Christopher Maxwell
Program Manager

BSc -Mechanical Engineering, Brunel University, London
CEng -Chartered Engineer

Core Skills     

• An accomplished Program Manager with over 20 years’ experience in IT enabled change.
• Has delivered a wide variety of change programs in Asia Pacific, Europe and the Americas.
• Industry expertise in Banking, National & Local Government, Retail, Travel, Consumer Brands and with Technology Vendors.
• Program implementation experience in SAP, Oracle, Siebel, Infosys (Banking) and Microsoft technologies.
• Able to mobilise and align diverse groups of stakeholders, team members and third parties.
• Able to create and deliver clear and comprehensive engagement plans to ensure a common, continued understanding of program goals.
• Able to deploy repeatable processes and metrics to ensure visibility of progress and predictability of outcomes.
• Places high priority on benefits realisation strategies to ensure that benefits are realised.
• Places high priority on program governance to ensure that key stakeholders are engaged, scope is controlled, cost is contained and risks are properly mitigated.
• Provides expert opinion on IT related legal cases.
• Former visiting lecturer on MBA and MSc courses at one of the London business schools.
• Chartered Engineer, able to bring structure and order to complex situations.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills; thrives under pressure whilst always maintaining a sense of humour

Key Clients            

• Barclays Bank
• Swiss Stock Exchange
• Sainsburys
• Thomas Cook Group
• Cooperative Financial Services
• British American Tobacco
• Toyota
• Woolworths
• Scottish Executive
• Government of the South West (England)
• NSPCC/Childline

 Key Achievements

• For Thomas Cook Group, reporting to the newly appointed Group CTO, led a program to establish a new, group wide IT capability across Europe and North America. Defined a new Group wide CTO organisation, gained buy in to this from local CIOs and group executive and enabled recruitment against this brief; created an enterprise wide architecture for business and technology deployment; put in place the architectural boards and associated policies and governance required to promote group wide development; created a 5 year road map and business case for delivery.
• For Sainsburys, led the development and deployment of a new operating model for service delivery for sainsburys.co.uk, covering food, non-food and financial services. This was part of a $35m program to deploy non-food products and financial services online. As a consequence of this work, Sainsbury’s launched their new proposition on time and within budget.
• For NSPCC/Childline, led the solutioning, build and deployment of an innovative new multi-channel contact centre platform for the NSPCC’s adult helplines and for ChildLine, the foremost children’s helpline in the UK. This was a major part of a $70m program, jointly funded by the NSPCC and central government. As a consequence ChildLine relaunched its helpline service to offer more relevant channels to children.
• For Cooperative Financial Services, led mixed teams of client, vendor and consulting resources across the Implementation, Change and Business Case workstreams for this $300m program to replace the Cooperative’s banking systems with a new banking platform based on the Infosys banking solution designed to support all of their core banking, insurance and life & pensions products.
• For British American Tobacco, led the implementation program for a global rollout of SAP HR to a user base in excess of 12,000. A substantial part of this work involved the transfer of knowledge from development teams based in Brazil, Malaysia and Europe to the outsourced service management provider based in India. The implementation went in on time and to budget.
• For the Swiss Stock Exchange, led a joint client and vendor team to develop and implement a new operational model for the exchange’s surveillance & supervision systems. This involved around 40 people in defining a new governance structure, and in reengineering operational process.
• For Barclays Bank, over a period of five years, led a series of change programs for corporate, retail, international and private client banks. This included leading a joint team to define a new operating model for the international bank, redefining the retail bank’s $400m per annum change portfolio and delivering a series of CRM strategies and implementations.
• For Toyota GB, led their Year 2000 program.