Tony Calusic
Senior Program Director
Areas Of Expertise:
- Program Management
- Digital Transformation
- Business Transformation
Education:
- Bachelor of International Business
- Griffith University and Korea University
About Tony Calusic
Tony is a Senior Business Executive with 25 years’ experience managing large-scale business transformations for 30 diverse clients/programs, with significant program and portfolio management experience. He joined Seven Consulting’s Sydney team in June 2022.
What Tony brings
- A leader with multi-disciplinary experience in business and IT transformation at 30 high performing organisations.
- Significant experience building and sustaining high performing teams sourcing talent and empowering teams to deliver business outcomes.
- Executive level experience managing large scale consulting organisations and respective client programs (outcomes, financials, people, and operations).
- Experience in program delivery including strategy, roadmaps, and implementation.
Client feedback:
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Health Services Network Executive, Insurance company – 2025 “Skilled in stakeholder management, information synthesis, and team engagement. A trusted team member who serves as a sounding board and independent arbiter, helping navigate complex matters with clarity and objectivity.” |
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Grace Hamilton, Program Test Manager – 2024 “Tony is an excellent communicator and facilitator, he ensures that project goals and tasks are understood across all levels of the project, from non-technical to very technical teams. He ensures there is transparency across all teams and vendors and enables teams to work together efficiently. I appreciate his jovial and positive attitude, that has helped to shape a team culture of collaboration and flexibility with a can-do attitude to get the job done. Since Tony came on board the project planning and management has improved immensely and the Thrive project has benefitted greatly from his experience and nuanced approach.” |
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Ana Smith, Head of Strategy and CEO Office – 2023 “Tony is a truly impressive leader – having masterfully navigated relationships, complexities, and organisational priorities. He is able to get cut through at all levels including Board / LT and has started changing ways of working where we’ve not been able to in the past. Trust / integrity are there in spades. Intellect, speed!” |
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John Lang, Chief Product Officer – 2023 “The depth of experience Tony had been very beneficial, particularly assisting through varying levels of support from consultants from other organisations that we worked with, particularly during the latter part of my working with Tony. His ability to diffuse the antagonism that emerged was significant in his workstream, delivering arguably the most difficult component of bottom-up activation. Tony’s been great to work with personally and professionally.” |
Key Clients:
- nib
- Iress
- Aust Institute of Company Directors
- Bureau of Meteorology
- Department of Human Services
- Commonwealth Bank of Australia
- Coca-Cola Amatil
- Nationwide (UK)
- Fonterra
- Rio Tinto
- Kyushu Electric (Japan)
- Energy Australia
- Dairy Farmers
- Dept of Public Works & Housing
- Dept of Justice
- Commonwealth Edison (USA)
Key Achievements:
As Senior Program Director at nib, Tony undertook two roles of significance. First, he was the Senior Program Director leading the nib Thrive Enablement Program, which was established to operationalise nib Thrive entering the NDIS sector and scaling to be one of the largest plan managers. The program focus included registering the nib Thrive brand, launching the brand, integrating the systems and processes into one unified service model, and migrating data to a single integrated system. After nib spent ~1 year of early planning with little success, Tony was brought in at the commencement of 2025 to review the program and subsequently drive the delivery to a 2025 implementation. Tony instituted a full rescope, a clear integrated plan, tracked delivery progress with rigour and brought the nib executive into appropriate steerage and governance of the program. The goal was achieved with the final implementation occurring in December 2025. Subsequently, Tony was seconded as a Senior Program Director to manage a significant bid with the Australian Defence Force, bringing together nib and Downer in a joint venture to actively bid for this ~$1b/year opportunity. Over the course of a year, Tony brought program planning, bid management and government procurement insight to the nib|Downer teams, and drove program delivery to successfully navigate early engagement with Defence, a successful RFI and significant work to prepare our solution, JV structure and teaming arrangements culminating in a final comprehensive RFP submission at the conclusion of Dec 2025.
As Senior Program Director and Chief Delivery Officer at Iress, Tony completed a comprehensive review of Iress’ major transformation program, presenting the findings to the Iress Board and newly installed CEO. Tony was subsequently tasked with the responsibility of delivering these recommendations as the Program Director (by establishing appropriate governance vehicles, re-focusing scope to benefit-enhancing and strategic initiatives and successfully managing a potential ~$50m blow-out). Tony subsequently supported the establishment of an even broader organisation-wide transformation initiative; establishing the Iress Delivery Office and implementing delivery-focused, data-driven insight to support the organisation understand how they translate their strategic priorities into executable outcomes. He was the only senior non-Iress stakeholder trusted with a leadership role supporting Iress through the transformation establishment with McKinsey and trusted to the extent that Iress proposed Tony establish and fill the Chief Delivery Officer role but given this would have required a switch to a permanent role this did not eventuate and as such Tony established and transitioned to the newly established internal Iress leadership.
