Areas of Expertise:

• PMO/EPMO establishment and management
• Project management
• Vendor and implementation management
• Project financials
• Scheduling and Portfolio reporting

Education:

• Masters of Science – Industrial Engineering
• Bachelor of Science – Industrial Engineering (System Analysis)
• Project Management Professional – PMP
• PRINCE2 Practitioner, Scaled Agile

About Bita Bagheri

Bita is a PMO Lead with expertise on large-scale portfolios, programs, and projects. She joined Seven’s Sydney team in May 2018. Bita brings an exceptional track record of results, with more than 20 years’ experience in project delivery and PMO services. Along with initiating and managing projects, Bita has supported portfolios as well as projects through establishing and managing dedicated or enterprise PMOs and ensuring strategic alignment.

What Bita Brings

• Seasoned PMO professional with a track record of delivery across multiple industries such as financial services and telecommunications.
• Highly experienced in establishing EPMOs, project governance, frameworks, principals, tools, and end to end financial reporting & analysis, risk and issue management.
• Excellent competency in identifying stakeholders’ requirements and managing their expectations with PMO related functions.
• An understanding of Traditional and Agile delivery methods.

Key Clients:

• Newcastle Greater Mutual Bank
• Indue
• Airservices Australia
• Optus
• AMP Life
• BNP Paribas
• AMP
• SAI Global
• Nokia
• Baharan Information Technologists
• System Group

Key Achievements:

As PMO Lead at NGM, Bita assessed the existing information regarding the Technology roadmap (44 projects) and created schedules for all of them. She then reviewed the schedules with the resource managers (Technology Senior Leadership Team), created and maintained the Enterprise Resource Centre and the shared resource demand to capture under/over allocations aligned with changes to the timelines. The Technology Resource Utilisation report was created in PowerBI so that all stakeholders can have access to real time resource utilisation that helps resource estimation exercise. Bita designed the Annual Resource Utilisation model to ensure Technology Roadmap commitments are achievable and implemented the model for FY25 Roadmap, reporting to Senior Leadership Team. 

As PMO Lead at Indue, Bita reviewed the corporate’ ePMO Governance processes and reports and uplifted the existing procedures and implementing new governance processes. To achieve corporate objectives set by Executives, she identified the sources of Demand (projects to be delivered and required resources) and Supply (the enterprise resources to deliver projects) and streamlined the end-to-end process through setting ground rules and aligning multiple stakeholders including Finance, Delivery, Project Management and Business resource managers. Bita used Project Web Application (PWA) and Tableau reporting tool to provide integrated governance reports to all parties.

As PMO Lead at Airservices Australia, Bita established the PMO for delivering Civil and Military Air Traffic Management System Future Support Model (CMATS FSM). She ran the PMO for 21 months including but not limited to developing program scope statements and program governance structure, developing, and managing the program integrated schedule, reporting program status, maintaining status of Risks, Issues, Actions, Deliverables, Decisions, Dependencies and Assumptions, and maintaining project repository.

As PMO Lead at Optus, Bita developed the Project Management Framework including templates as part of Optus EPMO Establishment. The framework includes the minimum standards and guidelines for project management as well as Optus delivery streams (Development and Implementation, Testing, Change management and Business). Seventh Way Tool has been customised based on the approved Optus Project Management Framework and implemented. She customised the “Seven Portfolio Review Tool” to fit Optus EPMO requirements and operated for FY22 Q1 Planning. PM Capability Framework and assessment was another initiative she implemented as part of PM capability uplift initiative.

As PMO Lead at AMP Life, Bita implemented and improved schedule management process for 16 projects including baselining, regular weekly schedule review meetings for 17 weeks and managing ~200 dependencies between the 15 active projects. She provided the overall program weekly schedule dashboard to the senior stakeholders. The average schedule quality score improved from 60% when started in July 2020 to 74% in October.

