Project Description
Ben Zwar
PMO Lead / Project Manager
Areas Of Expertise
- Project Management
- Project Scheduling
- PMO Management
- Metrics and Reporting
- Risk & Issue Management
- Change Management
- Resource forecasting
Education
- Bachelor of Information Systems (BIS), The University of Melbourne
- ITIL Certified – Foundation
- Certified SAFe® 5 Agilist
About Ben Zwar
Ben is a skilled Project Manager / PMO Lead who joined Seven Consulting’s Melbourne practice in December 2014. He has significant experience in both traditional and agile project management methodologies with a focus on establishing planning and scheduling standards, defining appropriate KPI’s and metrics to drive successful outcomes.
Ben has a broad range of abilities across Project / PMO Management including resource planning, risks & issues management, Project Governance & Reporting as well as schedule management. To date, Ben has held key Project Management, PMO and scheduling positions with clients including Alinta Energy, ASX, Telstra, NAB, ANZ and Bupa.
What Ben brings
- Project Leadership & Management.
- Advanced Scheduling skills developed over years performing the role of Master Scheduler.
- Establishment & reporting of effective metrics in traditional & agile environments.
- Coaching Project Managers & team members in effective use of Project Schedule templates, development, maintenance & procedures.
- Strong analytical ability, in particular critical path analysis & earned value analysis, as well as agile delivery tracking & reporting.
- Experience in Risk/Issue & Change Management.
Key Clients
- Alinta Energy
- Eastern Melbourne PHN
- ASX
- WorkSafe Victoria
- Telstra
- Telstra Health
- National Australia Bank (NAB)
- Bupa
- Carlton & United Breweries (CUB)
- ANZ Bank
- Hewlett-Packard
- ATM Solutions
Key Achievements
As Project Manager at Alinta Energy, Ben was responsible for initiating & project managing the discovery phase of the Pearl program business case. The Pearl program scope was for the West Coast implementation of Alinta’s new billing system (CORE), which had recently been delivered for the East Coast business. Activities included management of the technology resource pool assigned to complete estimates, managing risks & issues, schedule, progress reporting & managing stakeholders including through attendance at Working Group and Steering Committee meetings.
As Project Manager at Eastern Melbourne PHN, Ben was responsible for managing the transition of Mental Health data reporting by provider organisations from using legacy manual entry reporting methods, to an automated method extracting data directly from providers Customer Information Management (CIM) systems for direct upload to the Department of Health. This project also involved a major update to the PMHC-MDS v4 data model for providers and EMPHN, which required significant change management across several organisations resulting in an enriched data set utilised for enhanced reporting and analysis.
As PMO Lead at ASX, on the CHESS Replacement Project with a budget of $250m+, Ben was responsible for leading a team of 5 PMO Resources, governing Schedule, Risks & Issues, Change Management, and all levels of project reporting at stream, Working Group, Steering Committee and Board levels. Ben was also responsible for establishment & maintenance of the Project Schedule on this highly complex program, with over 30 work streams delivering a world-first Distributed Ledger technology for clearing and settlement.
As PMO Lead on the WorkSafe Strategy Portfolio, Ben was responsible for reporting & governance of the Strategy Programme, which encompassed 6 individual programmes totalling ~$390m budget. Key activities included creating & maintaining a Portfolio Release Plan (integrating scope summaries, delivery timelines & tracking), managing the governance of 6 individual Program & 2 Portfolio Steering Committees, as well as producing & implementing Risk, Dependency, Change, Document, Vendor & Schedule Management Plans.
As Master Scheduler, at Telstra on the B2B Digitisation Program, Ben was responsible for Program Metrics & Reporting on the agile program with a $200m+ annual budget. Ben developed Excel & Power BI Reports using Jira data to drive delivery across 40+ Feature teams. Coached Scrum Masters on using Power BI, facilitated sprint check in sessions & Scrum of Scrum meetings. Produced executive level reporting on program status/health. Developed & maintained a Launch Readiness Schedule for products going to market, along with facilitating Launch Readiness Governance meetings.
As PMO Lead at Telstra Health, on the National Cancer Screening Register Program, Ben was required to oversee and manage a team of six PMO staff who were responsible for risk and issue management, change management, scheduling, program governance, communications, business administration & stakeholder management.
As Master Scheduler at NAB, on Project Open Plan, (a partnership between NAB & Real Estate Australia to provide a seamless property search, financing & purchase experience). Ben developed & maintained a project schedule combining traditional & agile delivery streams across a number of internal & external teams.
