Senior Project Manager (Information Security)
Old Mutual
Total years of experience :10 years, 10 Months
Management of Information Security projects for one of South Africa's largest financial institutes. Projects span across the African continent (10 markets) and are both technical and non - technical.
Projects include the roll out of various security related technologies across all markets, such as
• Vulnerability Management
• Data Loss Prevention
• Cloud Access Security
• Disk Encryption
• Device Control
Non-technical projects include but not limited to,
• The assessment of the organization against the NIST framework
• Development and roll out of the organizations security policies
• Assessment of the organizations key third parties’ and key processes risk posture
The responsibility of the role itself was to manage all production facing projects related to a client managing tool called Oracle. A requirement for the role was to understand SQL, which was one of the primary languages used in Oracle. The team consisted of Data Base Administrators, SQL, Python and BI developers as well as Testers. Being a production facing product, all scoping sessions stemmed from a business analyst who was a part of the client facing side of the department. The duration of the projects ran from 4 months to a year. Testing in this department was critical and consisted of a team of roughly 20 testers. The environment here was mainly that of a Waterfall one, and the Microsoft Suite as the tools used.
The role consisted of managing the scoping and development of IT based - marketing and advertising related projects from inception to close out, for clients of the agency, which included highly reputable vehicle manufacturers and banks. The environment itself was predominantly Agile IT.
The role consisted of managing the development, deployment and maintenance of various e-commerce related payment products. Because the company focused on the full product, all projects were cross functional, consisting of technological, financial, legal and marketing components that contributed to the final deliveries. Project requirements would stem from Product Owners, which I would then feed into every function of the business, and manage delivery till the end. The Scrum Master would report to me on all IT related progress. In this role I reported to the Head of Delivery.
The role consisted of coordinating cross functional NGO/non-profit focused projects from initiation till conclusion/operation. Projects were fundamentally IT based, mainly USSD and Android, and were logistic based on the roll out phase of the project, which consisted of rolling out the finished products across Africa.
I managed small to medium sized projects from initiation to close out. Every project would start with a business requirement, which would then channel through the SDLC process. The timeframe of this would of course vary depending on the size of the requirement. After the product(s) has been sufficiently tested, and sign off has been confirmed, I would manage the roll out of these finalized products to various rural areas across Africa. I maintained a log which registered and managed project related risks, Issues, and dependencies throughout the lifespan of the project. MS Project and JIRA were the prominent tools used to manage the projects.s.
Reporting to the lead developer, we worked in an Agile environment, and daily stand ups were held every morning. Our platforms were Android, USSD and Web as the company’s customers were the lesser privileged who made frequent use of USSD and basic Android services. The tools we used in our operational capacity were, Jira for task tracking, and the Microsoft suite for everything else. On a monthly basis we would present our progress and products to management. All end products would get passed over to our Testers who would of course evaluate the quality of the final product(s) and sign off for production where applicable.
Completion of a Bachelor of Commerce degree majoring in Information Systems.