As PMO lead at BNP Paribas, Bita had PMO responsibility for 3 projects. The most recent project was a multi- year separation and simplification program implemented in both Australia and New Zealand. Bita defined financial, schedule, change and HR management practices for the program and ensured correct and precise reports were provided for both external and internal senior stakeholders. The project is planned to go live in H1 2020. The second project was onboarding a new client. Bita implemented a framework for managing project inter-dependencies, managed risk through deliverables management and risk, issues and actions management process, designed and implemented the regular reporting and implemented the change management process for the whole program in Australia and New Zealand.

The first was a transition project where BNPP transitioned registry services of their biggest client to a third party. Bita was responsible for establishing a structure that could drive a tight deadline through schedule management, minimising risk by managing scope changes, organisational risk and issue impacts and ensuring integrity and transparency of information through regular reporting and coordination of a 4-week Hypercare stream. The project went live on time, with a smooth warranty period. The governance structure and processes that were implemented were recognised as organisational best practice, which are being utilised by other projects in BNPP.

As Portfolio Analyst, at AMP Bita was responsible for preparing the portfolio status reporting packs for different stakeholders and forums, running health checks, and providing ad hoc analysis and reports. Bita also tracked the budget, monthly actuals, and forecasts, analysing the variance and advising corrective actions. She maintained the resource pool and allocations through the portfolio and developed the portfolio master schedule, major milestones and dependencies as well as maintaining it. Bita provided support to the Project Managers by managing the project change, risks and issues, financials, status, and progress. She also provided internal progress reporting on risk and issues, management, and change management processes. Bita reduced the cost centre closure duration from 6 months in 2017 to 1 month in 2018 and provided more visibility to the resource pool.

As the only EMPO Specialist at SAI Global, Bita was responsible for developing and implementing the project management framework for Waterfall, Agile and Hybrid project lifecycles. She was also responsible for training Project Managers in the US, UK, and APAC. Bita innovated metrics reporting, which provided transparency and flags for KPIs such as time and cost, this improved risk management reporting for senior stakeholders and improved the monthly cost estimation variance from the average of 50% to 20% through mentoring the Project Managers, which resulted in a more accurate capex monthly cash flow. Bita also provided a Project management framework, which improved organisational Project Management maturity and metrics of project success by 50%.

As a junior PM, at Nokia, Bita supported senior project managers in reporting, scheduling, resource management, change management, financial tracking, RAID management and vendor management. She also managed the Vendor Transition stream (transitioning all the equipment, access rights, commitments for all VHA-related sites (~10,000 sites) from the existing contractor to the new one), as part of Nokia Transition and Transformation program in 2013.

As PMO Analyst, Bita planned the programs, including preparing project management plans, forecasting resources and financials. Bita also monitored the projects, by updating the schedules, tracking resources, costs, and changes in scope, reporting on the project status, performance, and progress. Based on the defined KPIs, Bita executed weekly health checks and project reviews to identify risks and issues. She established an integrated shared resource pool view and provided better visibility of resource utilisation, improving the resource utilisation by 20%. She also implemented and managed a project acceptance workflow involving 7 different stakeholders, improving SLA compliance by 70%.

As PMO Consultant, At Baharan IT, Bita provided PMO and program/project management services to several clients in varied industries. She established the PMOs by developing the processes and procedures and business rules along with defining the roles and responsibilities and templates. Bita provided training to the stakeholders and PMO teams and Project Managers. She was also actively involved in hiring the PMO team and auditing the PMOs. Bita delivered 95% of the assigned projects on time, budget and within scope, resulting in 100% customer satisfaction. She implemented 10 PMOs for both enterprises and complex programs, leading to an increase of 50% in the projects’ success rate and trained more than 200 project managers on Project Management frameworks PMBOK, PRINCE2 together with facilitating MSP workshops.

As PMO Manager, at System Group, Bita established the corporate PMO improving the release delays to 0 with less than 10% of scope change and deployed the measurement processes, improving the resource forecasting variance to less than 5%.