As Program Director at the Australian Institute of Company Directors, Tony undertook a targeted review of the organisations largest program of work to validate its progress and provide recommendations on next steps. The review was undertaken prior to formal project commencement on delivery, but with a year’s planning already undertaken and significant energy expended, a focused review of the business case and the supporting inputs was undertaken. There were 19 key recommendations put forward and these were accepted as critical to the ongoing execution of the program and were factored into the business case and subsequent planning of the engagement.
As Program Director at the Department of Human Services, Tony managed the significant change Program; aimed at re-imagining the social service experience for Australian citizens. This focused-on building agility to respond to policy initiatives and see these realised as payments to the constituents of Australia, with a significant push to managed self-service. The Program streamlined to duplicate operations and drove cost savings. Tony directly managed $100m+ over several years with a direct team size of ~100 people. A significant portion of the work related to business strategy, development of long-term roadmap and establishment of processes / capabilities to support DHS moving forward.
As Program Director at Bureau of Meteorology, Tony managed a change program to deliver a robust, scalable, and secure Bureau website, providing a modern and flexible capability for the Australian population with a significantly improved security model and versatile and scalable development and deployment capability. He was responsible for leading the sale, definition of strategy/approach and solution design, and subsequently program managing the initiation, phase, design, and delivery and responsible for delivery of business outcomes. Tony directly managed $30m+ with a direct team size of ~50 people.
As Program Director at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Tony successfully delivered the Core Banking Modernisation (CBM) Program, modernizing the core banking platforms to create an agile, responsive business capability. The Program delivered new system capabilities enabled by SAP and significant process / product re-engineering and operating model transformation to deliver improved customer service and experience. Tony’s remit covered a significant portion of the program (~$200m with a team of 225 people) leading the Solution Centre capability, which was the delivery arm of the Program delivering CBM outcomes over a multi-year delivery cycle. Tony worked jointly in a collaborative model alongside a CBA Director and SAP Vendor Director to deliver the business outcomes.
As Program Director at Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA), Tony was responsible for transforming and standardising the Coca-Cola Amatil business through a business-driven technology-enabled transformation program underpinned on the SAP platform. CCA were one of the pilot bottlers involved in a consortium to develop and leverage a global template (Coke 1) which successfully transformed and standardised the front office, back office, and supply chain processes. Tony directly managed $50m+ over several years with a team size peaking at 100+ people.
As Project Manager at Nationwide, Tony delivered the Core Banking Modernisation Review, recommending improvements on the Core Banking Program approach and roadmap. Tony was the subject matter expert on project management, implementation approach and organisational / delivery structures for the Program of work.
As Project Manager at Fonterra, Tony was responsible for the HR Master Data Project where he defined and delivered the project outcomes, with a focus on delivering unified global business processes, rules, and systems capability across all HR data for all of Fonterra’s workforce and entities.
As Project Manager and Test Manager at Fonterra (New Zealand), Tony led the Customer Service Centre Project (FCSC) involved in defining the strategy and roadmap for the FCSC establishment. He created a 24×7, multi-lingual global customer centre to provide service delivery for 45 global locations across 9 languages utilising the latest technology.
As Project Manager at Rio Tinto, Tony led the Test Strategy and Enablement Project. He managed the Aligning Business Systems Program to create an effective, efficient, and scalable test strategy for a major, multi-year Program of work, and implement the test approach and enable the test automation capability.
As Project Manager at Kyushu Electric, Tony was the Utilities Business Domain Expert and led the SAP Utilities Customer Care & Service Project, including device management & customer teams, bringing expertise from his US and Australian experience to Japan’s first customer deregulation project. He undertook a complete business process reengineering and systems replacement to modernise Kyushu Electric’s capability and prepare for the impending deregulation.
As Project Manager at Energy Australia, Tony delivered the Achieving Contestable Environment (ACE) Project to deliver a major change program to prepare for the waves for customer deregulation. Tony played numerous roles across the multi-year initiatives, including Transfers Lead for R1 and R2 and Overall Release Lead for R3 and R4, and was responsible for ~30 people. The business processes and systems were modernised to enable compliance with the deregulated market and cost optimised given the impending competitive structure. Tony was targeted for this role given the experience he developed in the US working at Commonwealth Edison, delivering targeted client outcomes in preparation for the onset of deregulation.
As Development Team Lead at Dairy Farmers, Tony managed key elements of the Project Enterprise Business Renewal, which modernised the business capability at Dairy Farmers through significant business process reengineering and implementation of SAP system capability. Tony led several teams (both functional and development related) with a team size of ~15 people.
As Development Lead at Qld Dept of Public Works & Housing, Tony managed key elements of Project Sphinx which was a change program to deliver new business processes and systems capability able to match the growing needs of the Department in relation to real estate and asset management. Tony led a team of 10+ cross-functional and development resources.
