I’m a Brit who has been based in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than 20 years but is now looking to return to the UK and begin a new chapter.I’ve been privileged to be at the forefront of some incredible technological developments – the rapid growth of CRM, the explosion of cloud computing and digital transformation, and now the generational changes that AI offers.My focus has always been in the practical application of these ground-breaking technologies – how do you realize genuine business value from them? – and so my background has largely been in implementation services.I’ve seen the good and the bad in software deployments – enjoying the view variously as a consultant, a vendor, a customer and an in-house project manager. I’ve been an early-hire in a start-up company, and established practices from scratch, and I’ve worked within large organizations, building programs to enterprise-scale,Most deployment challenges are due not to technology issues but to other factors, typically beyond the reach of the traditional project manager – a lack of executive support, incoherent vision, competing objectives, unrealistic timelines, inadequate user adoption, etc.My background and the skills that I have gained over the years enable me to identify the hot spots in a deployment – and to put together the action plans to set programs up for success or to get them back on track.There’s no great mystery or secret formula to this approach though. It’s simply a question of understanding the components that go into a successful program, establishing the virtual teams that can deliver them, ensuring that you have good communication between them and then executing the plan with discipline.Easier said than done, perhaps, but I have a strong track record of delivering successful implementations across multiple industries.And I take real pleasure from seeing a big deployment – which has occupied the waking moments of hundreds if not thousands of people for many months, and will go on to impact potentially millions of users in the future – actually achieving what it sought to at the outset.