Areas Of Expertise

• Agile Project Planning
• Monitoring and Control
• Developing and managing project/program schedules
• Banking, Finance & Telecommunications Technology Projects

Education

• Bachelor of Information Systems, Monash University
• Graduate Certificate in International Business, ANU
• Master of Business Administration, UQ Business School
• SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) Program Consultant (SPC 5.0)

About Val Pope

Val is a highly experienced PMO Specialist, joining Seven Consulting’s Melbourne Practice in January 2015. Val has expert planning and scheduling skills and has successfully built and managed master schedules for multi-stream projects with resource-loaded schedules in industries including Banking & Investment/Finance, Utilities, Energy, Transport, Health and Telecommunications.

Val has worked with a variety of project planning methodologies including SAFe 5.0 (Scaled Agile), PRINCE2, MSP, P3O, PMBoK and has current SAFe accreditation. He has expert knowledge and experience using MS-Project, Primavera and Jira.

What Val brings

• Extensive Project Management/ PMO experience.
• Certified SAFe 5.0 Program Consultant, Prince2, MSP and P3O Practitioner.
• Specialist in stakeholder and dependency management in very large (> $300m) programs.
• Effective communication, project reporting and documentation skills.
• Rigorous Analytical ability.

Key Clients

• Department of Communities and Justice, NSW Government
• Future Fund Management Agency (FFMA)
• VicTrack
• Telstra
• National Australia Bank/ NAB Wealth
• AusNet Services (formerly SP AusNet)
• CenITex (Victorian Government)
• IPN (Independent Practitioner Network)
• Queensland Health
• National e-Health Transition Authority

Key Achievements

As PMO Specialist at Department of Communities and Justice, Val assisted in detailed planning for the Process and Technology Harmonisation (PaTH) program. Val was responsible for creating and maintain the Wave 2 schedule and provided support for the agency’s PMO. Val also assisted the DCJ Scheduling Manager and introduced a Resource management capability across the program. Val so used the Seven Consulting suite of tools (Health check, Dashboard and Pathfinder) to assist in tracking and reporting the overall program progress.

As PMO Specialist at Future Fund Management Agency (Australia’s sovereign wealth fund with close to $250 billion under management), Val established and maintained a complex integrated schedule for the Integrated Data Management program which consisted of seven separate source schedules. Each of the source schedule’s critical milestones were then identified and analysed to determine overall program/agency dependencies. These milestone dates were then baselined, and rigorously monitored for any early variation to planned dates. In this way targeted conversations could be undertaken with key stakeholders to identify mitigation options, and various recommendations could be proposed for consideration by the program Steering Committee. This work also allowed a critical path to be examined on a regular basis to identify any opportunities to “crash” or recover time on the program. Val blended the use of Microsoft Project and Jira to enable both agile engineering working practices and let executives and third-party stakeholders track and report progress. Val was also responsible for reporting team progress with a hybrid (waterfall/agile) approach using the Jira as the enterprise platform. Val also provides firsthand advice for setting-up: a program Kanban, program Sprints, processes to groom the program backlog. Val also provided advice and technical support for other key strategic projects in the agency.

As PMO Specialist at VicTrack, Val provided scheduling support to the Project Controls team. Using Primavera P6, Val assisted during a busy period for the PMO team. He was responsible for creating and maintaining around fifteen schedules and worked with project managers and subject matter experts to ensure the completeness and currency of all plans.

As PMO Specialist at Telstra, Val’s role on the program was to identify and record requirements in Jira in the form of Capabilities and Epics and to identify external dependencies and track these in Jira. He also managed and reported on progress to the B2B executive team. The B2B Digitisation program will automate many manual processes and vastly improve the delivery of products and customer experience for Telstra Enterprise customers.

As PMO Specialist at NAB/NAB Wealth, Val provided planning and scheduling advice for the Customer Mastering and Customer Experience Centre programs and configured the Jira platform to reflect the NAB ‘New ways of working’ in an Agile environment. Val aligned up to thirty schedules weekly for the New Payments Platform program. Collaborating with multiple stakeholders he developed and maintained cross program dependencies and reported any movements from agreed baselines weekly. Val also developed and maintained the ADA2 program schedule for NAB Wealth and documented maintenance and update processes and mentored in-house staff in scheduling practices. Val introduced schedule quality standards and provided high-level reporting to the governance body.

As PMO Specialist at AusNet Services, Val worked in the smart metering remediation program, Val designed and developed a complex set of nested Stream-based schedules which provided the ability for management to identify, record and track dependencies across over fifteen stakeholder groups. He managed the enterprise planning tool EPPM (Microsoft Project Server & SharePoint) and developed a number of solutions based on the SharePoint platform to help manage many hundreds of project Deliverables and Work Packages. Val also introduced the (PRINCE2) concept of Product Descriptions and established a register help disseminate this information and built a library of these items to improve understanding and reduce ambiguity across the organization.

As PMO Specialist at IPN, Val managed the implementation and configuration of the MS Project Server and SharePoint platform. He implemented and administered the corporate-wide cloud-based Timesheet system. Val also functioned as Resources Manager and used SharePoint 2010 to build custom registers, including a comprehensive Master Site list which incorporated information on all 230+ IPN sites.

As Project Director at Queensland Health, Val managed the implementation of the Warehouse Management System (WMS) and oversaw the team responsible for the adoption of individual healthcare identifiers.

As Project Manager, Methodology and Tools at NeHTA (The National e-Health Transition Authority, now known as the Australian Digital Health Agency), Val enhanced the reach of the PMO and established reporting and planning mechanisms to deliver more timely and current information to the executive level. He managed the adoption of the PRINCE2 project management methodology across the organisation, facilitated training sessions and contributed to the training content.