Program Management

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Essence

Exceptional Program Management involves aligning programs with organisational goals, providing a clear vision for success, and effectively communicating with stakeholders.

Leaders in this role proactively manage risks, build strong relationships and optimise resources for efficient program delivery. They foster innovation, encourage continuous improvement and resolve conflicts to create a collaborative and high-performing team. By implementing key performance indicators they measure success and share knowledge, contributing to the overall effectiveness and value creation within the organisation.

Experience

My first Program Manager role was in 2013 at Lloyds International in Sydney. The program had a vision to reduce the risks associated with Treasury systems landscape and have full operational support from all the component vendors.

It was broken down into two IT projects. The first was to de-couple the tightly integrated home-grown Risk system from Sungard's Quantum trading and settlements platform and use standard interfaces. The second was to re-implement Quantum on high availability infrastructure to the latest fully support version of the operating system.

There was a significant risk to the program as there was no technical documentation. In its absence the decoupling project soon reset expectations to simply upgrade the operating system. This decision pushed the de-coupling scope into the 2nd project and that added significant costs.

In parallel, my network of relationships revealed that organisation goals were shifting especially as Lloyds was then owned by the UK Government. Their appetite to invest in the Australian business dropped and consequently the business case no longer stood up. I brought the program to an orderly close.

At easyJet, I ran the Enterprise Integration program. This had a vision of a plug and play application landscape and an objective to remove point to point integrations over time. This was broken down into four initiatives; evaluation and selection of suitable middleware, an outsourced integration competency, cloud infrastructure to support the middleware and a roadmap to transition point to point integrations to the new middleware aligned with the project pipeline.

At Rabobank, I worked closely with the Program Director to shape an agile program. In a role similar to a Release Train Engineer, I facilitated PI planning (Program Increment) workshops and brought agile teams together to present each increment.

More recently, at Greencross I established the Harmony program with a vision of harmonised finance and supply chain business processes supported on enterprise software. This was broken down into two initiatives; creating knowledge assets of the existing ERP solution and evaluating enterprise software options. Following this, a straight forward upgrade implementation was established as the next tranche.

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