Areas Of Expertise

• Banking & Finance Project Management
• Systems Implementation
• Cyber Security Systems Implementation

Education

• Bachelor of Arts – Business studies, University of South Pacific
• Project Management Institute (PMI) Certification

About Katherine Whiteside

Katherine is a skilled Program Manager, who joined Seven Consulting’s Sydney team in May 2016. She has over 17 years’ experience in project management, with expertise in banking system project implementation including planning, executing, controlling, and closing projects, delivering business value, and managing expectations of stakeholders.

What Katherine brings

• Strong leadership and stakeholder management skills, used to align stakeholders, team members, vendors, and customers to the same objectives.
• Comprehensive and clear communication ensuring common understanding of status and issues.
• Ability to resolve concerns, conflicts, and deal with issues, by offering solutions that ensure competing priorities and objectives are effectively resolved.
• Highly capable of creating and managing project budgets and expenditure and managing schedules.
• Strong delivery focus and drive.

Key Clients

• CFS
• AMP
• Woolworths
• Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA)
• B&N Bank, Russia
• National Bank of Fiji

Key Achievements

As Program Manager at CFS, Katherine was responsible for the Application and Data Program, a key program within the CFS Transition Portfolio with objectives to complete an application discovery exercise to establish scope of CFS that had to be migrated from CBA into the CFS environment as part of the CBA/CFS demerger. She successfully established an agreed baseline Master Application list with CBA confirming the application migration treatments, target states, delivery program migration dates for over 600 applications.  She also identified and set up projects to address migrations and facilitate Transition Service Agreements (TSA) exits for newly identified scope. The program provided vital data to allow the program to finalize Portfolio budgets and timelines.

As Program Manager at CFS, Katherine successfully defined and Implemented Migration Framework and Migration platform to facilitate the migration of Applications and Business data out of the CBA and into the CFS environment. This included establishing a platform to support identified migration patterns along with supporting controls and processes to facilitate automated migrations. On completion of the implementation Katherine successfully managed the migration of over 20 migrations across this platform.

As Program Manager at CFS Katherine was responsible for key Governance forums for the CBA demerger with the Transition Program. She successfully established and chaired the Fortnightly Application and Data Migration Central Working Group, tracking Program progress, tracking inters institution dependencies, risk and issues and escalations to the Joint Program Delivery Forum and Joint Transition Steering Group of the CBA and CFS demerger. Katherine was also the key CFS representative to the Joint CBA/CFS Data Governance forum responsible for ensuring that CFS Transition programs adhered and met the required Data Governance requirements. Katherine was also responsible for maintaining the master application list with continuous verification with stakeholders and ensuring that data was kept in sync with CBA through change control.

As Program Manager at CFS, Katherine was responsible for Corporate Core Application Reintegration Program which required that corporate applications (Finance and HR applications) are onboarded on key foundational services including ITSM, IDAM, Logging and Monitoring and Cyber controls. This would ensure that allow for uplift of controls to align to the required risk posture and compliance to organization’s policies, standards, and procedures and ensure that applications operated within the required key integrations & controls are to effectively manage risks, service delivery and service continuity.  Katherine completed high level design across the required controls identifying onboarding requirements and defining required uplifts. The project successfully completed the application discovery across the 21 in scope applications and established onboarding requirements. Th project team has successfully completed a POC across 2 applications for onboarding on to ITSM.

As Program Manager at CFS, Katherine was responsible for the Jira and Confluence Migration Program to move instances of Jira and confluence and its associated Plug-ins onto Atlassian Cloud as SaaS service. The program had 3 environments in Scope and required prem migration and the migration of a cloud-to-cloud environment. Katherine successfully completed a High Level HSLA, agreed migration strategies across the 3 environments and established ongoing support and appropriate licensing requirements. Ogranisationsation change impacts and plans are in place for the impending migrations.

