Areas Of Expertise

• PMO Establishment & Governance,
• Implementation of Transformation Programs

Education

• Prince2 Practitioner, APMG-Australia
• Master of Science in Project Management, University of Manchester, UK
• Bachelor of Science (First Class Hons) in Management Science, University of Huddersfield, UK
• Diploma in Production & Inventory Control, Institute of Operations Management, UK
• Mental Health First Aid

Key Clients

• NAB Wealth
• NRMA
• Lend Lease
• RailCorp (Transport NSW)
• Qantas
• Rolls-Royce

About Louise Ford

Louise is a skilled PMO Manager who joined Seven Consulting’s Sydney Practice in October 2013. She has over 15 years’ experience in project and PMO management for large organisations, specialising in the implementation of transformation programs across IT, supply chain and engineering.

Louise has established, developed and operated Project Management Offices to introduce or improve Governance in terms of Schedule/Time Management, Cost Management, Resource Management, Risk & Issue Management, Quality Management, Project Change Control and Reporting. Louise effectively and proactively communicates progress and key decisions in a well-defined framework, ensuring stakeholder engagement, secure alignment to project goals and rapid corrective action when needed.

What Louise brings

• Experience working with a variety of high-level stakeholders, management styles & organisational cultures in complex multi-vendor environments.
• A proven track record in project and program level PMO process improvements, in particular around schedule management and reporting.
• Demonstrated capability of mobilising & coordinating cross functional teams to successfully deliver project outcomes.
• Strong interpersonal skills which are used to build valuable relationships with stakeholders, team members and key suppliers.

Key Achievements

Managed a large PMO team of a $250m business transformation program to implement a new aircraft maintenance system and standardise supporting business processes. Improved the effectiveness of the program’s governance through simplifying PMO processes resulting in recovery to corporate KPI targets.

Developed and managed the PMO for a $60m program of work comprising five projects to deliver significant changes to the client’s superannuation system to meet the Australian Tax Office regulatory requirements, including delivering significant uplift in project control and governance to standardise processes across the program.

Established the PMO for a $30m payroll transformation project and provided ongoing PMO support to over 50 people across the client, the system integrator, and the third-party vendor project teams.

Project managed the transition and cutover phase of a $70m IT transformation project to implement a standardised finance solution across the client’s global organisation. Led the cross-functional implementation team to successfully rehearse and cutover the first release on time and at high quality.

Project managed the supply chain rationalisation from 64 to 4 strategic vendors, resulting in a benefit realisation of £9 million. The role included the relationship management of both exiting and in-loading suppliers, inventory management, customer support, risk management and project scheduling to ensure successful transfers with no impact to build or maintenance activities.

Developed and implemented improvements to project control processes of a $25m CRM transformation project focused on project tracking and scheduling following significant slippages to the agreed plan. Facilitated planning workshops, and status review sessions to re-baseline the schedule and introduce more effective communication processes that increased stakeholder engagement at all levels and enabled rapid corrective action.

Led improvement team to implement a standardised global quality procedure for the project management of all purchased parts supply chain transfers, impacting circa 15,000 parts per year.

Worked with twenty project managers and stream leads to develop and maintain the Master Schedule for a substantial aviation engineering project, including tracking of cross-stream risks, issues, inter-dependencies, and resource commitments. Established and executed standard processes for schedule maintenance, tracking and reporting and introduced Earned Value management to improve measurement of project performance and progress.

Successfully project managed the organisation and delivery of a full-scale ERP Conference Room Pilot, which involved coordinating several teams to effectively integrate the business and technical content, as well as the logistics and communications for the week-long event attended by over 80 international client senior stakeholders.