Project Description
Christopher Hughes
Program Director
Areas Of Expertise
- Program/Project Management & Scaled Agile
- Business Transformation
- Risk
- Privacy & Compliance
- Data Projects
- Senior Stakeholder Management
- Vendor Management
- Application and Infrastructure
Education
- Bachelor, Double Major in Economics & Japanese Studies, University of New South Wales
About Christopher Hughes
- Chris Hughes is a customer-focused Program Director and consultant with 20 years of experience spanning Finance (Trading, SMSFs, Managed Investments, Privacy & Data, Compliance, Legal & Superannuation), Insurance, and 4 years in Telecommunications, Broadcast Utilities, and Government (NSW Police Force). A proven leader, he has managed large program teams of over 500 people in high-pressure environments. His expertise encompasses management consulting, project and program management, Scaled Agile delivery, digital and business transformation, governance frameworks, Privacy and Data Governance, Compliance & Risk, vendor contracts, change management, and operational IT management.
What Christopher brings
- A proven leader with experience managing large program teams of over 500 people in high-pressure financial, insurance, regulatory, and technical environments.
- Self-motivated and adept at problem-solving, with the ability to thrive under pressure while collaborating with multi-disciplinary teams across various technology platforms and industries.
- Leadership in Program/Portfolio Management, including stakeholder management, reporting, financial oversight, planning, prioritisation, benefits management, data migration, and risk & issue management.
- Experienced Vendor Manager focused on a team engagement and collaborative approach.
Key Clients:
- iCare
- BT/Westpac
- IAG
- CFS
- Macquarie Bank
- BT Financial Group
- ANZ
- Telstra
- NSW Police Force
- Broadcast Australia
- ING Australia
Key Achievements
As Technical Program Manager at iCare, Chris led the initiative to transition iCare’s Workers Compensation insurance scheme to the Guidewire platform. The project paused in December 2023 due to funding needs, and involved extensive technical, digital, and operational work, including re-contracting with service providers and onboarding over 200 government agencies through an API hub. Chris managed tech squads, coordinated with external providers, and evaluated the move to Guidewire Cloud, ultimately deferring it to 2025. He also oversaw a complex data migration process, which required partitioning over 3,000 tables and integrating them with the Snowflake Data Lake for reporting.
As Senior Program Manager at BT/Westpac, Chris managed a program to remediate 30+ systems across the BT business that stored sensitive customer information, such as TFNs, health data, and credit card information. He oversaw monthly ASIC and quarterly APRA breach reporting, managed high-rated incident closures related to TFN retention period compliance, and developed Guiding Principles to interpret conflicting regulations. Chris also led the Unstructured Data stream and the largest stream for the Panorama (Avaloq) strategic build, working closely with Legal and Records Management to define document destruction processes while considering legal holds.
As Senior Program Manager at IAG, Chris led the largest release stream ($75m) of IAG’s $1.5b initiative within a 10-year group-wide transformation program, prioritising replacing legacy systems with the Guidewire platform. His work focused on onboarding ASB (CBA Auckland), a major partner bank in New Zealand, to sell insurance through the platform. This Scaled Agile project involved 38 work streams, 55 squads, and over 500 people, covering technical platforms, business processes, pricing, and change management. Chris played a key role in building the complex API hub for ASB/CBA, ensuring rigorous testing and security, and worked on creating secure Digital Partner portals for enhanced customer experience. He also managed a $4M stream focused on scalability initiatives to support future growth while delivering a new Target Operating Model aligned with New Zealand’s regulatory requirements.
As Risk Platform Manager & Program Director at Westpac, Chris served as Program Director for the APRA Enforceable Undertaking at Westpac and Platform Manager for the Group Risk & Control system (Juno – IBM Open Pages). He oversaw a $50M Juno stream, enhancing functionality, reporting, data quality, and governance across structured and unstructured data. Juno was critical to 8 of the 19 workstreams under the Enforceable Undertaking. Chris also managed the Juno portfolio, system releases, licensing, vendor relationships, and downstream reporting. He scaled up delivery capacity, expanding to 7 cross-functional squads and transforming Juno into an enterprise-grade platform for over 10,000 users while transitioning to an Agile continuous delivery model.