As Program Manager at AMP, Katherine was responsible for the CloudX program where she managed the migration of applications off the AMPA group of applications onto AWS Public Cloud Platform. This included delivery of detailed analysis documentation, defining target state, establishing migration patterns to allow for successful migration of applications and groups services. Katherine managed implementation activities including Infrastructure provisioning, application configuration, integration to internal and external system including Testing phases of SIT, Functional and Performance Testing, Coordination and Management of cutover activities and ensuring that Hypercare support is in place for each migration. Katherine ensured effective engagement with APRA and other key internal stakeholders leading to ‘no objection’ in moving Heightened and Extreme risk workloads. She successfully completed the Detailed Discovery of the AMP Legacy Platform to establish Scope, Cost and Implementation plans to Migrate and test all applications to AWS cloud platform and to effectively decommission the legacy platform. This included detailed analysis documentation, Migration approach, Implementation wave plans, Timelines and Cost estimations.

As Project Manager at Woolworths, Katherine managed the STEP Program – ITSM Project. She successfully delivered the implementation of the Service NOW – Change and Release Management modules. This included integration to CA Harvest used for Software Change Management, introduction of new policy, procedures as well as organisation change management including training.  Katherine also managed the migration from the existing tool (SRS) to Service WOW for the Change and Release Modules. The project also decommissioned the SRS system.

As Project Manager at Woolworths, Katherine was responsible for the Cyber Security Program. She successfully implemented the Woolworths Enterprise Single Sign On (ESSO) Solution (Microsoft Azure AD). This included user data alignment across the Woolworths environments and applications to utilise the ESSO Solution. The project also established a business and support framework to enable ESSO service to be consumed by the company. Katherine also successfully implemented the Privilege access Management Solution (CyberArk). She improved controls and assurance around privileged account management and access. The project also established a Business and support Framework to enable the PAM Service to be consumed by the company.

As Project Manager at Woolworths, Katherine successfully completed the implementation of the Uplift of the Vulnerability Management solution (i.e., Security Centre product from the Tenable Network Security) expanding the monitoring capabilities across the Woolworths environment. This included Integration to Woolworths monitoring systems and the Woolworths Management and Compliance systems. The project also established monitoring and remediation processes and procedures.

As Project Manager at CBA, Katherine successfully delivered the end-to-end financial solution of CBA projects. This included responsibility for scope, confirmation, development, testing, and deployment.  She was responsible for management reporting, project financials including budget control and estimations, vendor management and change management. She completed the project implementation review and lessons learnt with the team, and obtained complete project sign off from final stakeholders.

As Project Manager at CBA, Katherine focused on the payments domain, including processing of local and international payments, processing of card transactions, integration of payments systems with front end channels and downstream data warehouse and other reporting and monitoring systems. Also responsible for intersystem automated financial and technical reconciliations, managing general ledger mapping requirements and integration into the corporate general ledger systems. For CBA, Katherine successfully delivered several projects within the payments stream. These included deposits systems legacy to SAP transition, vostro account migration, legacy system shutdown and home Loans legacy to SAP transition.

As Project Manager at B&N Bank, Katherine advised on and successfully led a multi-million systems implementation for the bank which was successfully rolled out across 3 regional branches. The project was delivered within scope, quality, and budget within the constraints of a complex regulatory environment in Russia and required resolution of complex logistical issues. Katherine managed an offsite project team consisting of 30+ employees across 4 locations including liaising with offshore development centres.  successfully delivered a critical system upgrade implementation using a phased rollout. She successfully managed several system study projects across a range of local and foreign banks and production of business proposal documents.

As Business Project Lead and Manager Operations at National Bank of Fiji, Katherine had deep involvement in the implementation of Core Banking System Replacement. She successfully led a team of business and technical staff through defining and developing requirements for banking applications including migration from legacy systems. Managed the IT Operations department being responsible for the daily batch operation, Bank reporting and Banking IT system maintenance and upkeep. Katherine led E2E testing and UAT testing for the Bank’s Core Banking System Replacement, working with technical teams to facilitate performance testing. As part of her role, she successfully restructured Bank IT Operations department, automating several of the batch processing requirements. In addition, Katherine successfully set up and managed IT help desk of 6 staff, supporting 12 branches of 250 staff.