Project Description

Mark Millen

Program Manager

Areas Of Expertise:

  • Portfolio Management
  • Program Management
  • Project Management
  • PMO Management
  • Delivery Assurance
  • Staff Development
  • Project Recovery and Agile Delivery

Education:

  • Bachelor of Engineering, Information Technology (Hons), University of Western Australia
  • Post-Graduate Certificate of Technology Management, Deakin University
  • MSP (Managing Successful Programs), PMI PMP, PMI-ACP (Agile), P3O, Professional Scrum Master, SAFe 5 (Scaled Agile)

About Mark Millen

Mark is a results-oriented Program/PMO Manager who joined Seven Consulting’s Melbourne team in August 2019. He has a strong history of delivery to schedule, budget and quality at portfolio, program, and project levels. He has extensive experience in professional services leadership, working with enterprise customers across Banking, Telecommunications, Utilities, Government, IT, and Health sectors.    

His delivery management experience in Software Engineering, IT Infrastructure, Data and ITSM domains is underpinned by a strong technical background.


What Mark brings

  • Positive leadership and communication.
  • Structured, and logical problem-solving skills.
  • Commitment to customer outcomes/benefits and building productive stakeholder relationships.
  • Professional composure under pressure and uncertainty.
  • Delivery assurance expertise, improving delivery outcomes.

Key Clients:

  • AGL
  • Vault Cloud
  • Alinta Energy
  • Telstra
  • ANZ Bank
  • Macquarie Bank
  • Spark NZ
  • NEC
  • Cenitex

Key Achievements:

As Program Manager at AGL, Mark provided governance for AGL’ s demerger program which entailed over 100 initiatives/projects, over 300 team members, and an approximate budget of $160M. Focuses included uplift of scheduling, improving transparency, milestone management, dependency management, risk management, quality assurance, and vendor management.


As Program Manager at AGL, Mark managed Go-to-Market (GTM) delivery, driving the implementation, and tracking of customer growth initiatives to support AGL’s growth targets. This entailed uplift of the existing GTM delivery management & reforecasting processes, implementation of RAID management, and assuring sufficient visibility and transparency for a broad range of stakeholders and executive sponsors to engage and assist as required.


As Program Manager at Vault Cloud, Mark performed an Incident Review, reviewing change management and implementation processes, interviewing stakeholders, reviewing artefacts, and delivering findings and recommendations to mitigate future occurrences.


As Program Manager at AGL, Mark delivered the Dynamic Pricing program (~$14M), transforming AGL’s capability to optimise pricing for their ~4M customers in a strict regulatory environment. This required recovery of an in-flight program using proven recovery processes, delivery of the re-baselined plan to meet hard deadlines, transition to BAU, and benefits realizationKey program streams included Business, Infrastructure, Cloud SAAS software, Data & Analytics, Data Migration, Testing, and Change Management. Strong vendor management skills were applied to uplift vendor delivery and renegotiate their fixed-price engagement. The re-baselined Program was delivered on time, under budget, and planned benefits were exceeded.


As Program Manager at Alinta Energy, Mark managed the End User Computing Program, from business case creation/approval to delivery. Highlights included development and management of the RFI process, vendor evaluation, benefit modelling, stakeholder engagement across all business units, infrastructure preparation, organisational change management, CMDB reconciliation, and management of a pilot to gain business support.


As Project Delivery Manager at BMC Software, Mark governed a multi-year Australia/NZ/Singapore Services Project Portfolio (~$40M), across 30+ concurrent engagementsHe provided delivery assurance resulting in large, complex and successful application go-lives for BMC in Asia Pacific, impacting 100,000+ users across various industries like Telecommunications, Banking, and Government. As PMO Manager, Mark improved portfolio project margin (~7% in 2 years) by introducing new delivery assurance processes and trainingThis was enabled by health checks, management of aggregated key risks and issues across the portfolio, standardized status reporting, standardized scheduling and forecasting processes, escalation management, and development of key stakeholder relationshipsMark grew initial projects in marquee accounts into long-running programs, achieved by demonstrating successful customer outcomes early, proving capability, and building strong relationships. During this time, Mark achieved 0% staff attrition in the PMO team over 4 years, managing and coaching staff to develop into a high-performing team. Mark led and initiated the APAC Project Management Community resulting in greater re-use, capability, and collaboration across the APAC region.


As Senior Program Manager at BMC Software, Mark delivered a complex infrastructure and application upgrade for one of Telstra’s most important and widely used systemsThis encompassed the migration of 12-year-old legacy infrastructure and applications to the cloud, underpinned by complex data migration streamsThe program required 5000+ technical effort days, culminating in a successful 48-hour cutover window with no impact to production operation   A key cutover risk was mitigated via coexistence of old and new systems through data synchronization.


As Senior Program Manager at BMC Software, Mark led, won and delivered a large, complex program for a Telecommunications organisation, overcoming historical challenges to achieve a successful customer outcome on time and under budget. Mark transformed the Global Capacity Management capability of a major bank, increasing coverage beyond 150 business applications across 3000 servers, enabling instantaneous service modeling, capacity forecasting and early warning alerts, delivered under budget and on schedule. Mark implemented large-scale multi-release business critical ITSM programs under budget and on schedule, managing 10,000+ technical effort days using global teams. He successfully minimized downtime of critical systems using both in-place and side-by-side upgrade approachesMark worked closely with Product Engineering to successfully align with customer objectives and delivered various fixed-price and time-and-materials contracts, using onshore and offshore global teams across Australia, New Zealand, India, USA, Europe, and Singapore. Other engagements included:

  • Implementation of a solution for ANZ Bank to automatically scan the bank’s global network infrastructure to discover information about IT assets, such as Windows servers, Linux servers, Unix servers, network devices, storage devices etc.  This improved CMDB accuracy from 20% to over 90% and provided a reliable source-of-truth data repository (for business cost transparency, service modelling etc).
  • Mark migrated a large-scale business critical workload automation solution (Control-M) for Singtel, upgrading the system to a new software platform on new server infrastructure.
  • Mark migrated Macquarie Banks’s core ticketing system and data onto a new software platform on new infrastructure, including over 50 integrations with other internal systems.

As Project Director at Hewlett Packard, Mark oversaw all projects and project managers within an industry portfolio (~$20M), receiving an APAC company award for the delivery of a complex multi-region engineering program within a strict customer-specified timeframe, for a highly available, real-time transaction-based application. Mark successfully recovered a large ‘red’ agile application development project inherited from a HP company acquisition. He achieved this by root cause analysis, identifying and managing actions in the Recovery Plan, and rebuilding team performance and morale. Mark was appointed Project Schedule Excellence Lead across the region, responsible for championing and coaching excellence in Project Schedule method and quality for HP Consulting Services.


As Senior Project Manager at Hewlett Packard, Mark transformed and consolidated a large manufacturer’s disparate legacy IT infrastructure onto refreshed server hardware, an Active Directory / Microsoft Exchange core, a consistent desktop SOE (Standard Operating Environment), and into a Managed Service Capability run by HP. This reduced costs and improved IT service for the customer.


As Senior Project Manager at Hewlett Packard, Mark successfully delivered an IT server consolidation and upgrade project for a government utility on time and under budget. Through subsequent phases he transformed the IT environment including migration of IT infrastructure from Novell to Windows, Active Directory and Microsoft Exchange.


Other Team Members