Simone Johnston Email & Phone Number

Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

• As the Head of Project Management I oversee a team of 4-6 direct reports. My responsibilities include:
• Providing leadership, training, and guidance to project managers on project management processes and standards
• Leadership-level management and communication regarding project status, outcomes, constraints, and risk assessments
• Developing and implementing project management standards to streamline project execution and improve efficiency
• Supporting risk mitigation efforts across projects

• After transitioning into this role, I assumed broader responsibilities for the optimization of project execution and management on top of the Head of Project Management role. Additional responsibilities include:
• Optimizing delivery management and execution
• Identifying and eliminating inefficiencies and losses across projects
• Maximizing revenue and billings for the department while driving customer satisfaction as measured by Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Collaborating with group operations to design, manage, and implement tools and processes to enhance work quality and project reporting, including developing a revenue forecasting model and risk framework

Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

• Held a joint role in project and product management, but following a team restructure, transitioned to a sole focus on project management. My overall responsibilities included managing the end-to end delivery of.
• Defined and prioritized features and made product decisions using user story mapping, requirement writing, and product roadmaps
• Collaborated with the SDLC team to align projects with deliverables and ensure successful project execution
• Strategic management of projects, including delivery roadmaps, budget, resource allocation, scheduling, release management, and risk identification and mitigation
• Forecast Revenue and managed invoicing and collections for projects
• Mentored junior project managers in project management best practices

Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

This was a short term contract aimed at facilitating and managing Covid-19 specific projects.

Stellenbosch

• This is a project and client management role. I manage the device integration projects, as well as client agnostic deliverables. Responsibilities include:
• Daily management of timelines, resources and stakeholders (both internal and external), in order to plan, execute, monitor and close projects within time and scope.
• Working with SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) teams, aligning work with project deliverables and enabling the needs of the teams, projects and organisation.
• Facilitate workshops to determine the definition of project scope, goals and deliverables, and ensure rapid decision making and knowledge transfer.
• Communicate project status, scope updates, constraints, identified and mitigated risks and actions to key stakeholders, including external clients.
• Assessment and feasibility of incoming projects, resource assignment and mitigation measures for projects at risk.

Stellenbosch

• This was a client facing role requiring aspects of project management specific to the deliverables for my client. Responsibilities included:
• Point of contact for client to drive solution delivery. Coordinated the first launch of a client to our production environment.
• Internal and external stakeholder management and communication on delivery status and outcomes, project constraints and risk assessments.
• Managed and coordinated cross functional SDLC teams in the prioritisation, scheduling and development of customer deliverables.
• Drove key decisions across the project, coordinated releases, continuous improvement planning post deployment to increase success probability.

Stellenbosch

• This was a middle management role where I was responsible for the Support team, leading 4 direct reports. Responsibilities included:
• Managed and lead the support team, including recruitment, training, and continuous team development.
• Established the support office, set up and maintained help desk software, wrote requirements and managed the development and improvement of novel in-house support tools.
• Managed investigations, research and development, and implementation of bug fixes and major improvements on a project level.
• Successfully orchestrated and lead the support of the companies first pilot (1000 participants) for our first production client.
• Acted as liaison between internal teams, partners and customers, advocating for the customer internally by representing the customer’s voice and experience.

Stellenbosch

• Multifaceted position requiring considerable time management skills. Support responsibilities included:
• Handling technical issues and requests from our platform evaluators and B2B partners.
• Content development and management.
• Induction and training for new users of our technology. Quality Control (QC) responsibilities included:
• Executing routine QC checks of hardware, firmware, algorithms and software environments (cloud and mobile applications).
• Management of small-scale R&D projects.

Master Of Philosophy - Mphil, Biomedical Forensic Science, Distinction

Activities and Societies: Forensic Science SocietyThesis Title: Efficiency of Buccal DNA Sampling Device in the Mortuary. The aim of which.

Bachelor Of Science Medicine (Honours), Biological Anthropology, First Class

Activities and Societies: Facilitated University level Anatomy and Physiology tutorials.Awards: National Research Foundation Scholarship.

Bachelor Of Science, Genetics And Physiology

Awards: Dean’s Merit List