As Project Manager at NAB for the ASIC PDS Project, Ben managed a team who had the remit of assembling and delivering a high volume of documentation to a tight deadline. A high degree of scrutiny was necessary for approval of the documentation produced, which meant that close management of resourcing & tracking of the project deliverables was required to deliver the project successfully.
As a Master Scheduler at NAB, across several programs within the Products & Markets Portfolio, Ben was accountable for developing schedules for new projects, as well as joining existing in-flight projects & taking corrective action to bring the schedules up to an acceptable standard. Performed health checks on many projects across the portfolio, providing coaching for project resources to uplift their ability to effectively manage their schedules & advise on corrective actions required.
As Master Scheduler at NAB, Ben had accountability for complex Scheduling including the ADA2 Transition program, which is one of the largest Asset Transitions ever completed in NAB Wealth, comprising of approx. $18bn in assets, multiple formal communications with nearly 1 million members to transition, as well as business & technology changes.
As a Scheduler at Bupa, Ben created & maintained project schedules for several key strategic sales initiatives within Bupa, one of which was the very successful “Simple Start” product & campaign. Also contributed to the business EPMO through the development of standards & procedures for resource allocation, forecasting & time sheeting.
As a Scheduler at Carlton & United Breweries (CUB), Ben developed detailed schedules for individual workstreams, which he rolled up to a Master Schedule for the CUB Pangea program. This program involved the implementation of the global SAB Miller Global SAP template with several local systems. Ben was Also responsible for resource estimation, forecast & levelling for the Program.
As PMO Manager at ANZ Ben had accountability for the Transactive Program. His responsibilities included Resource forecasting & tracking, Financial Reporting, Risk & Issue Management, Change Management, Governance & ad-hoc reporting for senior stakeholders. A key requirement of this role was to prepare slide packs, chair & take minutes for Steering Committees, Change Management, Risk & Issues and Project Status meetings.
As Master Scheduler at ANZ Bank, Ben developed & implemented scheduling standards & processes across all streams of the Transactive program ($50m+). Ben worked on tracking schedules of several major releases through to completion. Ben also had accountability for the coordination and preparation of status reporting & critical path analysis on all schedules.
As part of the Hewlett-Packard – Telstra team Ben was responsible for creating scheduling standards & processes, for adoption, across the Telstra Billing Portfolio. This role inducted users both on & offshore in the use of the templates & supporting processes to ensure consistency of reporting & the ability to roll-up individual stream plans into a solid master schedule. Ben instituted a review of stream schedules & worked with stream leads, to achieve a level of consistency within the plans, as well as the creation of a baseline for each streams plan across the OIM Program. Ben ensured critical path analysis was performed which revealed resource & time constraints and prompted senior management to institute remedial action, to ensure the program delivered within the agreed timeframe.
As part of the Hewlett-Packard – Telstra team, Ben was responsible for the Risk & Issue Management, as well as Change Management governance, across the Telstra Bluebox & other projects. This included chairing fortnightly Risk & Issue meetings and weekly Change Management meetings. Performed the role of Interim PMO Manager for several months, performing required activities around Financials, Resourcing, Scheduling, Risks & Issues, Change Management, and governance reporting.
As part of the Hewlett-Packard – Telstra team, Ben was appointed to The Bluebox Program. The initiative was established to roll out SAP across Telstra at a cost of $17m. The Program had been running for some time but was behind schedule for Go-Live. Upon appointment a review of activity lists & dependencies was completed through a series of structured workshops to build a remediated schedule. Upon successful implementation of the master schedule a promotion to PMO Manager for the program was made to ensure overall consistency within program reporting continued at the high level achieved post remedial activity implementation.
As a scheduling expert at Telstra, Ben developed end-to-end project schedules (with a high degree of complexity through the existence of numerous internal & external dependencies). Developed a ‘Start of Week’ planning session concept to ensure tasks scheduled for the commencement or completion over the next week were understood by project teams & managed appropriately – an approach adopted for all Online projects.
As Project Manager at ATM Solutions, Ben successfully Project Managed deployment of ATMs across Australia for major clients such as BP & ALH. Ben managed a team of 20+ staff across the Client Support Services department, which acted as a first line helpdesk for 5000+ ATM sites across Australia. Led development & configuration of new call logging software (HEAT) to provide immediate fault resolution instructions for Helpdesk staff resulting in a 20% improvement in remote fault resolution. Establishment & management of Helpdesk training modules & quarterly training seminars.
