Most project managers come up through delivery. I came up through communities. My first real work was as a project worker at Save the Children, where I established the Shoreditch Youth Parliament: a framework for giving young people a genuine say in the decisions that shaped their lives. It worked well enough that Ken Livingstone, then Mayor of London, adopted it into his Children and Young People Strategy for London. I was building governance before I had a word for it.

From there I moved to the second largest regeneration project in the country, working on youth empowerment, advocacy, strategy, and housing: the slow, contested business of changing a place and the lives inside it. As a Partnership Manager in Tower Hamlets I ran programmes to widen inclusion and get people into work. The through-line of those years was simple. Real outcomes for real communities, measured by whether anything actually changed.

Then I crossed into commercial work, and I did it the hard way: running a French bistro and a coaching company at the same time. After that I joined Nutri Foods, one of the largest vegan FMCG businesses in Central Europe, in a serious commercial and operational role, where I learned what margin, supply, and operational fragility feel like when the numbers are yours to answer for. I went back to coaching for four years after that. Workshops, one to one sessions, and clients across the United States, Northern Europe, and the UK. Three industries, three continents.

At 37 I went back to university. At 38, through the COVID lockdowns, I completed the first year of a Masters in Computer Science, because I wanted to understand the systems I would be accountable for rather than take engineers at their word. Then I caught COVID badly. I was hospitalised for five months, part of it in a coma. By the time I had recovered the university would not let me finish the second year remotely, and I still needed to socially isolate, so I took the Postgraduate Certificate in Computer Science for the year I had completed rather than the full degree. I went on to finish an Executive MBA, and I hold the PMP, PSM II, and AZ-900. I came back from that closer to the work than I left it.

I became a project manager directly off the back of that first year of Computer Science, and I have spent five years in delivery since: about a year at Geeks Ltd, and roughly four at Transparity, a Microsoft MSP boutique with an Azure and Microsoft ecosystem specialism, where I am now. Seven programme recoveries. £5.9m stabilised.

None of that is a straight line, and that is the point. The organiser reads the people and the trust that has quietly collapsed. The operator reads the commercial reality and the burn rate. The engineer reads whether the technical claims actually hold. Most recovery work fails because someone is looking through only one of those lenses. I look through all of them at once.