Donald Wilkinson

With an IT infrastructure hardware and services budget of just over $8 million and a total project budget of about $1.5 billion, I played a key role in helping facilitate the timely opening of the Calgary Airport Authority (CAA) new international terminal building. For my contribution, this project involved the successful deployment of over 730 Cisco wireless access points and 118 Cisco switches, respectively, that integrated into a new Cisco LAN network.

One of the keys to my success was repairing the clients' relationship to improve trust and confidence in TELUS's ability to deliver. Before being brought on board, this relationship was severely strained, and I engaged my adaptive leadership style, personable character, and attitude of goal-oriented drive and commitment to regain this confidence and trust, further resulting in an improved, more collaborative relationship.

Despite the time, equipment, and human resourcing constraints that I faced, I was very creative and effective in utilizing nine technical IT resources across the project. I maintained set schedules and ensured deliverables while effectively forecasting additional resource requirements ahead of schedule and diligently performing risk mitigation and management.

As the lead project manager (PM), I successfully organized, managed, empowered, and led a cross-functional team toward the shared delivery goal of upgrading and deploying Shaw's new internet speed tiers while collaborating with other PMs in separate teams.

Of notable achievement is the fact that the first of the internet tiers we delivered took approximately eight weeks to implement. Using Agile and Lean methodologies, I was able to identify several areas of waste, determining improvements that could be made to help Shaw roll out these types of services quicker.

Collaborating with the other PMs, I reviewed the process and managed to reduce the delivery time by 25% such that, in future internet tier increase projects, the rollout was reduced to six weeks. I also created templates for internet tier releases that any PM involved could easily follow. This was to help mitigate increased onboarding time for new PMs—a risk I identified—, especially since one of the collaborating groups had a high PM turnover rate at the time.

I was commended for my initiative and work on these projects such that I became the de facto internet tier PM that the business product team always requested to lead these projects.

Directed six project manager direct reports and effectively led a large multidisciplinary team of technical, business, and operational personnel. I also coordinated seven different departments spanning the Shaw organization.

My responsibilities included:
- Status reporting and general program communication to senior and executive management
- Overseeing forecast and resource planning, as well as the resolution of high-level budgetary concerns
- Producing detailed project plans for the program that included milestones and deliverables and ensuring that the project scope was strictly adhered to