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Expert has worked with organisations to identify where they are working effectively and where they need to be transformed to either effectively deliver to their existing customer community or to a changing customer community. This is particularly pertinant where organisations are having to reduce their staff numbers whilst continuing to deliver a service to customers and shareholders.

This information can then be used to ascertain the 'future state' for the organisation and a plan to transition from the current to the future can be developed and put into action. Dependent on the scale of the transformation this will include: the behaviours that are required across the organisation and from individuals; how the business is managed which may require reporting structures to be slightly modified or significantly changed; re-enginering of parts of the business maybe moving from functional teams to multi-functional teams; a review of the organisation's training and development to ensure these areas reinforce and support the organisation for the future.

Expert has experience in all three aspects ~ determining the 'future state', developing the plan to achieve that 'future state' and implementing the plan so that the organisation changes to meet their future challenges.

Expert has significant experience in helping organisations to change in a way that is sustainable for the future. This experience means that senior managers can be confident that their investment (time, effort and money) will reap the rewards that they anticipated in the business case rather than the organisational changes slipping back to the old ways after a period of time. On average 50% of all improvement projects do not achieve their stated outcomes and that is significantly impacted by the people side of the change not being taken into consideration.

Expert's engineering background means that she brings a practical perspective to the change management part of a project. This includes: loooking at the areas in the organisation that will be impacted by the change and planning appropriate interventions; training people in how to implement change and some of the resons why it can be hard to do; the design of, and delivery against, a communications plan; incorporating the change elements within the main project plan; mentoring the senior managers in their role as sponsor and also in how to get the best from their staff; and ensuring that reinforcement activities and mechanisms are considered throughout the life of the project and not just at the end, which is too late.

Expert has been the project manager for a number of business improvement and organisation change projects. Expert has worked with multi-disciplinary teams to ensure the projects are successful. These teams are often made up of a mix of client and consulting staff.

Expert has been a member of various steering groups and has either reported into a single Director or has acted as an interim member of the senior management team reporting into the MD.

Expert uses visual means of planning for her projects which builds engagement and also drives through interdependencies and ensures that all risks are identified and managed accordingly. Expert has also been responsible for resource management (ensuring the right people and skills are available at the right time) and for managing the financial budgets of programmes.

Expert has introduced cross-functional team working to a number of organisations who had previously worked within functional matrices with the associated silos that had, in these instances, appeared. This experience has included: Working with the Directors to understand the business issues and personal worries that they have. There is often a perceived loss of power at a senior level which has to be carefully managed; Working with individuals who cross a full spectrum of emotions everthying from worrying that their technical expertise will be compromised through to being excited by working in a different way.

Expert has a number of tools and techniques that she uses to ensure that once formed the cross-functional teams work effectively together:

- A fully popoulated and cascadebale plan to ensure team leaders have true ownership of their tea members
- Clear definition of roles and responsibilities and interfaces between the different teams
- Ensuring that everyone knows what the roles and responsibilities are
- Review of reporting structures - it may be that two are required, one for personal developemnt and another for day to day task management
- Team charter and team values
- Daily stand-ups around visual display boards so that every member of the team can see how what they are doing its in with the wider team
- Daily issue capture mechanisms
- The introduction of new ways of working to help reinforce the new way of working

In all instance where this way of working has been introduced the team leaders feel truly empowered and the team members feel as if they are part of a team and well communicated to. All of this then leads to the team working effectively together and delivering a great result to the company and it's customers.


Responsible for the design and delivery of a significant £1.5 m consulting assignment. This included an initial diagnostic, determining the desired state with the senior managemnt team and then managing a mixed client and consultancy team to implement all the changes. The project split into two areas:

1) Mobilisation of a £230m, 13 year, 100 people support programme where they had to change how they delivered to the MOD. Led the introduction of collaborative working practices across all areas of the programme.
2) A wider culture change programme that was an outcome of the changes requred as it became apparent that the culture of the whole organisation needed to be more collaborative and have a greater delivery focus
Responsible for:
- Redesign of the organisational structure to adress those issues that would hamper success
- The introduction of a new role so people would know it was different
- The introduction of delegated responsibility with authority
- Helping the MOD and industry work effectively together
- One unified team with a shared vision, structure, and ways of working
Achievements:
- Certificate of commendation for the programme
- Forecast six month slippage was recovered
- Secured funding that would otherwise have been unattainable
- Programmes who embrace this way of working consistently outperform others when measured using the MOD Supplier Relationship scoring system.Having set the challenging target of achieving a three-fold increase in turnover within seven years,
Thales UK’s aerospace business was successfully growing its order book, but was being held back by the UK's chronic shortage of systems engineers. If it was to fulfil these orders, the company needed to dramatically increase the productivity of its current workforce and reduce its development cycle times. At the same time, it had to address the need to raise the quality of leadership at all levels, an issue which had been identified by a staff survey.

Designed an integrated programme that could be rolled out across the company using trainedfacilitatirs and coaches. Led an integrated team to develop a programme specifically targeted at Team Leaders which could work alongside existing management initiatives.

Project managed the two year roll out process; covered nine departments, more than 100 Team Leaders and 600 team members and three sites. Each element of the programme paid for
itself in less than 12 months with the following business benefits:
- Improved team and inter-team communications
- Driven continuous improvement
- Quickened the business pulse
- Increased customer confidenceThales Defence (Wells) decided that they could not continue with a “time & materials” mentality and a culture of project over-runs when the Defence sector was moving towards “fixed price” contracts in a more commercially astute environment. They wanted to introduce the concept of Collaborative Working to the organisation. Project managed two discrete projects with mixed consulting and client teams and up to 6 consultants and 6 client staff permanently on the change team. Successfully delivered both projects in a difficult cultural environment with a total consultancy value of £1.35m.
Responsible For
- The initial diagnosis, determining the overall vision and planning to achieve a practical solution.
- Ensuring the quality of personal and team deliverables and alignment with the overall vision.
- All the organisation change aspects including the recruitment of team leaders, role/skill definition, communications planning and delivery, team leader training and team building.
Achievements
- Accepted by the client Executive team as an interim member of their team.
- Late deliveries improved by 77% corresponding to a reduction in overspend for 1 project of ~£4.5m.
- Increased morale and job satisfaction reflected in 70% reduction in client staff turnover in 12-month period following the introduction of collaborative working into a major programme (110 people in the team).LDV (a volume van manufacturer) decided that an ERP system was necessary to support their new business. The ERP system would replace the numerous legacy systems and eliminate the duplication of both data and effort. Part of the 3 strong CSC team who were responsible for evaluating the available options with the business.
Responsible For
- Providing subject matter expertise in the Package Evaluation and Selection process and related methodologies and ensuring that our approach met the client’s requirements..
- The creative use of techniques to get the best out of the workshops held with client staff at all levels of the organisation. Acted as lead facilitator in all workshop sessions with the client.
Achievements
- Delivered the project on time and to budget for the client.
- CSC won the implementation phase with LDV and it was recognised within CSC that this ‘win’ was largely as a result of the success of this project and the personal credibility of the CSC team
- Client funded significant study for the Change Manager role for the implementation phase.