TELECOMMS
"Debbie managed a large operational team within C&W’s UK billing organization, and consistently demonstrated her effectiveness as a leader motivating and driving strong performance.
Following this, and as part of the separation of Cable & Wireless’s consumer division from the business division, prior to the sale of the consumer division to NTL, Debbie led the Bill and Collect workstream activities.
The bill and collect scope was complex and needed to complete two months earlier than the other workstreams in order to avoid complications at financial year end. The team achieved this, very much due to Debbie’s organization and planning and her drive, leadership and clarity of thought.
Debbie is an effective senior manager who has demonstrated her strengths in both an operational and project management environment"
William Hoyle
Senior Vice President – Global Product Management
"I have worked with Debbie since 1996 when I recruited her to manage C&W/Mercury Mobile Services billing and credit management. Her extensive skills in operational and people management were required by C&W to bring the billing and credit management functions together and to significantly improve an under performing group and has to be said neglected group.
This she did successfully. Following this Debbie was promoted to Director Billing responsible for all of the UK Billing activity for C&W with a total of approx. 200 staff, later taking responsibility for the payment processing teams. Debbie significantly improved the customer service of the group, reducing customer complaints, improving payment and billing processing time and building an excellent management team.
During this time she led a number of major programs. These included the consolidation and outsource of bill production. Her skills in program management enabled Debbie to successfully integrate 4 business’s billing functions, work with Strategic Partners (Xerox and IBM), manage the people involved in a TUPE transfer and develop realistic service level agreements. This project delivered to time and budget saving C&W Billing Operations £5m pa whilst significantly improving bill production times.
The sale of the consumer business to ntl: required C&W to separate all systems, buildings, people, infrastructure and processes in preparation to hand these over to the new owners. I asked Debbie to lead the separation project for Billing Operations. This was a hugely complicated program as Billing Operations had 17 billing systems, 4 credit management systems, 700 people, 10 departments and 100’s of processes at that time. Again working with partners IBM, Xerox, PayPoint, KPMG and a selected team of people the Billing Operations Project was the only one that delivered all of the milestone requirements on time and again to budget allowing the successful transfer of consumer billing operations to ntl. She then joined ntl as Director of Transformation and Business Change for their Billing and Customer Service groups.
Debbie returned to C&W after 6 months to head up the CRM Program within Global Business Transformation. This program had lost the “pull” from the business and as a result was not delivering the business change and improvements required. Debbie pulled the CRM program together, created an excellent management team, integrating a number of instances of the Siebel system across the company, implementing additional functionality surrounding sales commission, pipeline processes and front office integration. The milestones for this project were again achieved and delivered to budget.
Her skills in stakeholder and partner management were used to great effect in “Taskforce” a Global Stakeholder Management survey which was commissioned to improve relationships with the business community ensuring better senior management buy-in to systems and process changes as a result of the significant number of changes we were implementing into C&W Global. This work was carried forward and was used in the re-organization of the Transformation Group and is today being used as a model for Stakeholder Management by other areas of the company.
More recently she has been responsible for the delivery of customer programs and assignments as part of the dServices division. Acting as a consultant on Change Management to the bid teams responsible for major customer project delivery, projects with values of £20m+ and is currently leading an internal project to consolidate 5 global project and customer program management teams into a new structure, to improve ownership of customer projects, realize revenue potential and streamline the engagement and methodologies used by the teams.
In summary Debbie is an excellent program manager who is enthusiastic, energetic and milestone delivery driven. She has excellent planning and organization skills, creating a “team” environment wherever she goes and drives her people to achieve great results at the same time as making sure that everyone has fun while doing it.
I would have no hesitation in recruiting her again or recommending her for a senior program director role on complicated multi vendor/partner projects and programs.
Chris Sanders
Vice President Global eBusiness and Process Transformation