It is essential that our customers maximise the value of the cyber security services they procure from Redscan.
Mark Welding, Redscan’s Head of Project Management, explains what’s involved in delivering effective services to our customers.
What is the purpose of the project management team?
Our role is to ensure we provide our clients with a first class experience when implementing our cyber security services while assuring the quality of those services. We provide external expertise to ensure that the organisation is looking ahead and addressing all the aspects that need to be considered.
What does your role involve?
Everything we do is focused on making sure we deliver high quality services to our clients. My role involves looking across the work that is being undertaken and ensuring that the necessary resources are assigned to each customer. I also support the Project Managers in their delivery and addressing any challenges as they arise.
My role also involves looking at how to improve delivery processes and working with different teams to understand how they operate and how improvements can be supported and facilitated in their areas.
How do you ensure that clients are onboarded quickly and effectively?
We have undertaken hundreds of implementations across a range of industry verticals and different sizes of clients. We have applied this experience to build a consistent and templated deployment model that can be customised to each of our clients’ specific needs.
Our standardised delivery model means that we can get things done very quickly. Where possible, we have automated delivery methods and pre-defined documentation for customers. We work to a week-by-week structured delivery plan and drive it in partnership with our customers.
What can clients expect during the onboarding process?
We develop an in-depth understanding of our client’s environments and capabilities to ensure that our deployment and service fits their operational requirements. This involves combining structured processes and a highly adaptive approach to achieve the best results for clients. We work on a partnership basis with customers, to make working ties with them as close as practically possible so that if they need support when dealing with other teams, we’re there to help them.
Because these types of projects are now gaining much more visibility in the executive management chain, we also provide customers with the information they need to keep their stakeholders informed.
Which other teams at Redscan do you work with?
We work closely with the Sales team to ensure we understand the requirements of new Redscan MDR clients and appropriately plan the delivery phase. During implementation we work with our engineering, SOC, service, TAM and development teams.
We liaise with the development teams to build any new capabilities that need to be created in support of customer deliveries, whether that is new parsers, new use cases or new integration needs.
From the business change perspective, we could be working with a variety of teams, depending on what the specific requirements are. Activities can include providing support or help with a piece of development, whether that’s within the software development team, setting up better ways of working for things like use case development or looking at improving back-end system integration.
How have you used your experience as an end-user to improve Redscan’s services?
I’ve had eight years’ experience of being a cyber security customer, working with organisations like Redscan. One of the reasons I wanted to join Redscan and work on the supply side is that I appreciated the level of focus that is put into delivery. My own experience on the client side means that I understand common frustrations around cyber security onboarding and this informs me when I’m developing ways to address these challenges.
What do you find most rewarding about your role?
The people I work with! They are extremely hard working and positive and they’re always trying to help and support and find solutions. It’s as simple as that. The ethos at Redscan is all about striving to deliver our service to the highest standard and quickly address any issues if and when they arise.
Can you give us a quick overview of your career to date?
I have over 20 years’ experience in project/programme management, working with FTSE 100 and global organisations to manage the delivery of high value and business-critical projects and business transformation activities through large teams and third party providers. More than seven years of this was involved with cyber/information security project management.
Examples of the types of projects I have managed include converting an aircraft hangar into a tier 4 data centre and delivering life-critical 999 Silver and Gold Command Centres for emergency services. I worked on a contract with BP where I was looking after all of the finance, HR and procurement systems for their oil trading function. At Visa, I was responsible for data centre hardening their entire mobile payment infrastructure, while at Sky I led the implementation of their SOCs.
What skills would you say are needed for your type of role?
I think the key skills required for this role are predominantly interpersonal. That means the ability to be able to get things done through coordinating people and the ability to encourage those people to deliver when it’s challenging or when things aren’t going to plan.
Another important skill is the ability to be organised and to organise others. You also need to be able to understand the route to getting something done and the different technical elements that support getting it done at a high level. This is critical, particularly at Redscan.
Any tips for people looking to get into this area of cyber security?
Project management is great because you get to see so many different elements from a cyber security perspective, a business perspective and a people perspective. It’s a really interesting area because it changes all the time and there’s always a learning curve.
The world of project management has changed. It’s no longer a case of prescriptive project plans. The world has moved on, business has moved on and everything is much more rapid. Project Managers now need a much more open view and a lot more judgement about when to use structure and when to allow flexibility.
What you set out to deliver is rarely what is needed to be delivered by the time you get to the end because everything has changed. Project management is now about being able to adapt, learn and move on.
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