I was recruited to deliver a strategic development of the AA’s market-leading route planning web service to offer a UK (and, eventually, European) travel and leisure portal funded by a £2m business case. Features included sophisticated interactive GIS mapping, hotel, restaurant and cottage booking services and a leisure inspiration engine based on an interactive map using Flash technology. My end-to-end project management responsibilities extended from definition to deployment and entailed budgetary control, senior stakeholder management up to board level and matrix-management of product development, analysis, graphic design and software development resources, numbering over 25.

Notable achievements included delivering the largest e-commerce project in the AA in 2006/07, developing a junior resource into the role of team-leader, co-ordinating 3 different analysis streams and making a significant contribution to development of the end-user proposition applying my experience from the travel industry.

Successfully brought back on track a failing multi-stream technology and business change project involving the strategic replatforming and relaunch of leading retailer’s shop-front website. Included Interwoven (CMS) implementation, SEO, web analytics (Omniture) rebranding and overhauling e-commerce journeys.

I was recruited mid-way through the project to bring project management discipline, financial control, structure and governance to a complex scrum/agile project using a challenging offshore/onshore model that was struggling to meet stakeholder’s expectations; deliver shippable code at the end of each sprint; or meet delivery targets. My responsibilities involved both applications and infrastructure delivery, the latter entailing the procurement, configuration, testing and operational handover of 8 production and near production environments, managed through an infrastructure delivery lead and board that I chaired.

Through the Change Manager, Technical Lead, Testing Manager and Delivery Leads that reported to me, I managed a matrix of 25 technical resources and a budget of £3 million. My work focussed on getting the right governance structures, accountabilities, communications, planning and priority setting to leverage the substantial investment that went into this flagship change programme.

Key achievements:

 Forecasting, tracking and managing expenditure on a budget that was running out of control when I assumed responsibility for the programme. Peaks needed to be balanced with measures to bring expenditure within budget by year end.
 Establishment of a Benefits Realisation plan and the implementation of tracking measures.
 Planning and management of business changes such as training, process and workflow re-engineering.
 Replanning launch dates and working closely with the SRO to ensure the reasons for the rescheduling were understood in the wider stakeholder community and was achievable.
 Significant process improvements to the development approach to improve efficiency, quality and customer satisfaction.

Project managing a portfolio of strategic web projects for News International’s major newspaper titles: The Sun and The Times. Included initiating a major upgrade of the award-winning MySun social-networking site and automating the generation of intra-article contextual links and topic-pages for the Times On-Line using the industry-leading FAST search engine. Also responsible for project managing the publication of the Sunday Times Rich List 2008. Responsibilities included writing project Charters (=PID), developing Business Cases and securing project and funding approvals. Relationship management with specialist offshore vendors and senior stakeholders up to board level; contract and commercial negotiation; management of business analysis and 3rd party development resources.

I was responsible for the initiation of all 3 projects and so developed the Business Cases, successfully piloted them through the investment committee and built the project teams. I managed the production of requirements specifications and architectural design through specialist resources and developed the appropriate delivery methodologies in each case. I also set up a governance structure, including project boards to ensure effective co-ordination and communication. Stakeholders ranged from product development experts to the on-line editors of the Sun and Times newspapers and the deputy managing director of News International.

High-profile multimedia project to create a new revenue stream by developing a high-value news alerting subscription service using content from the highly regarded ‘Lex’ newspaper column, targeted at senior City clients. This entailed integration with DRM and CMS systems, development of a real-time news alerting service using RSS feeds to Blackberry, mobile and smartphone devices and mobile web content platform. I was responsible for end-to-end project and budget management; implementation of a scrum/Agile project approach; management of RFP (supplier tendering & selection process); vendor management; contractual and SLA negotiations, workflow process changes, testing and migration. The project delivered below cost and to target and contributed to a significant uplift in 2007/08 on-line subscription revenues.

