

In the Project Director role, Chris led the creation of the onboarding strategy for a national transformation program FOAK integrated healthcare and insurance data platform in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He was responsible for the creation, refinement, review, and submission of all program deliverables, as well as for management of all IBM project financials and invoicing. He chaired committee meetings with C-Suite officers from the public-private consortium entities, supervised hospital site visits at hospitals in various cities, including Qassim, Riyadh, Dammam, and Khobar, and led the public-facing plenary sessions for healthcare ecosystem stakeholders from Dammam and Riyadh. He also spearheaded the creation and design thinking canvas and concept and conducted three days of remote Design Thinking Sessions with healthcare ecosystem stakeholders from across the Kingdom. Chris also authored and presented the Change Management Strategy, the Communication Strategy, and the Stakeholder Map during the inception phase.

In response to work-from-home restrictions, Chris designed and delivered enablement sessions for 3 out of 4 of the "Core 4" remote tools for IBM Global Business Services Consultants as part of the “Virtual Becomes Reality” program. He acted as lead instructional designer, defining the templates and format for all 10 courses in the program. Chris delivered all the MURAL, Slack, and Box training for Middle East and Africa Consultants, reaching 369 attendees in 29 sessions and achieving the highest NPS scores in the program (0.83). He continues to advised IBM account partners and delivery leads on numerous engagements, leading remote tooling demonstrations and design thinking sessions. He also acted as a Squad Leader for IBM Middle East and Africa's Garage Immersion, a remote large group interaction to collaborate with key IBM clients on their most pressing business problems.

Working as IBM’s Healthcare Subject Matter Expert in South Africa, Chris led several design thinking workshops with industry leaders and consortium stakeholders. By leveraging his combination of industry and facilitation expertise, Chris led the team to successful mapping of journeys for three key personas for the proposed Blockchain healthcare platform. He also played a key role in securing IBM’s relationship with the client as a trusted advisor. As a follow-up to the workshops, developed an effective Business Model Canvas for the proposed Blockchain healthcare platform, wrote and finalized the business case for presentation to the Board and all potential investors. Chris also conducted Business Development meetings with industry stakeholders in Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Stellenbosch.

As Project Director for an assignment in Saudi Arabia, he led four consultants in a comprehensive maturity assessment for the human resources centers of excellence at a major automotive wholesaler. As a people-focused leader, he personally delivered the assessment for Talent Management (Succession Planning and Leadership Development), Learning and Development, Performance Management, and supervised a high-performing team to conduct the assessments for Communication, Rewards, Compensation, and Talent Acquisition. Chris also led the creation of an integrated 18-month roadmap for centers of excellence transformation and designed the Target Operating Model and delivered the final reports for the CHRO and the Vice President. Additionally, he led workshops for the cross-functional team to create the 5-year strategy Learning and Development.

Chris was assigned to this role based in Saudi Arabia, located in the office of the Vice President of a prominent system integrator, where he conducted a FOAK assessment of behavioral and technical skills across pre-sales engineers and sales managers in five verticals. Here, he delivered a 12-month roadmap for skills gaps closure. He utilized technical and behavioral assessments to develop heatmaps and quadrants for management, segmenting staff for high potential programs and redeployment. He completed the engagement successfully, achieving a high level of customer satisfaction. He also acted as a trusted advisor to the VP and all the stakeholders, solidifying him as a true asset to the IBM practice.

As a culture-driven executive, Chris was selected as Leadership Development coach for a leading government ministry in the United Arab Emirates, where he wrote and delivered 4 days of a 8-day leadership development curriculum to 10 high performing UAE government leaders. He also provided several months of one-on-one coaching sessions for program participants. When executing his responsibilities, he received overwhelmingly positive feedback. The initial session generated so much enthusiasm that the Vice Minister expanded the program, nominating additional participants.

After acting as the content owner and one of two presenters who delivered the winning pitch for IBM, Chris was assigned to a FOAK capitated payment health management organization in Kuwait as the Project Director and SME. Here, he set up the project management office, ran the Method Adoption Workshop, generated the concept and model for their Smart Clinic, and participated as a jurist in the EMR system selection process. He also led a two-day Design Thinking workshop with C-Suite executives and other key stakeholders to articulate their Future State Vision.

After pitching and winning a training scope for IBM worth more than US$ 8 million, Chris was designated as IBM’s Training and Change Lead at a large healthcare entity in the UAE, supporting their landmark Epic electronic medical records implementation by designing and executing the training and adoption strategy for theer 12,000 employees. Here, he recruited and managed a team of 23 Epic-certified trainers and 3 support staff. He made a tremendously positive impact on the team by first using design thinking to map the journey of new team members, then by crafting a comprehensive FAQ, employing video interview process, and using Snapchat to depict to US-based candidates the employment conditions, lifestyle, and housing options in the UAE. During this engagement, he acted as the IBM change representative at the three largest hospitals and pioneered the use of WhatsApp groups for communication go-live support teams, extracting the transcripts to inform help desk scripts and subsequent curriculum versions.

Chris began his journey at IBM as an IT Training Program Manager for a historic greenfield digital hospital opening in Abu Dhabi. Here, he implemented an IT training strategy comprising more than 50 applications for 2500 users in a greenfield digital hospital. In order to achieve this, he intentionally recruited, managed and led a team of over 24 instructional designers and trainers. Together, they were able to collaborate successfully with L&D, Nursing Education, Hospital Activation, HR, Information Technology and numerous ecosystem partners to implement their activation roadmap. Chris successfully pivoted their training delivery strategy to strengthen existing processes, maximize efficiencies, and minimize costs.

