|
View from the Top - Part 1 |
Part 2
|
PROFILE
|
 |
|
|
|
Pearl Murphy
|
Company: Yorkshire Water.
Interviewee: Pearl Murphy.
Job Title: IT Programme Manager.
The Subject: Yorkshire Water is
using new project management software to improve its
visibility of IT resources and projects, and promote
best practice.
PERSONAL FILE
NAMES: Pearl Murphy.
BACKGROUND: Pearl is a member
of Yorkshire Water’s IT management team. She is responsible
for the company’s IT capital programme, worth £83 million
over five years and involving 250 staff and around 200
projects a year. She ensures the right projects are
undertaken in line with business need and bring the
required business benefits. She is also responsible
for ensuring that overall resource requirements, in
terms of both numbers and skill sets, are appropriate
for the delivery of this programme. Pearl was previously
an IT team manager at Yorkshire Water, an IT team manager
with Intasun and Club 18-30 tour operator ILG Travel,
and an IT project manager with FI Group (now Xansa).
She began her career as a mathematician/programmer/analyst
and has a BSc in mathematics, an MSc in industrial applied
mathematics and a PhD in heat and mass transfer.
|
Q: WHAT ORIGINALLY LED YORKSHIRE WATER TO
CHANGE ITS IT PROJECT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE?
A: In April 2001, Alan Harrison joined as our IT Director.
One of the first things he did was to set up our IT Programme
Office as a central governance function for programme and
project management. I became Programme Manager within that
Office, with Mandy Farren as my assistant.
His vision was for us to move to more robust and ‘democratic’
planning – where everyone involved in a project is involved
in its build-up, everyone sees the project plans and has the
ability to challenge those plans before they are baselined.
We debated buying in a lot of tools and processes to help
us achieve this, but chose a more evolutionary approach instead.
Over the past couple of years we have got processes embedded
within IT, but it became apparent that whenever senior managers
wanted to have better visibility of plans or resources or
skills usage, we had to tailor something.
In April/May last year I saw a demo of Microsoft Project
2003 which looked like it would give us these abilities.
For some years, Yorkshire Water has used Microsoft Project
as a corporate project planning tool. However we decided we
shouldn’t just jump. in with the new version of that product
but have a wider look at the marketplace.
Having said that, we didn’t want to invest tens of thousands
of pounds researching other products, so we took advice from
Gartner about the main players in this marketplace. A small
team of IT project managers, Mandy and myself then did an
online review of the packages – and found that there was no
real differentiator between products. So as we were staying
with Microsoft Project in the rest of Yorkshire Water, we
decided to pilot Project 2003 in IT.
More...
If you are not registered with the site, please register now to read the rest of this page.
If you are registered, please sign in to read the rest of this page.
Conspectus 2004
|
Copyright © 2004
|
 |
|
