Working as a PMO Analyst at a leading payments platform

Grayce Analyst, Onima Choudhury reflects on her time working as a PMO Analyst at a leading payments company.

Redefining processes

Within 5 months of joining my payments client, I was able to deliver a variety of outputs, one of which included completely rolling out a new PMO process. This required learning how to use Tableau to create a dashboard, using Confluence to create a page to define the process, undertaking workshops to gather requirements and presenting to the entire Project Delivery Team. The first 5 months were significant in boosting my stakeholder management skills which were fundamental to success on my next assignment, becoming the PMO Lead for the CEO’s weekly Top 10 meeting.

The Top 10 meeting consisted of the CEO, his direct reports, and senior initiative leads on large programmes that came under the CEO’s top priorities. As this was a new governance meeting, I was able to determine the structure. I created a weekly task matrix to ensure the data and inputs required would be ready from all the key stakeholders. I worked on the template, wrote high-level minutes, created a Confluence page and managed SharePoint which stored all key materials. I reported directly to the Chief of Staff in this process and built a strong relationship with a C-level executive. As a result, I was trusted to create a variety of materials (one pagers on progress, financials, KPI and milestone summaries) for the ExCo board meetings. My experience working on the CEO’s Top 10 meetings was one of the highlights of my time at my client as it allowed me to build strong relationships with a range of senior stakeholders, from VPs, to SVPs, to C-Level Execs.

Role evolution

Although my role started off as PMO governance for the weekly meeting, it has diversified a lot since then. I have been able to use a variety of tools to create key deliverables that govern processes and capture key data. I’ve also contributed to requirements and inputs for a dashboard in Power BI which was created in order to help drive decisions around KPIs / Financials / Milestones.

My role expanded beyond the weekly meetings and into other exercises for the ExCo. The biggest takeaway from this process was creating strong and lasting rapport with senior leaders which enhanced my learning experience and enabled me to strengthen my own leadership and stakeholder management skills. I was then able to take these skills on and use them in my own projects.

Exceptional feedback

Onima has gained exceptional feedback from her client, including directly from the CEO, who told Onima: “I want to say thank you for all your effort in making our Top 10 weekly sessions a really meaningful way for me to drive alignment on strategic priorities across the organisation. I know there was a lot of ‘behind the scenes’ work from you with all the co-ordination and follow-ups. Thanks a lot – you made a real difference.”