Capita Public Service Methods and Standards Specialist

Lead the enterprise Portfolio Management Office team and was responsible for assurance of projects and programmes through a Stage Gate process, definition and provision of PMO services, ensuring the Governance Framework was embedded and fit for purpose, implementation of project financial management process and coaching and support project managers in the successful delivery of their projects.

As the Governance and Assurance Lead, I was responsible for defining and implementing a Governance Framework which needed to be sufficiently flexible to support a wide range of types of projects and programmes, from the Agile in house developed EMIS products through to third party software deployments used to run the business.

I started my career at Royal Mail bringing my P3M experience and expertise to lead the Portfolio Management and Reporting team in Technology. I transformed the Portfolio Reporting to include analytics on Portfolio Performance which lead to key process and framework changes. I was responsible for Technology Project Gating and introduced a Project Risk Assessment to right size the Governance to the projects. I strengthened the assurance of Project and programme management and added Business Analysis to the Gating Panel. I introduced a Project Health Check service offering, with different depths of deep dives into under performing projects. I was then asked to lead the change of Group Governance which applies to all RM programmes and projects, including many without a technology component. I devised a Project and Programme assessment tool to categorise projects by their risk and complexity. I defined different Project and Programme Governance levels and framework to ensure the governance was appropriate to programmes and projects. I supported the deployment of an Enterprise Portfolio Management to further strengthen group Governance and provide insightful Portfolio analysis. I defined a Delivery Assurance Framework and performed several Deep Dive assurances of projects and programmes at risk of not delivering. Working closely with accountant colleagues we devised an alternative programme and project funding process specifically suited to Agile Delivery.

I started at Credit Suisse as the IT PMO Lead on a multi-year cross product programme, working closely with the business PMO Lead. In December 2009 was asked to move into a CFO IT Business Management Team to manage a change programme delivering greater transparency of IT costs (Service Management). This was successfully implemented at the end of 2011 and since then I have worked primarily on detailed analysis of the departments financials. As I prefer more role diversity, I began looking for an internal PMO role.I volunteered for redundancy in November 2011 to become an IT contractor.

I spent just over 3 years working within the Shared Services department performing project management related roles. I was initially recruited to manage the rollout of a process change programme aimed at improving the operational efficiency of Shared Services. In addition to managing the programme I also set-up a PMO to support the programme and the large number of business process improvement projects that had been initiated. Following the successful completion of this project, I moved to the project management of the implementation of a vendor application to provide shared services support to countries where Citi had a smaller footprint. In addition to managing a global team and the vendor, I also set up and led a PMO to support the implementation programme.

Leveraging the expertise I developed whist working as an Project Risk Audit Manager, I was asked to join the Investment Banking IT department to implement quality management into the software development process and provide project risk assessment of key projects. The quality management process was successfully implemented and by the time I left, was seen as a valued part of the software development process. As a result of quality management, project risk assessments and the reporting of project key performance indicators, the performance of projects in terms of staying within budget and within timescales significantly improved within the department.

IT Strategy, IT Assessment, Project Management, Expert Witness Research