Gina Sarasan , Ilford, United Kingdom

In my current role at Arup, I am the primary PMO analyst and main point of contact within PMO and Portfolio Delivery. From having a pivotal role within the Portfolio Delivery team in Digital Technology, I strongly believe I have the skills needed to fit into this role with ease and confidence.
When I joined Arup, I was lucky enough to join at a time when tools for planning, monitoring and evaluating Project Delivery and Portfolio Management had humble beginnings. Therefore, I was very much involved in the evolving of tools and reports to analyse and effectively present data for forecast planning and past year evaluation. A lot of this was done through complex power queries, Microsoft Flows, SharePoint lists and most recently Power Bi for more dynamic data representation. This allows me and my line manager to communicate complicated data sets to a wider audience. This also allows me and the team to identify areas for improvement within our processes and to better present our data for our colleagues.
From completing my Prince 2 qualification I was able to apply principles and best practice approaches towards projects as a project support function in order to track the delivery of projects and how successful they will eventually be. I also adhere to the Digital Technology Project Delivery Framework which details the various stages of the project lifecycle to help inform project managers and teams of the correct methods and processes to take (with respect to the nature of the project).
I have been involved in the creation of dashboards and scorecards so that complex information can be presented in a clear and understandable format for a variety of audiences. At the beginning of each financial year the PMO readjusts their processes and documentation such as status reports, business case templates, finance planners, etc in order to fit in with current year's ways of working and processes. I have had the opportunity to be at the centre of the creating of these documentation for our users.
From working with complex tools, I have learnt how to problem solve and develop solutions on my own with very little help from others who had deeper understanding of these tools than I did. After troubleshooting and problem solving in my own time I was able to then consequently fix and produce meaningful reports and methods of analysis. One example of this is when my colleague left the company and a SharePoint list that he built had stopped working and he had left no handover notes on what to do in the event that this breaks. I had to spend a significant amount of time learning how the report works and the Microsoft flow used to build this. Eventually, I got the SharePoint list working after understanding our end goal and what we want to achieve.
Often, having the ability to solve problems and come up with widely accepted solutions to these problems motivates me to continue to learn, produce better solutions more often and drive more efficiencies. This as well as also being a Mathematics graduate means that I am highly results orientated and enjoys the process of getting to those results.
I build strong working relationships with several of my colleagues and stakeholders which means that I have had the opportunity to influence and engage with them across different levels. From previous 360 feedback I have been described as a positive influence to the PMO function. I continue to build excellent rapport with everyone I meet and do my very best to drive efficiency through methods of communication.
Working within Digital Technology (formerly Information Technology), there is a strong working ethos of being customer focussed and delivering solutions for our customers. Within the PMO function, this is a vital part of the role as not only do we deliver for our customers outside of Digital Technology, but also within Digital Technology. This is driven by the fact that a majority of the work we produce is to drive efficiencies and facilitate our team for our customers.
When I have larger pieces of work and projects on my hand to manage I regularly make a plan and review on a frequent basis to ensure that I am on track. Arup uses a new product called MS Teams which is a collaborative planning tool, prior to this I was using Microsoft Project.
As a primary product owner of Project Management tools, I have had to write guidance, how-to's and FAQ's for our users as well as provide one-to-one training in addition to this. At my early days in Arup such guidance was what I relied on to learn my way into the role, however a lot of this was out of date so I had to start building on this at an early stage as well as administering this to other people. I also am leading on the restructure of the Portfolio Delivery SharePoint page which has several outdated ways of working and guidance.
I regularly analyse problems and make recommendations to the Head of Portfolio Delivery and the Global Portfolio Manager as I own a lot of processes and products, giving me the knowledge to make such proposals. A lot of this is to do where the reports we use to pull in data comes from and how better to use different datasets to give us more meaningful information.
In the projects and initiatives that I have managed so far, there have been very little risk and with any foreseeable risks I was able to mitigate them quite early on to prevent them from becoming an issue. Within the PMO function, I chair and manage high-level risks that need to be made aware to management team outside of the Project Board. I am involved in the production of the risk report which gets presented to the Digital Technology Leadership team. A lot of the time I review the risk items and rework so that it is coherent and understandable to them.
On a fortnightly basis when I am preparing the fortnightly portfolio report I have to often chase people to complete the overdue reports. This can be challenging at times as I have to request people to do their reports on a Monday morning where they may have conflicting priorities. However, to ensure that as a Digital Technology function we report accurately I communicate the importance of this task to ensure that they all cooperate.
My team involves myself and my line manager who is the Global Portfolio manager, therefore several actions and requests come to me directly to manage. I have always been able to self-manage my work with minimal supervision and so working in such a small team has made that more apparent. As a single point of contact within my immediate team and not having another person I can delegate my work to, this has meant that I have to be able to prioritise and reprioritise my workload on a regular basis. Working with complex spreadsheets and very few members in the team to confer with, I have managed to deal with issues and tasks alone. I am generally a very self-motivated person in all aspects of my life and working in a small PMO function within a large organisation has helped me even more to be self-sufficient. I also am confident enough to escalate issues or problems to get a more expert opinion if I don't feel I have enough background information to make the best decision
Within the PMO function and within Portfolio Delivery I would be described as a confidence and resilient person whilst also remaining a kind and friendly face in the team. I have been called out in yearly team awards for being very approachable and for single-handedly chairing meetings with a large audience consisting of several members of senior leadership (whilst keeping to time and managing the agenda in an orderly way).
I am an extremely organised individual who uses various tools like my Outlook calendar and MS Teams to plan out my work. One example of demonstrating my organisation skills is that I have tasked myself to clean up our metadata and document libraries within our SharePoint site to make it more organised and relative to this financial year's ways of working.
I have experience in creating PowerPoint decks for myself to present in meetings as well as in assisting in creating presentations for my team and line manager.
I would like to apply for this position as I believe the skills I have gained through working in project management and also those gained on a personal level can provide real benefits to this role.