My Most Memorable Career Engagements (1/3rd of a Century and Counting)

Earlier this week I was having a chat with one of our IT Team who asked a great question, “In your career, what is your most memorable accomplishment or project?”? Understanding that my career started 1/3 of a Century ago (a little humour there), I’ve got a lot of choices.

The most recent memorable event was the modernization of our Peoplesoft system.? This involved moving Sheridan’s Peoplesoft system to the Oracle Managed Services Cloud which gave us system stability, something that had been problematic for over a decade, and this allowed us to do our Peoplesoft Version Upgrade project which was a very challenging initiative also. What made this memorable was the involvement of the many upgrade team members and our various internal and external partners.? This was a big team with many stakeholders, and with the help of the Executive Steering Committee, and a strong PMO, it became one of my favourite initiatives here at Sheridan.

Going waaaay back into my past work, 2 engagements really stick out for me.? MY FIRST was my secondment to a large insurance company as part of their Business Protection Team.? There, I acted as the Program Manager responsible for Physical Site Security and Policy Enablement, Business Continuity/ Incident Management Planning, Disaster Recovery Planning, and Information Security Process, Applications and Policies.? This was fun work and the team there was phenomenal, made up of former law enforcement and corporate risk specialists.? This led to some great relationships that years later led to some additional work helping a police auto theft team and getting a real understanding of policing.

The second most memorable engagement has a little bit of a build-up. It was for a public sector client I had while I was working with Peoplesoft/Oracle. Back then we did a “Project Recovery” engagement when their in-house managed payroll upgrade project failed. We had to go in to get it back on track and complete a Root Cause Analysis.? This engagement was very successful, and we built some good relationships at all levels which led to MY SECOND most memorable project a couple of years later. I had left Peoplesoft/Oracle and joined up with PwC and while at PwC, one of my contacts at this client was promoted to Assistant Deputy Minister (ADM) and he called me to see if I was available to help with another major issue that they had. The financial systems for this organization had suffered a major crash of the hardware and they had spent a week trying to recover with no success.

I and my PwC Public Sector Partner at the time went over to see the team there to better understand the issue and decided that we could indeed help advise and oversee the recovery effort and most importantly complete an independent Root Cause Analysis.? What made this memorable was the scope and size of the system, the impact that it had on the public at large if not recovered quickly and fully, and finally, it was an election year, and the election was just a few weeks away. Not good for some of the elected officials.? What I was truly honoured about though was that the ADM upon finding out that I had left Peoplesoft/Oracle, sought me out at PwC because of the success of our previous work experiences.? Though it has been a long time since this engagement, I still maintain relationships with many of the people and senior leaders engaged with us.

So, these are my most memorable accomplishments over the last 33 years.? Though the work was challenging, the one common element that made these memorable was the people involved.

What are your most memorable accomplishments or engagements?