andre van der westhuizen

My role is to develop the company’s IT & digital strategy and define the technical roadmap. This is a key aspect of the overall business strategy, with outcomes including better customer experience and improved, more targeted product offerings

IQ Business Group provides consultancy services to a range of clients. Highlights of client work at a large financial institution included developing a new operating model for the test function, including design and governance models and implementing the full test function including structure, processes and resources. This had a significant impact on reducing defects and costs.

I had overall responsibility for multiple complex, concurrent migration projects running across three geographies – UK, South Africa and India. I regularly travelled between UK and South Africa, building good relationships in both locations and adapting to different cultures and ways of working. This included defining the programme strategic objectives, scope, structure, roles, budget and plan and worked closely with all parties to implement the plan consistently and effectively. A highlight was developing an implementation strategy to handle the migration of extremely large volumes of data with tight deadlines, and managing the plan and resources to do this including cross functional and cross cultural teams. The team and I overcame numerous challenges including resolving knowledge gaps and up skilling third parties. This required very strong relationship management, collaboration and negotiation skills.

The main objective of the role was to deliver the RDR (Retail Distribution Review) programme alongside the Platform Re-Architecture and transformation of the digital offering. I successfully delivered a multi-million pound portfolio of strategic change programmes, leading a team of 12 Project Managers, a wider team of over 200 people based on three continents, including a large offshore outsourced team. This was a highly complex portfolio and to stabilise and keep it on track, we implemented an effective new programme delivery and organisational model. I also introduced new delivery methods for the front end development and combined those with traditional methods for other parts of the programme and championed this new way of working with multiple geographically dispersed teams. Running concurrently to my programme was a major CRM upgrade which affected multiple aspects of the programme and introduced new dependencies. This required the incorporation of the upgrade and complete re-planning of some work streams which I handled without losing sight of the objectives and deadlines.

* Deliveryed many multi-million pound and business critical projects for the leading and award winning investment platform in the UK * Operations Management * Infrastructure Management * Release & Configuration Management