Key achievements:

 End-to-end project management, including leading the RFP process, project initiation and planning, test planning and execution and handover to production
 Developing appropriate project methodology with US 3rd party vendor
 Building business case; submission to investment committee; forecasting, tracking and managing expenditure.
 Managing external project dependencies and convincing stakeholders to more closely integrate this project within a much larger programme in order to leverage synergies
 Worked closely with marketing, customer services and sales stakeholders to identify and implement the necessary business change.

led a portfolio of linked projects to implement a site-wide refresh of the BBC News website and enrich the user experience with new services and features (including personalisation). One stream involved an innovative and technically challenging use of Flash to enrich the Most Popular now section of the News site. My role included managing the definition phase (including usability testing), securing approvals from senior BBC management, marshalling technical resources and planning/tracking development. An additional dimension to my role was contributing advice on project process and governance.

Teletext is a digital advertiser and publisher whose TeletextHolidays.co.uk website services a range of needs from users who want a cheap deal to independent travellers who prefer to “self-package” separately booked hotel, car hire and insurance products. Typical projects included integrating flight booking engines, white-label services, cross-selling mechanisms as well as marketing and advertising initiatives involving CRM and portal development.

As On-Line Programme Manager, I was accountable for managing and delivering a diverse programme of projects, which ranged from front-end functionality to back-end databases, data feeds and integrations (internal and external). At any one time, it comprised between 8-15 concurrent projects of varying sizes. Software development was undertaken by the in-house team, UK vendors or an Indian off-shore facility in Delhi or a combination of the 3.

• Building the annual Online software development plan and budget; providing strategic consultancy to stakeholders and evangelising effective testing and the innovative application of IT; participating in senior management reviews of divisional strategy and technical infrastructure;
• Mid-term planning in line with changing commercial objectives and revenue targets and tracking the delivery of the On-Line programme according to cost, quality & time; identifying technical projects with hidden but significant revenue potential;
• Working with the Development Manager to optimise delivery sequence and resource utilisation
• Maintaining programme plans and financial spreadsheets tracking spend and resource consumption; driving up the standards of risk and issue management by my project management team;
• Personally project managing the initiation (Requirements Capture, Analysis/specification, Business Case) phase of high-value/high risk projects;
• Presenting weekly programme-level reports of progress and deviations to the OnLine Managing Director; directing and guiding my project managers and BA’s; and managing the projects under my direct control.
• Owning end-to-end project processes; encouraging the evaluation/adoption of latest development methodologies such as Agile; trouble-shooting process failures;
• Chairing programme and project boards; conducting post-implementation reviews and issuing objective assessments of successful and failed projects;
• Acting as a bridge between the technical and non-technical communities such as Product Development, Marketing & sales; offering a one-stop shop to stakeholders on technical matters; representing project management interests in external client meetings;

Key achievements:

• Establishing an offshore development facility in India to lower development costs & flex capacity;
• Successfully introducing the concept of programme management, thereby giving the Business visibility of the entire project landscape, enabling it to anticipate pinch-points, align project priorities with revenue forecasts and align its expectations which what was achievable;
• Championing a tailored application of the PRINCE2 methodology and process-driven delivery, thereby given the stakeholders and sponsors confidence in published timelines and introducing a high degree of predictability in the development process;
• Personally delivering a number of projects regarded as ‘model’ such as the restructuring/reskinning of a high transacation volume website with no interruption in service;
• Managing the graceful closure of a failing project to deliver batch data upload systems and maintaining the confidence of senior management to relaunch the project with a new supplier;
• Arriving in a process-free zone and implementing effective change control, prioritisation approval processes, quality measurement, planning and documentation templates and project boards, thereby vastly improving management confidence and the throughput of projects to cost, quality and time;
• Ensuring that all business change activities were identified as part of project initiation processes and were agenda’ed in the programme board that I chaired.
• Pioneered business cases and budget forecasting/tracking for both projects and programmes.
• Managing a wide range of stakeholders from Marketing and Sales departmental heads to IT and Commercial Directors to the Managing Director.