Meet the Major Programmes team

Have any life events compelled you to take action and deliver purpose through your work? What led you to Deloitte?

I started my career in the oil and gas industry. My first week after graduating, the very first experience I had in my job was doing helicopter crash safety training – being strapped into a helicopter hull, dunked underwater, and spun around! What a way to enter my first year of work – which was spent working offshore on an oil rig. Seeing at source how oil and gas is extracted to meet the world's energy demands made me realise the importance of energy generation and mineral extraction, and that there will always be a need for people who can deliver and support complex projects in that area. When I left BP, one of the things that brought me to Deloitte was that understanding that these incredibly complex projects would be in operations for many years – certainly a good environment to build a career. That's how I found myself in ER&I within Deloitte.

Did you join Major Programmes to make an impact in that sector? What impact do you see yourself making?

One of the great things about our team and Deloitte is the flexibility to work across lots of different project types. More recently I have really doubled down on the ER&I sector, but early on in my 10 years at Deloitte, I worked across so many different sectors including defence, transport, oil and gas, and telecoms. Early on in my career, building a really broad programme delivery skillset has set me in good stead - which I've since been able to take back into ER&I – which is where I started my career.

Out of all of those varied experiences, what has been your career highlight?

My highlight has been the two years I spent working in West Africa, supporting the construction of a new mine – big enough to significant impact global supply of metals. For about 9 months, I travelled back and forth on a two-week rotation, leading project controls, PMO, and reporting activities – tiring but rewarding! Seeing a project which is genuinely transformational to an entire country really opened my eyes: we deliver a lot of big and exciting projects in the UK, but projects in other areas of the world can be even more transformational. This project will have a substantial impact on the GDP of the entire country - the excitement and importance of UK projects pale in comparison to that kind of impact! It involved amazing experiences, like being immersed in an environment where we could set something up from scratch, working with local talent on their upskilling and development journey, and partnering with local organisations. It was a very different experience, and one I'll probably talk about forever.

Did you find any challenges in terms of adjusting ways of working to an international project and international clients?

Yes – I did have to adapt to a new culture quite quickly – everyone was very friendly, but one particular piece of advice I was given was always to ask about someone's family and how they were when meeting a new person, which isn't necessarily something we do in the UK. I’m usually straight down to business, or maybe I might make some small talk about the weather but in West Africa, they really like that personal connection before they are willing to dive into work, which I found quite fun to get the hang of!

Can you describe the impact you deliver in one sentence?

I like to think that the impact I deliver is helping to cut through complexity and make progress when other people or teams have struggled to do that. Sometimes, this involves reducing the scope to a simple question – ‘what do we need to do next’ or accepting that we’re sometimes going to make people a bit uncomfortable by making a change where every possible avenue hasn’t been worked through.

What I’ve seen in the last 10 years is a lot of unnecessary complexity being developed at the upper-middle management level. This means people that are ‘doing the work’ often don’t know what the priorities are, and lose motivation to deliver. The ability for my team to come in and support project delivery, cut through (or link up) that complexity, and provide a clear understanding of priorities sounds like a really simple thing, but is often massively lacking in a lot of organisations that we work in.

How do you find the energy to stay motivated in making those changes, especially when tackling a problem that others have struggled to fix?

There’s a train of thought going around in the tech industry that says that the reason people burn out or give up is not because they're working too hard or the problem is too difficult, but because they're not making any progress. If you take an environment like a startup, people work incredibly hard but are generally happy and motivated because they're making a lot of progress. It's when you get into an organisational environment where expectations remain high but you can't make progress that people give up or get burnt out or lose passion for the job. The thing I often relentlessly focus on is “what’s the next step to make some progress here?” That's what actually keeps people motivated - even if it's a small step forward. There's nothing worse than working really hard and not feeling like you're making an impact or progressing. From a broader perspective, my Christian faith is fundamental to how I approach life and work – taking care of my teams, showing the type of kindness that Jesus showed, and helping develop people are things that give me endless energy!

Are you doing any work other than client work that you’re particularly interested in?

Yes, absolutely. I'm doing a lot of work in the Digital Catalyst space – part of our Programme Aerodynamics offering, supporting our thinking on how digital tools and solutions power Next-Generation Delivery. Everyone is talking about AI, and we're doing a lot of work to understand two elements of that. Firstly, how can we, as a Major Programmes organisation, take our programme delivery expertise and apply it to big AI scaling projects? What do AI programme governance model, organisational model, or set of business processes look like for this kind of project? Secondly, we're at the cutting edge of what AI can do for project delivery. How can we bring AI into our Deloitte ways of working and our clients' ways of working so that they can deliver more efficiently, on schedule, and on budget?

What would you like to be able to say about your career upon retirement?

I'd hope to say that I built teams of people who enjoyed what they were doing, felt they were being impactful, and felt supported to be productive and get the best out of themselves. I'm less insistent that my impact will be based on what I delivered from a project perspective, but more on how I made people feel in the teams I built.

What's on the horizon for you? What are your next steps, and what areas do you want to be at the cutting edge of knowledge and expertise in?

From a personal perspective, I'm going on paternity leave in the next couple of months. I'm very grateful for Deloitte's really great paternity leave provisions. I'll also be taking some career break time at the end of that. When I come back to work it will be interesting to see how my perspectives on what's important in life have changed, and how I can juggle a young family with getting the best out of the work we’re doing.

In terms of long-term direction, I typically work in oil and gas and mining companies, where the delivery environment hasn't changed very much in a long time. It's often managed and overseen by people who have been in the industry for a long time, making change and transformation difficult. I'd like to think that in the next five to ten years, we will start to see a shift. Millennials, like myself, who have grown up at the cutting edge of digital technology, will become the dominant generation in middle and senior management. That demographic change will, I think, create a quick shift in organisations, making them better at using data, AI, and technology as fundamental drivers for effectiveness. I’m looking forward to seeing that start to change. For the last five years, organisations in ER&I and infrastructure have been on a digital transformation journey, but they’re making slow progress. I don’t think that will change hugely without an external driver, which will be that demographic change in middle and senior leadership.