My experience of working with Kate was very positive. The business was expanding in terms of both volume and international reach. There was a real need to increase capacity, decrease lead and cycle times and reduce costs. What emerged was a real partnership between our Finance and Operations teams. Kate led her team outside of the normal confines of a traditional Finance role and provided us with a great deal of practical support in terms of project management, methodology for analysis and driving key decision deadlines. There were a large number of tactical decisions to be made and we needed clear, accurate and objective data to come to those decisions. Kate and her team were instrumental in developing RFPs and RFIs to solicit bids from suppliers. Kate provided timely, concise and insightful executive summaries but also proved to be adept at surfacing flaws, omissions, ambiguities and conflicts in the detail of the subject matter. I was particularly impressed at the speed with which she became familiar with the important technical aspects of our business that were fundamental to the analysis of the responses.
As part of the process it became apparent that ongoing management and reporting could be significantly improved by integrating disparate systems and developing certain new capabilities and interfaces for our customer groups. Kate stepped into the breach again and provided the various scope documents, key milestones, project management timetables and took the role of PMO lead. As part of this work Kate developed a number of SOP documents which enabled all user groups to better contribute to, and use, the systems and information available.
In conclusion I would state that Kate excelled in a General Manager role. Her particular expertise is in Finance but she has a wealth of interest, knowledge and capability (both nascent and learned) that gives her a solid foundation of skills which organizations can leverage across a wide-range of business activity.
Barrie Godwin
Senior Vice President
Worldwide Technical Services, Disney
virtuallythere
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