A day in the life of our...Head of Consulting

Our Head of Consulting Zoe Bradshaw discusses the most rewarding and challenging aspects of her role at makepositive

Describe your role at makepositive and how did you get into Salesforce consulting?

My role is Head of Consulting (UK) and I’ve been at makepositive for 16 years now. Before that I worked at PwC Consulting and IBM Consulting, delivering billing integration projects for a range of retail and wholesale telecommunications providers across Europe.

At makepositive I oversee all of our Delivery consultants, PMO & Resourcing, plus our specialist Salesforce Practices (Quote to Cash, Mulesoft, Service Cloud and Sales Cloud, with more coming soon!). I’m responsible for ensuring that we have the right team, we’re giving them the training that they need and that we’re resourcing them on the correct projects, to ensure that we’re delivering success for our clients and that our people are growing during the process. On the Practice side of things, it’s the same again but with a particular focus on those clouds.

What does a typical work day look like for you?

Every day is different but will typically involve having a number of catch ups with my team leads, checking in on people and projects to see how things are going. We review recruitment and resourcing regularly against targets to determine any additional skills that we need and where. On the PMO side of things we run regular reviews, entry and exit gates plus lessons learned, so that we can continuously improve our end to end delivery process, so I’ll usually have a number of initiatives on the go to enhance how we deliver. In addition, I’m supporting on delivery of our Delivery 2.0 Strategy, which is building on the great work that we have started in moving more into business transformation and business change management for our customers.

What is the most challenging part of your role?

Balancing the different demands of commercial pressures versus the people side of things is always a challenge, but I like to think that we get it right most of the time. In addition, the endless stream of Salesforce initiatives, products, clouds – we want to get involved in everything (and do get involved in most things), but it’s important to keep a focus on maintaining and building expertise in the right areas and not spreading ourselves too thinly.

What is the most rewarding part of your role?

Seeing the team grow and get some really amazing feedback from clients is so rewarding. We run a graduate academy, and our five graduates that we took on last year have just graduated, they are all now delivering high quality solutions on some really exciting projects and are progressing very well. We’ve just started another graduate academy for 2020, the standard of applicants was amazing and I’m just sorry that we couldn’t take more people on at this point!

Also being able to create an innovative environment where people can generate and implement new ideas is brilliant. For example, a couple of months ago, Giorgia, our Resourcing Manager suggested that we run a mentoring scheme for people that may have lost their jobs through Covid, or who are looking for a career change. Fast forward just eight weeks later, Positive Proteges was born with Alex, one of Implementation Consultants heading things up with an enthusiastic team of MP volunteers involved in the scheme. I’m so proud of how our Delivery, Recruitment and Sales & Marketing teams pulled together to initiate this, and all in their spare time too!

What’s your favourite thing about working at makepositive?

The people, definitely the people! Everybody is so hard-working, professional and dedicated to delivering quality and success for our clients, but with a friendly and relaxed attitude – so we approach everything with fun and a smile.

Author: Zoe Bradshaw