Global Workplace Manager - Projects
Kingston Upon Thames / London, United Kingdom
I was the initial point of contact for all of Unilever’s Workplace projects (mainly office fit outs for Activity Based Working (ABW) (CAPEX €500k - €35m)). My role was to provide ABW & Project Management consultancy to the ‘in country’ Workplace transformation projects. Within 12 months I was actively involved in 70+ projects, across 40 countries. This enabled me to share best practice and lessons learnt with the projects, which was especially value adding at the early set up stages of the project (structure, resource, governance etc.) & also during the Design and Delivery stages. The role also required a tracking & monitoring element, which I delivered as a PMO lead. I provided Quality Assurance to projects by reviewing their monthly status reports, tracking their Risks, Issues, and KPI’s. Being so close to the projects enabled me to shape the strategy and agenda for the monthly Projects meeting with the Global Workplace Leadership team. I lead this critical meeting covering reporting, key metrics, and highlighting the areas that could drive continuous improvements across the Workplace projects. In addition to the Project Consultancy and PMO role, and arguably the part of the role that I am most proud of, was my involvement in leading the PM Framework. When I joined the team, a tender had just been completed to provide 3rd party Construction Project Management services via a panel of 3 suppliers (CBRE, AECOM, and Cushman & Wakefield) – something Unilever had never attempted before. It was a great time to get involved and even though it was a team of competitors they quickly started to work as partners; driving collaboration and innovation. Initial resistance within Unilever was overcome through careful communications, stakeholder and change management and now with a clearly defined infrastructure in place, the PM Framework is the ‘de-facto’ way to secure external PM resources across Unilever’s global Workplace projects.