Parliament UK

When I was in my twenties, I fancied myself as a songwriter. Being an aspiring poet who absolutely loved music, this was the obvious next step, and when a move to London put me in the path of people with similar ambitions I formed a band called Inspiration Junkies. Although it disbanded before any tangible success to mention, we did have management, gigged at cool venues across London, shot a video at MTV studios in Camden and complied a CD that some people even bought. The end of my music days was when I started to work at Parliament UK.

Parliament UK was my business and project training ground. Although, I always had a natural flair for management which was demonstrated in the organisation of my band - and a number of other artists who approached me to manage them (another story for another day), it was Parliament that gave me the opportunity to not only learn new disciplines but to evolve my organic skills into professional aptitudes. I took every course on offer and lobbied my managers to fund my PRINCE2, MSP and Risk Foundation qualifications among other learnings.

Equipped with my new expertise, I then went on to pursue a path untrodden within Parliament. At the time, there was only a hub for IT projects with no central project resource for business interests. I therefore sourced project and business initiatives across the Houses and offered my services untethered - I presented ‘myself’ as a the business facing solution provider. This was successful and I found myself travelling the halls of Parliament solo and under many guises, which meant I was able to meet some wonderful people across an array of teams and departments.

Here are some select assignments showing the business support, consultancy and project management I undertook within the House of Commons Service:

Select assignments:

• International Relations Funding Project: facilitated review of financial and governance arrangements associated with parliamentary funding
• Publication Scheme Implementation: devised implementation plan for the release of Commons information into the public domain
• Health and Welfare IT Proposal: produced business case to procure occupational health software
• Information Security Project: planned and implemented a document protective marking scheme into the Commons and Lords
• Electronic Documents and Records Management System Procurement: setup and managed the EU procurement of an EDRMS for Commons and Lords
• Programme Dependencies Management: designed, implemented and managed best practice approach for dependency management
• Programme Business Case: produced gap analysis, business need, scope, situation report, dependency register, project descriptions, approaches and plans to procure an EDRMS