SLIDE DECKS

During her time at EY, one of Cristina’s frequent assignments was the production of slide packs to be used in client presentations and workshops. This included her production of written and visual content, after doing some analysis and research, and storyboarding the deck to structure the message to convey. Other times she had to revise the text written by her colleagues in the slide-decks, to re-write the same more concisely. Most often the slides were commissioned directly by colleagues at the Director level.

Whilst working in a secondment in Quality Risk Management (QRM) for EY, Cristina was assigned the creation of slide decks also by a colleague at the Partner level, who had the role of Quality Lead for the EY UK & Ireland Advisory Services. The EY Partner highly appreciated the quality and value of Cristina’s work, to the point of recognising it with an EY Impact Award.


BAU PMO

Among her various responsibilities - whilst working in the QRM secondment for EY - Cristina had also the role of Project Management Support Officer for Business As Usual QRM operations (BAU). This consisted mostly in the daily tracking of several processes to manage risk for all the EY UK&I Advisory Tier 1 engagements (which were the advisory projects with revenue above £2 million GBP or of strategic importance for the firm). This work was paramount to collect and crunch project data to enable the EY UK&I Advisory’s early warning system, to anticipate risks.

Cristina created also new project management Scorecards for the QRM department, to measure and compare performance for this EY function and for all its resources, assessed against the defined and expected results and goals. Her establishment of scorecards enabled the evaluation of the success or failure of QRM projects and initiatives, based on key performance indicators (KPIs). The use of the scorecards was also essential to measure the QRM’s realised benefits and to enable the department’s optimal use of its human resources and financial budget, selecting the projects on which to invest the most and eventually the projects to terminate.

Another responsibility of Cristina as a PMO was the detailed planning for the rollout of EY-wide QRM Change projects. As part of this, she also revised the planning and scheduling of activities and deliveries milestones for all the EY-wide QRM’s communications around the EY wide change projects to implement.

As a project manager for QRM change projects, Cristina took care of ensuring project governance measures were identified and in place, based on the level of risk of the project to roll out and according to their RAG status (the projects assessment around quality and timely confidence of delivery, where the acronym stands for Red Amber Green: the colour code utilised to indicate how well a certain project is performing, with Green being the best).

In terms of Strategic PMO, managing the QRM portfolio of projects (considering the EY UK&I business wide strategic direction, innovation and performance improvement impact) Cristina enabled as a project manager the roll-out of the EY permanence improvement QRM’s biggest change project. The delivery of it allowed the EY business to be more data driven, with the introduction of automated QRM dashboards, adding value by allowing more informed decision making, and by saving reporting time to QRM and the EY Advisory Tier-1 delivery teams.


REPORTING

Cristina’s daily monitoring of BAU QRM activities fed into her monthly production of performance reports for the EY UK&I Advisory services’ leadership, for whom the QRM department was a trusted advisor and enabler of decision making around engagements termination and projects continuation, with the introduction of risk and quality management measures.

Cristina’s monthly reports (for which she was accountable but not responsible, as they were reviewed by more senior colleagues before their submission) identified risk and quality early warnings, and highlighted trends for all Tier-1 EY UK& I Advisory engagements. This included reporting also on the level of satisfaction of the Tier1 engagements’ clients and delivery teams (surveyed monthly by Cristina by carrying out a QRM established practice, called Barometer, which consisted in running and analysing questionnaires about all Tier-1 consulting resources' satisfaction).