Mary-Ellen, you’ve had a highly successful journey in the enterprise IT world. Could you share a bit about your background and what sparked your career path?

My career journey has been both varied and rewarding. With the IT industry constantly evolving, there’s always a new challenge around the corner – and that’s what makes it interesting. I have over 25 years of experience in engineering and management roles across various sectors including aviation, manufacturing, retail and public services. Throughout my career, I’ve been driven by a passion for continuous learning and growth. I hold several professional certifications including PMP, Prince2 Agile, Scrum Master, and Lean Six Sigma Green Belt. Developing my skillsets helps me to stay at the forefront of IT programme management.

Today, my focus is on managing large-scale infrastructure projects, like the cloud migration project I’m currently leading for a global retailer. I also specialise in implementing transformation and modernisation activities and rolling out disruptive technologies. My foundation as an engineer means I understand how technology works and how processes hang together. I apply that expertise to every project, particularly when it comes to overseeing complex IT environments.

Before joining Saros Consulting, I honed my skills in project management and people management working at Aer Lingus and Fujitsu. In these environments, I was involved in high profile, complex, modernisation projects managing large teams – a challenge I’ve always loved. Now in Saros, I’m expanding on that expertise and taking it to the next level.

What motivated you to join Saros Consulting, and how has your experience here shaped your professional growth?

In October, I’ll mark three years with Saros and I absolutely love it here. In other companies I’ve worked in, it was difficult to get to know people, but here, I know every single person. It’s really nice, that feeling of being part of a community.

I’d achieved a lot in my previous role, setting up processes and new ways of working, but I’d gotten to the point where it was very much rinse and repeat. The opportunity to join Saros came at the right time, and it has led to some fantastic new opportunities.

Now, as a Programme Manager, I spend 80% of my time on a global retail account, and the remaining 20% across other client accounts, leading a large team of project managers, coordinators, business analysts, and technical specialists. It’s a very rewarding role and I thoroughly enjoy the variety of challenges it brings.  What I’ve found with Saros is how great it is if you want to develop yourself there are so many opportunities. The co-CEOS – Justin van der Spuy and Ray Armstrong – are so approachable and genuinely open to new ideas. You can go to them and say ‘I’m really interested in this’ or ‘can I develop this?’ – you simply wouldn’t get that opportunity everywhere. They encourage you to bring your ideas to them and they care about your opinion and are open to exploring new things. I’ve never experienced that from people at their level before and it’s opened a lot of doors for me professionally and for my continuous development.

In your opinion, what is the most underrated aspect of your area of work, and why do you think it deserves more attention?

For me when it comes to project management it’s all about building personal relationships and you do that with open and honest communication. You simply can’t over-communicate in project management. The success of any project hinges on communication and keeping that open dialogue with everyone involved in the project.

At Saros, I’ve come to appreciate just how powerful open and honest leadership can be. During a company away day earlier this year, our CEOs shared an experience where they took a bold step, and while it didn’t go as planned, their willingness to openly discuss the challenges they faced was incredibly impactful. Their transparency in discussing what they learned from the experience was a great reminder that real growth comes not from everything being smooth sailing, but from navigating and learning from new undertakings, whether they go as planned or not. To see that honest communication coming from the highest level of a company is so important in any team or project environment.

What are your personal hallmarks of success and how have you developed these skills over time?

For me it always comes back to delivering a project on time and within budget. That we did not disrupt people, that we won over the stakeholders and built that trust, and that they received a quality project at the end of it. And that’s our ethos at Saros – the quality has to be high with everything we do. As cheesy as it sounds, I care about what I do and always try to do it to the best of my ability so that I can deliver a high-quality project.

What are the most common IT challenges that clients are facing today and how are they tackling them?

I’ve spoken about tech debt in my recent article, and I think managing tech debt is a huge challenge for our clients right now. Aside from that, modernisation is an ongoing challenge for clients who need to complete large projects like moving to the cloud, and modernising their technology to enable that move, all while keeping up with demand for a 24/7 service. This is particularly true in the retail sector where consumer demand continues to evolve. And because everything is digital, or moving to digital, the sheer volume of work is significant. We often joke that it’s like a giant game of Tetris, where every move you make has an impact on something else, all of these project elements interdependent. The journey is so long and complex. And the clincher, like I said, is to do all that while maintaining 24/7 service.

What future trends in your area of expertise are you most excited about and why?

I was at a Project Management Institute (PMI) conference recently and naturally talk turned to Artificial Intelligence (AI). Within project management we’re going to see people using AI to take over the more mundane tasks – like repetitive documentation. Interestingly, at that conference there was a speaker from Aer Lingus who gave a presentation on robotics. They outlined how Aer Lingus had automated its refund system during Covid, as it was dealing with a massive volume of refunds. And this is exciting because robotics, automation and AI together will help us to, not replace the PM, but to free them up to focus more on the human side of the job. What we’re seeing now is that things have never moved as fast in IT as they are today. The challenge is to get on board or get left behind.