Project Description

Syed Saad

Syed Saad

Snr PMO Consultant

Areas Of Expertise:

  • PMO Uplift and Management
  • Portfolio Financial Tracking & Reporting
  • Resource Management
  • RAIDD Management
  • Change Management

Education:

  • Bachelor of Project Management (Civil Engineering Science), University of Sydney
  • Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Bilkent University

About Saad Syed

Saad joined Seven as a Graduate in February 2020 and is dedicated towards building a strong foundation in PMO Consulting and Project Delivery. He recently worked across multiple projects at CBA over 2 years, where he helped manage PMO for Technology Platforms, led adoption of a new PPM solution for a Business Unit, and supported end-to-end delivery of transition of key services to CBA India. His key strengths are PMO delivery governance (RAIDD Management, Status Reporting), Budget tracking and reporting, Portfolio Resource Management, Project Framework adherence, and end-to-end management project deliverables. He is also CMI-accredited Change Management Practitioner.

What Saad brings

  • Financial Tracking (including variance analysis and reporting) on a project, program and portfolio level.
  • Porfolio Resource Tracking
  • RAIDD Management
  • Senior Stakeholder Management
  • Portfolio Status Reporting
  • Change Management

Key Achievements:

As a Project Officer in CBA, Saad worked across multiple projects over a span of 2 years. 

  • A new Portfolio Project Management (PPM) solution, Planview Enterprise One was being implemented across CBA to help meet its technology and project delivery requirements. This led to a significant change in the way projects were managed and delivered across the bank. Saad’s role was to ensure the change was implemented successfully across the Corporate Services BU. This included the following activities: 
    • Engage with key stakeholders including corporate executives to provide delivery support across their portfolio. This involved validating and uplifting key project data to assist with data migration to the new PPM tool 
    • Coordinate training of approximately 10,000 high impact users across the bank 
    • Work with project teams across different Business Units to make sure all resources had adequate roles and access 
    • Provide post go-live support to successfully embed PPM tool 
  • He provided PMO support to a complex divestment program which was aimed at establishing core Finance and HR systems for the divested entity. The key activities included: 
    • Ensure adherence to group project delivery framework throughout project lifecycle 
    • Manage project and portfolio reporting, including risk, resourcing, schedule, and budget reporting  
    • Financial management of both Capital and Operational expense budgets for project portfolio 
    • Project scope management through change requests with financial impact ranging from $50,000 to $1 million  
    • Facilitate project hygiene sessions with project working groups such as schedule updates, RAIDD reviews and Finance deep dives 
  • He helped setup and manage portfolio tracking and reporting for Group Property and Procurement technology platform, where my responsibilities included: 
    • Coordinate and facilitating workshops with business stakeholders and product owners to help document key project requirements, map business capabilities and prioritise delivery portfolio 
    • SME for project delivery teams where he assisted with project forecasting, end-to-end financial management,  and facilitated Centre of Excellence sessions for continuous learning and development in project delivery and PMO Consulting  
  • He provided project management support for a Privacy Enforceable Undertaking (EU) program which aimed to remediate existing IT applications across the bank to enable successful onboarding to bank’s new Identity and Access Management platform. The key outcome was to handle and protect privacy of customers and staff in accordance with regulatory requirements. His responsibilities included the following: 
    • Create, baseline, and maintain project schedule, including dependencies and milestones tracking
    • Consolidate project status reports and dashboards 
    • Facilitate risks and issues workshops 
    • Create and maintain resource plans and facilitate forecast of resource requirements  
    • Manage end-to-end financial reporting. This included tracking timesheets, Statement of Works and vendor invoices 
    • Maintain application master list to ensure delivery of scope against project plan 
  • As an Associated Project Manager in CBA India, Saad assisted with the following: 
    • Complete business readiness assessment for transitioning services to CBA India 
    • Contribute towards business case creation 
    • Manage recruitment planning with talent acquisition 
    • Manage delivery governance and provide PMO support 
    • Conduct training needs assessment and create knowledge transfer plan 
    • Documented parallel run KPIs and SLAs

As PMO Analyst at AMP Life, Saad worked towards creating new artefacts and processes as well as optimising existing ones. This included creating new templates for PMP, Closure Report and PIR; streamlining existing templates for Project Brief and Business Case, developing program-level risks, issues and assumptions log as well as processes for approval of various project artefacts. Saad also worked towards creating a central finance tracking tool to assist with the visibility and reporting of program financials to senior stakeholders and later supported towards collating resource data from project managers and used it to create a resource tracking tool with dashboard capability, which was a single source of truth for the storing program-wide resources. He also assisted with administration work which included arranging weekly meetings with the client, recording meeting minutes and maintaining Planning Board on Microsoft Teams.

As Graduate at Seven Consulting, Saad completed the Graduate program which is designed to enhance the core Project Management skills amongst the people who are experienced in their individual professional fields. During the Graduate program, he has gained theoretical and practical knowledge on different aspects of project management by going through different sessions and exercises with domain experts. This program has developed his skills and confidence level in using PM tools (like MS Project, JIRA etc), techniques and soft skills. Saad also had the opportunity to work shadow senior consultants in actual project environments where he has been exposed to risk, issues, and constraints on a project and better ways to manage them.

As PMO Consultant, Saad was involved in assessing the EPMO capability at GBST. During the three weeks of engagement, he facilitated interviews with senior stakeholders including the business division heads and C-level executives. All responses from the interviews were stored in a central repository which were later used to derive recommendations for improvement. Those recommendations were then prioritized to cater to client’s objectives which then formed the basis for the final EPMO Proposal. It was later presented to the GBST executive team for approval. He also worked towards estimating the work effort that was expected for the EPMO implementation and operation.

Bachelor of Project Management (Civil Engineering Science), University of Sydney

Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Bilkent University

GradConnection Top100 Future Leaders in Australia – Jacobs Engineering Consulting Award

Civil Engineering Liaison Committee Representative – Responsible for representing the Civil Engineering undergraduate students in University of Sydney, suggest and implement improvement measures to enhance the overall academic experience.

Tutor – TLG (NGO) Worked on bridging the gap in educational disparity in NSW. Provided one-to-one tutoring in mathematics and science to the students of Wee Waa Public School. All subjects were taught with respect to the NSW curriculum.

University Marketing Coordinator; Dawn Expo 2016, an international education fair in Karachi, Pakistan. Syed assisted the international students team in promoting the university in terms of prospective student recruitment. It was a huge success as they witnessed a record number of international student applications that year.

Taleem Sab Ke Liye (NGO); Organised and successfully ran a standardised school system for the underprivileged children of Karachi, Pakistan. Syed worked with a team who wanting to bring educational change to the region. The students were taught basic language subjects such as English and Urdu (native) along with technical subjects including science and mathematics. Total community service hours were 147.

The Aga Khan University Hospital; Assisted a research team from the Johns Hopkins University on a project based on pre-hospital care. Syed interviewed organisations responsible for running the ambulance networks in Pakistan. Syed completed 263 hours of voluntary service in the Department of Emergency Medicine.

Interchange 2018; Syed worked on building up a startup which addressed the key issues faced by international students in Australia, as part of Interchange Program 2018. The idea of the project revolved around building a platform which would provide better opportunities to the fashion and design students, enabling them to express themselves and have a brand of their own.

Other Team Members