Stephen Parrett

Senior Consultant

Stephen joined sigma in 2005 after over 30 years of business and management experience within a major UK Financial Services company. From 1990 he held a variety of group-level positions in a FTSE 100 company covering a wide range of project, portfolio and executive reporting initiatives. His responsibilities included the development and implementation of organisation-wide governance and operating models, with particular focus on processes to capture, analyse and report on core project data, especially benefits. He has experienced the challenges of encountering and addressing business change issues from many perspectives within large organisations.

Specific assignments have involved:

• Providing consultancy/facilitation to support embedding sigma benefit realisation management into a number of public and private sector organisations.
• Establishing a unit within a major government agency to specifically support major programmes in developing their business cases and benefits realisation plans.
• Designing and implementing an organisation-wide benefit reporting process.
• Writing and progressing benefits-focused programme business cases, working with senior stakeholders at executive level.
• Developing/producing regular executive reports on progress, risks & issues of a company’s full change portfolio, for oversight bodies up to and including the Chairman’s committee.
• Managing implementation of a cross-company process to provide top executives with a longer-term view of investment in change, benefits and strategic alignment.
• Leading a cross-functional team in developing/constructing the corporate change portfolio, including facilitating the agreement of annual change and IT budgets; (up to 800 projects across 20/25 business units with a total value of >£500m).
• Designing processes to enhance portfolio and change risk management and prioritisation, with emphasis on the impact of delivering (or failing to deliver) planned benefits.
• Introducing a new project portfolio management approach to a major business unit to help improve the understanding and management of a portfolio of over 100 change initiatives.
• Managing development of monthly reports on the company’s top 20 change initiatives to help the executive team actively manage and resolve major conflicts, risks and issues.
• Leading the design, development, implementation and operation of the organisation’s first company-wide project/portfolio database.
• Managing the integration of two project information databases, upon the merger of two major banking groups, and developing a prioritisation and reporting framework for the resulting post-merger business transformation project portfolio.
• Setting up a company-wide project registration & reporting process for major projects.
• Implementing new processes and systems for a major retail banking division, creating the first pan-division portfolio of IT projects, to support planning, prioritisation, annual budgeting and reporting.
• Managing research initiatives on emerging technology and introducing a standard operating system across a branch network, including user interface design and designing a ‘Branch of the Future’ conceptual model.

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BSc (Hons) Earth Sciences (Open University)

Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Bankers (FCIB)