Leadership spotlight: Director of Business Planning, PMO & Delivery (UK & ROI)
In this series we will hear from the Senior Leadership Team at Three about the latest activity across the company and a little about the people behind the projects.
Vital stats
- Name: Justin Conry
- Job title: Director of Business Planning, PMO & Delivery (UK & ROI)
- Function: Strategy, PMO & Transformation
- Tenure: Three Ireland since 2014, Three UK since 2020
Tell us a bit about your background
I started my career in cold call sales, selling call credit to the UK market and that led me into telco life. I worked for 11 years in Vodafone, generally in project delivery roles but ending as Head of Strategy & Planning. I guess I have grown up with the industry and remember the excitement of WAP enabled phones and 2G to 3G as well as the Y2K project! From Vodafone I moved industries and worked across financial services, technology and business consulting before joining Three Ireland in 2014. I joined Three at a really exciting time following the acquisition of O2 Ireland and have been fortunate to be part of a transformative few years. I also have also been lucky enough to work both for and with truly talented people and have been given opportunities to learn each and every day. This current role is no different, having an opportunity to work across Three UK and Three Ireland.
In a nutshell, describe your role and how it supports Three’s objectives
My role is to lead a Three UK and Three Ireland function that enables both businesses to deliver change. In simple terms the function exists to work with all units in the company to portfolio plan and then help enable integrated delivery to meet our strategic goals. Our lifeblood is partnerships and collaboration with all the areas of the organisation.
The function has 6 pillars, each run by a head of function across various change disciplines. The area covers the creation of an integrated change (capex) portfolio for the organisation, business programme and project delivery of large cross-company change and ultimately business readiness / management into go-live. It also supports the organisation in different disciplines like continuous process improvement (lean-sigma), customer experience management in ROI and latterly an automaton centre of excellence in Three ROI.
What have your team worked on since formation in January this year?
The main focus has been on ‘best of both’, to take what the UK does well and reuse it in the ROI, and vice versa. There has been a large focus on aligning structures, teams, ways of working and incrementally improving how things are planned and then delivered, as well as building new services to the organisation. I would say the top focus however has been on connecting with people. I onboarded to the UK business during the pandemic, so it has been tougher to forge new relationships both with my team and internal customers remotely. I am very proud of the team, that in the middle of a lot of change for the area their focus has steadfastly remained on delivery.
It has been great to have an opportunity to understand a new business and meet new colleagues with fresh thinking and new perspectives. I believe we have the fantastic prospect of bringing a ‘best of both’ philosophy to life by looking at our successes in both companies and bringing new learnings to our teams. We are on a journey to change how we work and build a set of services to both organisations, change takes time, but I believe I have the essential ingredient already with a team of engaged and skilled people and I am so proud of all we have accomplished as a team so far in 2021.