As Program Director at Westpac, Chris led multiple high-impact projects, including the $12M Document & Matter Management (DMM) project for Legal & Secretariat and the $20M Monitoring & Surveillance Strategic Project for Compliance/Group Control Room. Chris introduced the iManage platform for the DMM project to centralise legal matters, emails, and documentation, overseeing vendor selection, contracts, and execution. He managed a 40-person team, ensured the solution met stringent security and data governance standards, and led the bank’s first full transition to O365. Chris also orchestrated the migration of millions of documents and emails, conducting 70+ remote training sessions due to COVID-19. Additionally, he ran the Monitoring & Surveillance project through its Prototyping and Initiation stages, integrating diverse data sets for enhanced governance, before the project was paused due to organisational restructuring.
As Technical Program Manager at CFS, Chris led the transformation of Bedrock’s strategic wealth platform implementation, Dimension, for Colonial First State, replacing an outdated Performance and Attribution system. As the foundation of a 5-year roadmap, Dimension serves as the IBOR (Investment Book of Records) with plans to expand into ABOR (Accounting Book of Records) and other modules. Intending to grow Funds Under Management from $300 billion to $1 trillion, Chris managed a 75-person team across 7 agile streams, ensuring executive-level engagement. He transitioned the program from waterfall to Scaled Agile, implemented rigorous cost management and governance, introduced a Data Warehouse with Tableau for reporting, and fostered early risk management collaboration.
As Technical Program Manager at Macquarie Bank, Chris led the critical Project Dawn, a global compliance program at Macquarie focused on meeting overdue US Dodd-Frank CFTC and SEC regulations. Spanning 5 business units across the US, UK, Manila, and India, Chris managed a team of 250 people working on 60 core trading and settlement systems. He transformed trading platform messaging into structured Canonical Data Formats, built a new front-end Java application, and developed a data warehouse to handle both structured and unstructured data. This enabled Macquarie to meet stringent reporting requirements, reconstruct trades within 72 hours, and achieve compliance. Chris also led Project Phoenix, a monitoring and surveillance initiative, successfully delivering on time and within budget, with significant executive involvement.
As Agile Transformation Program Manager at BT Financial Group, Chris led the SMSF stream for BT, working closely with the Chief Product Owner on feature roadmaps, PI phases, and overall program management. He was responsible for implementing a new business and platform offering that had been in design for 5 years. Managing a team that grew from 5 to over 100, Chris coordinated with 4 Product Managers, 4 Project Managers, 2 Scrum Masters, an Agile Coach, and a UX Lead. He oversaw vendor selection, legal, and commercial activities, managing contracts exceeding $30M in Year 1. Chris championed Risk Management within Agile, aligning with Legal for PDS updates, and navigated the strategic complexity of integrating sprint cycles with Westpac Enterprise’s 9-month lead times. He prepared fortnightly Steering Committee reports, managed cross-program dependencies, and acted as Scrum Master during team expansions.
As Senior Project Manager at Anz and E*Trade, Chris was specifically recruited to resolve a troubled audit project at ANZ, which was an Enforceable Undertaking escalated to the Chief Risk Officer. The project, crucial due to a Denial of Service attack on ETRADE, aimed to move to a hot-hot, dual-site data center model to improve failover capabilities. Chris successfully delivered the project, reducing recovery time from 12-24 hours to 4 hours, re-platformed ETRADE’s legacy infrastructure, and restructured the team for success. He managed significant change and communication efforts, including 15 weekend implementations and two full Disaster Recovery tests.
In a separate high-profile project, Chris was tasked with overseeing the first phase of a $25M program involving a white-label solution from Super IQ. He developed a comprehensive 300-page vendor contract, managed technical implementation, risk, and security, and established closed-door governance groups. Chris also led the creation of an ANZ microsite for the SMSF offering, developed by Deloitte and hosted by Melbourne IT. The project was delivered on time, becoming a key component of ANZ’s Digital Wealth portfolio and contributing to year-end results and market announcements.
