Sara John Email & Phone Number

Drive the Digital Accessibility and Assistive Technology agenda to ensure the bank’s technology is barrier free and accessible for NatWest colleagues and customers. - Presented the business case for further embedding digital accessibility into NatWest to Head of Strategy (Bank Executive Committee) with improvement recommendations.- Continue to provide ongoing leadership and management to drive activities forward and provide stakeholder reporting to the Bank Executive and Technology sponsor.- Represented Natwest at external Disability Awareness events (TechSharePro 2020) and presentations to various interest groups to raise awareness of the Accessibility and disability considerations.- Implemented an in-house Accessibility testing and measuring functionality, to be more cost efficient and agile at achieving accessible applications.

Project managed an improvement programme as part of a bank wide initiative to return NatWest to ‘Gold’ rated by the Business Disability Forum (BDF) by 2018. - Developed and led a Technology programme to improve the digital accessibility agenda and embed disability awareness across the 10,000 employee department. - Moved the company from unrated to gold for an externally recognized accreditation from the Business Disability Forum.- Gained executive and senior leadership sponsorship to support the programme by ensuring resources, time and commitment were given to drive activities and make improvements.- Collaborated across the Technology function to review and introduce disability checkpoints into the development lifecycle for systems and applications to ensure the design and deployment of products to Natwest Group customers and staff are accessible and inclusive. - Secured signatory to the BDF Technology Charter.- Developed learning and support collateral to produce accessible solutions.

London, England, United Kingdom

Working within a team of 3 supporting the department Leadership team with special business management projects. - Supported the effective management and decision making across TP&BM by designing and implementing a Business Board pack (and underlying processes) that provided key business data, and chaired / secretariat at relevant department meetings and boards.- Ensured operational continuity for the department through the management of business continuity plans for London as well as collaborated with other plan owners to ensure business continuity is fully covered across all locations in the department.

Technology Services Information Services & Planview Support Team

Team leader of a team of 4 delivering a service proposition to over 6000 system users. Planview is the Project and Programme Management reporting and resourcing tool used in RBS. Accountable for designing, implementing and managing a new systems support model to support a growing global user base despite a reduction in support team size due to compulsory redundancies (reduced from 7 to 3 FTEs) resulting in circa £80k savings in internal process wastage.

Senior member of the Planview Support Team at RBS specialising in analysing user requirements to build and implement appropriate strategic business solutions. Due to changing business needs became an integral member of the Planview globalisation programme team, rolling out Planview to an additional 1000 users based in ASIA & India.

An integral member of the highest ranking Programme Office supporting one of the largest banking integration Programmes of its kind. Processed, analysed and challenged data from the satellite programme offices to ensure the Programme Manager was supplied with key information to make strategic decisions.

Programme Governance support to the programme manager and six project managers to implement a £1m business critical change management programme which ensured the largest mortgage finance company of its kind is compliant with the Financial services authority regulations. Governance processes included weekly reporting to the Programme Steering Board, facilitation of meetings, programme risk, issues, dependency, finance and change control management.

Education record

1St, Business Information Systems

Graduated with 1st class honours. I was 1 of 2 pupils to achieve a 1st for this degree in 2002. Undertook a placement year at Oracle.