Be sure not to miss our Work Smarter Together event – 23 October 2019
At the WST 23 October event we have two sessions – the first launching the new Project Management Community of Practice, the second looking at Lean Green – how the Green agenda can be supported by the thinking and approaches of Lean.
Register here to join us in the Fitzgerald Chamber, Student Centre to learn, connect and collaborate with your colleagues.
Join the conversation on Twitter with #UCDWST #WST #UCDAgile and follow @UCDWorkSmart for news and updates.
To help us explore these areas we are excited to welcome our two guest speakers John O’Sullivan and Samantha Fahy. They will be joined by colleagues from UCD in the two segments but what follows is more on our guests.
John O’Sullivan
John O’Sullivan is Director of the Programme Management Office in Trinity College Dublin, joining Trinity in 2017, and is our guest speaker at the launch of the Project Management Community of Practice on October 23.
We asked him to join us at the launch because of his wealth of his project management experience in industry, his recent experience in higher education, his commitment to project management as powerful discipline, and his current experiences in helping shape a project management community of practice in Trinity.
Before joining Trinity, John has worked in Jacobs Engineering,CRH, Texas Instruments and Siemens AG. During his 28 years with Siemens, working across four continents delivering corporate and customer-facing programmes and projects in areas such as Global ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) Implementation, M&A, Restructuring, Change Management, and Programme Management Office Governance.
Looking to the value of project management, John makes the point that the concept of the ‘project-oriented organisation’ has really taking hold, with most large organisations now undertaking all change initiatives via projects, with this project focus putting a keen emphasis on being able to successfully manage projects. This in turn puts a keen focus on project managers. Project management, more generally, has become a distinct discipline in the last 25 or so years, a trend which has been driven by globalisation and by the recognition that good project managers can transcend functional boundaries – project management is a key and ‘mobile’ skill set.
John’s own mobility has seen his move from industry to Trinity where, as Director of the Programme Management office, he is responsible for the centralized and coordinated governance of the university’s portfolio of capital projects.
In welcoming John to UCD for the October 23 WST we are looking forward to hearing John share from his experience – project manager, programme manager, industry, higher education – and take part in a great Q&A as we look at how we develop our project management community in UCD.
Samantha Fahy
Samantha has been the Manager of Sustainability at DCU since 2012. This cross University initiative to develops and promotes Sustainability across all functions including teaching and learning, research development and innovation, campus management and operations as well at enhancing engagement with external stakeholders.
Samantha has over 20 year of experience in the management and administration of high technology research projects and has developed a deep understanding of research practice gained from working closely with outstanding researchers engaged in complex projects, such as SFI Strategic Research Clusters, which are multi- institutional, multi-disciplinary and have deeply embedded industrial partners.
In 2004 Samantha was appointed the Centre Manager for the National Centre for Plasma Science and Technology focusing on the long-term strategic planning for the Centre, including the coordination and submission of major research grants applications and other funding opportunities as well as management of complex budgets over multi-year time frames, liaising with many partners (often with conflicting interests), and successful negotiation of difficult consortium agreements.
Earlier in her career (2001 – 2004), Samantha launched and managed a start-up company focused on delivering technology focused education and training programmes tailored to specific industrial requirements.
Samantha Fahy holds a primary Science degree from NUI Galway (1991), a Master in Optoelectronics from Queen’s University Belfast (1992), a diploma in Management from Trinity College Dublin (1997) and an MBA from Dublin City University (2010).
