Mary Barber

She is a Transformation Director with over 30 years’ experience in the Private (Mars Inc.) and Public sector (NHS/DoH/HMRC) in transformational programme leadership roles. 

She has experience of delivering successful digital and customer focussed strategic change programmes across a variety of business areas including organisational change. Mary is skilled in stakeholder engagement and strategic planning; recognising that successful change comes from harnessing the power of process, data, technology and people, and building relationships at all organisational levels and across the supply chain.

She is used to working in fast paced environments, where decision making and gaining the agreement of senior stakeholders at executive level is critical and she uses a variety of leadership and influencing skills. She has been successful in challenging failing projects constructively and reshaping them by asking the difficult “why” and “how” questions.

She has brought individual change projects together to form change portfolios and build high performing teams developing leadership and leaders by role modelling and coaching. She presently directs 2 Government Major Programmes, with a budget of £90m pa and directly lead a team of 150 civil servants and have functional leadership of a similar number of technical, business and supplier resource.

She has managed major national suppliers to successful delivery, spent time working in commercial and procurement. She is a graduate of the Governments Major Project Leadership Academy (MPLA) Cohort 7.