Chosen to form and co-lead a new business unit in response to then CEO Robert Pearl’s mandate for an applied technology performance improvement team, Chris selected the 30 highest-performing trainers and instructional designers from across the region and mentored, coached and enabled them through a role transformation from classroom trainers to workflow consultants. Leveraging his relationships with physician IT leaders at all NCAL sites and the experience gained from 12 years of leading technology adoption for Kaiser Permanente’s Northern California sites, he co-led the company’s "Maximizing Support to Primary Care" workgroup, authored standardized regional curricula for managers and staff, and used bright spot analysis to create a highly acclaimed physician-led training program. The results among the most challenged Adult Primary Care physicians were reduced risk, enhanced satisfaction, better retention, and improved overall performance against KPIs. Chris received the James A. Vohs Award for Quality, in recognition of his outstanding contribution to KP HealthConnect Oncology Beacon Module rollout.In addition, he led a cross-functional team to modernize company strategies to improve talent acquisition and retention. His proposal to executive management obtained approval and was followed by a successful execution.

Promoted to Project Director, Chris was asked to perform a turnaround of the inpatient training program and double the pace of the planned implementation. He interviewed over 100 candidates to select 40 additional team members for the organization’s rapid deployment phase and took overall responsibility for a team of 109 reports, including 3 directors and 4 managers. In his direct scope, he delivered more than 70 performance reviews per year, executed progressive discipline, conducted fraud investigations, and initiated terminations for 7 staff members. He also mentored his directors and managers in leadership, strategic planning, and performance management. Furthermore, he established uniform performance metrics and evaluation criteria for delivery and non-delivery staff across inpatient, outpatient, front office, and operating theatre teams.During his time in this role, he performed a successful turnaround of inpatient and operating room training programs while continuing to oversee Ambulatory post-deployment training. Chris combined his tenured business knowledge and technical expertise to commission multiple iterations of a custom scheduling application that was later utilized by 3 full-time schedulers to allocate 100+ resources across all Northern California sites. He also led his organization of 109 reports to train 45,000 inpatient clinical users in 2.5 years, with an overall user satisfaction rating of 4.8 out of 5. With his proven expertise, the company asked him to advise the National Labor-Management Partnership and National Workplace Safety on assessment design, which received two Chancellor’s Grant awards.

As a Regional Director Training Resources, his primary duties were designing and overseeing training programs Kaiser Permanente’s historic KP HealthConnect electronic medical records implementation in the outpatient setting. And, subsequently to help clinicians leverage the power of the new system to provide superior patient care. During his time in this role, he hired and managed a team of 59 direct reports, including instructional designers, trainers, environments technicians, clinical subject matter experts and project managers. He also crafted and implemented new hire, new feature, early adopter, and resident training programs while overseeing the development of web-based training, intranet portal, document repository, and a wiki trainer knowledgebase.After carefully determining employee needs, he led the commission of small, informal teams to address wellness, social activities, and career development, resulting in the lowest attrition rate of all NCAL KP HealthConnect project teams. Not only that, but he led instructional designers from all application suites to agree upon standards, templates, and specifications for reusable learning objects, documents, and web-based training, which resulted in instructional design products being adopted by three other Kaiser regions.Chris’ highlighted achievements include the design and structure of training programs for over 20,000 end-users across 18 Medical Centers. He also played a crucial role in reducing the number of classroom training hours per clinician by 18%, saving $3.27 million. Chris’ implemented strategies also cut materials costs per user from $48 to less than $6, which moved all document production from outside print shop to internal, union-approved print shop, saving $778K in the first year alone. Chris was also the creator of an internal, vendor-approved certification program that eliminated the need to send California employees to training in Wisconsin.

As a forward-thinking Business Area Leader, Chris spearheaded the replacement of 50-60 “home-grown” applications with enterprise-wide solutions and managed IT desktop computing needs of clinicians. Heavily involved in IT Project Management and user activation, he contributed to the successful openings of new medical office buildings in San Francisco, San Bruno and Daly City. He acted as the SPOC for San Francisco and South San Francisco business partners, stewarding their requests for software procurement and guiding them through the Comprehensive Delivery Process. Chris facilitated the design of training room and conference room specifications for new facilities and renovations in the Northern California Region. Additionally, he also represented Information Technology at Joint Commission survey and mock survey and authored, administered, and reported out on the Joint Commission survey needs assessments for HIS, IT, and Telephony.

Kaiser Permanente is an integrated managed care consortium based in Oakland, California. Chris began his time here as Lead Business Consultant, where he was responsible for supervising 3 trainers, creating curriculum, and directing all computer learning for over 3500 end-users across 4 medical centres, as part of KP’s “California School of Computer Learning.”As part of his activities during Y2K remediation, he also designed and implemented a new transcription environment on the Windows NT 4 platform, implementing CCP, Echocardiography, HTML upload, and CIPS Dictated Discharge Summaries, and successfully training and migrating all transcription users in the Golden Gate Service Area’s 4 hospitals.Chris also played a vital change agent role in countless hardware and software deployments, including benefits verification, service request management, nurse scheduling, payroll tracking, physician web portals, national help desk consolidation, remote access, Lotus Notes upgrade, physician PC upgrades, electronic referral system, cabling, and infrastructure upgrades, PACS installation, POS rollout, server and switch inventories, lab results, electronic referral requests, as well as the design and build of all the department Intranet Sites for the South San Francisco Medical Center.