Digital Transformation Leader & Product Manager

Achievements
• Identified & scoped the first roadmap for the company’s digital transformation projects, providing focus & alignment.
• As a cultural committee member, I conducted the company’s first fireside chat focused on diversity & inclusion in the workplace.

Responsibilities
• Collaborated between the business and IT during the initialization phases of digital transformation initiatives.
• Collaborated with EPMO and IT teams to define the PDLC phases.
• Prepared the budgets for financial planning cycles, ensuring financial feasibility.

Achievements
• After building a new technical team of 17 specialists & engineers, I led and grew the company’s architecture, software engineering, DevOps, database, data-modelling, and business intelligence capabilities.
• Initiated and owned the company’s cloud adoption and migration from on premises infrastructure into Microsoft Azure & Oracle Cloud. IT was able to release new value faster and enabled us to use new technology to provide future solutions.

Responsibilities
• Department Head for Application Development team to build and manage IT solutions for business processes.
• Managed the business intelligence tool and underlying raw & modelled data.
• Member of the Programme Board, responsible for strategic decision-making, budget planning, project prioritization, and scope.
• Designed & facilitated workshops to encourage collaboration and alignment of business units, identify requirements for software development projects.

Achievements
• Developed the company’s first BI tool, underlying data models, dashboards, automated reports, and user training & onboarding. Significantly reduced reporting efforts across the company and enabled management to react quicker to changing circumstances.
• Created a balanced Scorecard to evaluate factories based on quantitative and qualitative KPIs, providing a more objective & data-driven approach.

Responsibilities
• Created, calculated, and presented annual financial budgets & forecasts.
• Regular management reporting of company financial & operational performance.
• Cost allocation of P&L accounts for cost & profit centres and supervision of system specialist for calculation scripts.

• Throughout the working week, I had the pleasure of teaching English to young learners at multiple local kindergartens.
• I taught mostly through music & games providing a multi-sensory learning experience for the children.

Achievements
• Rebuilt the working files that maintained a trust account worth R250 million for 4000 trust beneficiaries in a municipality fund.
• Successfully supervised a team to administer the data-sensitive bulk offboarding of 2,000 members after municipal members after municipal elections.
• Added controls in member onboarding & offboarding that significantly reduced operational risk.

Responsibilities
• Sanitized the data for asset and liability matching of the fund, which involved reconstructing assets worth R1 billion for 6000 members invested in 16 investment portfolios managed by various multi-managers.
• Reported to the regional manager and the Board of Trustees and governing bodies such as the Financial Services Board and SALGA (South African Legal Governing Authorities).
• Supported the fund accounting department in preparing audit working papers for the financial year ends and provided audit data to the fund’s actuaries.
• Established processes and controls, including creating templates and financial calculations.