Marion Thomas and Sarah Walton

Marion and Sarah are both ‘hands on’ project/programme managers who also run transformational training for project people who want to enhance their leadership and people skills. Since the early 90’s both Marion and Sarah have been working as freelance contractors across a huge variety of industry sectors and projects ranging from business re-engineering to system implementation, regulatory change, new product development, cost management/reduction and business efficiency.

This variety gave them the perfect opportunity to observe what makes a project really successful and the impact good leadership and people skills has in engaging teams to ‘get things done.’ They both invested in their own personal development in these areas and brought those skills into their delivery work. One senior sponsor noted that they ‘seem to get 20% more from their teams,’ and so they realised that their approach to project leadership was certainly working. As they continued to encounter failing projects and programmes and overly stretched project teams they decided they could really help their fellow project people through sharing what they had learnt during their careers.  And so ‘Extraordinary Project Management’ was born and Sarah and Marion now balance project delivery with running training programmes to help good project people to stretch into becoming great or ‘Extraordinary’ project managers. Empowering yourself first and then your colleagues and sponsors is at the heart of our programme – it’s like being on a plane put your own oxygen mask on first then you can empower others and can also be empowered.

Presentation Synopsis

The adage that programmes don’t GO wrong, they START wrong is unpacked by Marion and Sarah, both Chartered Project Professionals with over 30 years’ “hands-on” experience.  They are frequently called in to rescue projects or programmes that are already ‘in flight’ where even though all the correct documentation is in place, progress is painfully slow and the sponsor is nervous.  What is the extra magic you need to make sure your programmes don’t falter and end up in recovery?