A Year in the Life
By Richard Lee
My second year with Quest Worldwide had a distinctly Dutch flavour to it! Having established great working relationships with a major Dutch multinational we were delighted to be asked to provide Programme Management, Communications Strategy and Change Management Support to one of their most significant global transformation programmes ever.
The BEST in Finance Program, led by a team of 25 Finance Professionals and many IT consultants, aims to redesign and implement a complete suite of best in class Finance processes worldwide. The scope of the project is vast, covering closing and consolidation processes, business planning, reporting and analysis, decision support, back office processing as well as significant migration to shared service centres.
My assignment, working for the Program Leader, was on the face of it straightforward: bring structure, discipline and control to the 30 individual global projects that made up the overall program.
Setting up the Program Office required me to be based four days a week in Eindhoven, and involved a tremendously diverse range of challenges from establishing key project reporting processes and developing project and program milestone plans, to designing and delivering project management skills training and conducting internal project audits.
Whilst the Program Office workstream required me to give lots of coaching to project managers it was very left brain oriented, so it was great to get the chance to use the other side when I was asked to expand my role and develop the Program Communication and Change Management strategy and plans.
This was a very rewarding part of the program which saw us take the program to more than 500 key stakeholders around the world. We designed and facilitated a range of high energy, high engagement, high impact events in places as diverse as Hong Hong, Stone Mountain Atlanta USA, and Sao Paulo. This was a very creative time as we developed and delivered a varied range of communication media including intranet sites, web casts, change deployment workshops, deployment plans, newsletters, conferences, quizzes and web polls.
What did I learn? Well I know the menu at the local Holiday Inn by heart (not difficult as it’s not very long!) and I know a total of 27 words and phrases in Dutch, including "wa mot je", “een glas rode wijn tevreden” and “ga de nietmachine over” (look them up!). I also took my project and programme management skills to the next level and added some great change management and high impact event tools and techniques to my ever increasing repertoire!
This assignment took up a large part of my second year with Quest and it is really becoming clear that all of our assignments embodied many of the Quest values. This assignment was all about anticipating and responding to client needs…flexibly, effectively and with impact. Applying best practice tools and techniques, delivering short term results with longer term benefits and developing internal capability, but above all, investing in our relationships.