Abigail Pritchard | Management Consultant | PA Consulting

I started my career on a Graduate Scheme with a professional services company, after graduating from Durham University, where I read Geography. Upon graduating, I wasn’t sure where I wanted to take my career so the Graduate Scheme was an ideal environment for me to quickly learn and explore what roles and opportunities exist in a professional environment. I was immediately drawn to the digital and technology division. The variation in projects available was exciting and I hadn’t come from a technology background, so I wanted to push myself to explore something completely different. I first worked with a team that specialised in PowerBI and IBM Cognos TM1 planning analytics tools. I learnt how financial and planning models were built and deployed with clients, and project managed a number of implementations with several UK universities who were using these tools to manage their current and forecasted student populations. I then project managed a large technology-enabled transformation programme with a police force, responsible for upgrading their legacy systems, delivering a new integrated platform and coordinating the migration of historic data. It was these interesting experiences that then led me to move to a new job as a Technology Programme Manager with a firm that specialises in software across the housing, government and public sector. I spent three years with them and in that time, planned and delivered three large-scale implementations with police forces across the UK. I spent a lot of time on client site, working closely to design and deliver new software alongside the customer. I managed the core project delivery teams, while also working with large development scrum teams. I was able to translate customer requirements and configuration requests into designs. I also led complex and large-scale data migrations from multiple legacy systems into a new integrated policing platform. Following my time with this company, I am now working for a management consultancy within the Technology Delivery Domain. For the past year, I have worked with a central bank, leading my own workstream and team to deliver the Service Transition approach for a major transformational programme that is replacing legacy software. I have been responsible for planning four dress rehearsals and setting up a Command and Control Function to manage the technical go-live of the new software. I love the variation I have experienced across my career and how I have built up my skills and knowledge to become a subject matter expert in leading large-scale tech-enabled transformation programmes.

CAST YOUR VOTE OF SUPPORT NOW