As Senior Business Project & Deployment Manager at Telstra, Chris quickly established a Governance framework and operating model for a large-scale project, creating structured streams for Deployment and Training, Process, Marketing Communications, IT Delivery, and Testing. He organised regular meetings and reporting for all streams with designated leads. A major achievement was preparing and scheduling training for over 1,500 internal and offshore staff, essential for managing the influx of inquiries from nearly one million customers. Chris engaged over 150 stakeholders, ensured the project was deployment-ready, and planned the transition from an old billing system to a new one. He also set up cross-program governance for three major Telstra Billing Programs, totaling $70M, to provide a unified deployment view.
As Senior Business Project Manager at Telstra, for the NCS Mercury Migration Project, Chris led the migration of customers from an outdated billing platform to a new strategic platform, utilizing Telstra’s cloud offering for product promotion. He delivered the project on time and under budget by $165K, overcoming significant challenges such as complex communications, legal reviews, and product and data mapping issues. Chris mentored a junior agile team, helping them get back on track after a 4-month delay, and established a scalable, repeatable framework for future migrations. He also recommended a strategy for migrating 350 remaining product sets to platforms aligned with Telstra’s strategic goals.
As Senior Business Project Manager at Telstra, Chris was brought in as the seventh project manager to salvage the $5M “Project Protect,” which was on the verge of being canceled due to previous failures. The project’s goal was to curb the $20M annual credit outflow to Telstra Enterprise and Business accounts by implementing tiered credit limits for 3,000 user accounts, replacing the previous unlimited authority system. Chris introduced rigorous business involvement at each review stage to ensure accurate requirements interpretation for offshore development and testing. He diplomatically replaced ineffective team elements and successfully delivered the project within 4 months in November 2011.
As Program Manager at NSW Police Force, Chris managed a fixed-price program for the NSW Police Force, focusing on Phase 2 enhancements to the Exhibit and Forensic Management System (EFIMS). He oversaw five work streams, including requirements gathering, system integrations, RFID technology, dashboards, and reporting. Chris’s team developed a framework for transitioning to a 4-week agile sprint cycle and managed the build in prioritised iterations. Key achievements included delivering all five streams on time and on budget, completing the 2020 tender process, and installing RFID equipment across three sites within a tight deadline. He also handled site tours, technical implementations, change management, and final signoff at the Commissioner level.
As Project Manager at Broadcast Australia, Chris held a key IT Project Management role, leading a team of three Business Analysts to deliver software and application projects. He successfully managed the highest priority customer project, a $3.5M business transformation initiative, transitioning from paper-based testing to an online system using Adobe Technology and Smart Forms. He also implemented a Microsoft BI reporting solution for management and customer reporting, rolled out to over 200 technical staff across Australia, including a 10-week nationwide training program. Key achievements include managing the Power Recovery project, which automated the recovery of $1M per month in power costs by linking SAP with Remedy/Oracle, and developing a customised Project and Change Management framework with 35 lifecycle templates and a web portal for project site creation.
As Project Manager & Team Lead at ING Australia, Chris managed the Corporate Super IT team, expanding it to 26 members while overseeing all Project Management aspects of software and infrastructure projects. He handled budget and capacity planning, scheduling, and resource assignment. Key achievements include introducing Business Objects and a data warehouse ($1M), managing a major infrastructure scalability project ($1.7M) to increase transaction handling volumes from 100,000 to 2 million per day, and implementing financial controls for SOX and AML. A notable highlight was being selected for the 2006/07 Talent Pool and receiving personal mentorship from the CIO.
As Senior Business Analyst at ING Australia, Chris’s expanded role as Project Lead for the Corporate Super IT Team involved overseeing the entire project lifecycle, from capacity planning and resource management to stakeholder and vendor coordination. He successfully managed enhancements for Product Brochure Rollover and Annual Statements, implemented Dollar Disclosure Legislation, integrated enterprise data warehouse feeds, introduced Bpay capability, and oversaw an infrastructure upgrade from NT to Windows. This role also required transitioning to a 3-month release cycle calendar, showcasing his ability to handle complex, multi-faceted projects efficiently.
As Business Analyst at ING Australia, Chris managed all Business Analysis aspects for IT Corporate Super systems at ING, overseeing system upgrades, legislative changes, and product updates. He was also seconded to the E-Solutions team for six months to test and document the integration of the Corporate Super system with the new front-end portal, EasyTransact.
