Personal Profile
My clients mostly ask me to help them overcome problems or extraordinary IT-related challenges, and coordinate associated projects. I work for my clients as consultant, manager and project executive. My work usually encompasses international reorganizations, large and complex projects such as data centre consolidations, and the outsourcing of IT activities. The scope of my projects often extends beyond organizational and even national boundaries.
As a passionate and goal-oriented person, I focus on finding original and practical solutions and on achieving results. Thanks to my inner drive to understand situations, I can focus directly on applying structure to these situations from various angles. This attitude helps me to quickly identify the approach that would produce the best solution.
It comes as second nature to me to first synthesize situations and view them in their larger context, and then make a thorough analysis of the problems so as to arrive at an orderly and solvable situation. This gives my clients the information and insights they need if they are to take the right decisions. My result-oriented attitude and my passion to help clients also act as an incentive to prove the feasibility of my recommendations by putting them into practice.
Paul Hertroys profiel
The aspirations, mission and culture of the client organization form the starting point from which my work is carried out. I check whether the complexity of the project and the nominated objectives are in harmony with the culture of the organization. Within this field of tension between complexity, objectives and culture, I endeavour to define useful and practicable solutions that will provide sustainable results for my clients. The wheel doesn’t need to be re-invented every time, but it may well have to be adapted to remain well-fitting and durable. In my efforts to find a basis for an acceptable solution, I rely on both formal and informal communications with all stakeholders concerned. Finding the right balance between the investments to be made and the value to be gained is an obvious starting point for this acceptance. Only an improvement shaped and accepted by the organization can be truly carried through.
1. Infrastructure architecture and management:
- Consolidation of several data centres worldwide. These projects have often also encompassed the design of a new infrastructure that was implemented during the process of consolidation.
- Setting up and improving various departments in IT operations and service management. The improvements were usually focused on changes in the processes and structures of that organization. In a small number of cases, I have also provided employee training for the new organizational format.
2. Sourcing:
- Developing sourcing strategies for several manufacturing companies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. These sourcing strategies concerned both telecommunications and infrastructure, and sometimes included the entire IT organization.
- Managing the outsourcing of data centres, desktop and network management for European clients.
- Defining an exit strategy for a failed outsourcing relationship on behalf of a large international company.
3. Strategy and Governance:
- Developing IT strategies for major companies with operations in both domestic and international markets. These strategies concerned both the IT strategy for the entire company as well as the strategy for different parts of IT operations, such as:
- the telecommunications strategy for several German and Swiss companies;
- the IT strategy for a national and an international insurance company.
4. Project Management and Application Development:
- Optimizing and managing several large development and infrastructure projects with budgets of several dozen million Euros, such as:
- assessing and improving a global business process redesign project based on SAP;
- assessing and improving a global Windows 7 roll out project;
- assessing and improving the project portfolio of Dutch insurers and banks;
- defining and managing large data centre consolidation projects for multinationals in the Netherlands, Germany and Great Britain;
- defining and managing several system development and integration projects.