A question of diplomacy (and a lot of hard work)

According to UTS Master of Project Management graduate Jonathan Shinn, getting new services up and running can take hundreds of people and years of work.

As the Senior Program Director, Digital Transformation for Nokia, Shinn recently led the deployment of a new cloud network for Nokia’s client company, Three UK. It was a massive undertaking – among other things, the new network will enable faster and more efficient scale-up of services, including the rapid delivery of 5G and Internet of Things connectivity.

Shinn was responsible for coordinating Nokia’s technical teams, managing the client relationship, and generally making sure that the project kept moving forward despite constantly evolving technical specifications and emerging customer needs.

“Overwhelmingly, it’s about trying to align the people working on the program – with 500 plus people and requirements that are continually changing and delays coming through in software and technology, you need to make sure that everybody is connected up and understands what the current priorities are,” he says.

“So it was about constantly prioritising and making sure that the team worked to deliver what the customer needed.”

You can have a project that delivers on all its metrics, and still have an unhappy customer ... so it’s about managing and understanding stakeholder expectations, especially as they evolve.

Jonathan Shinn
UTS Master of Project Management Alumnus

The Three UK project was the biggest initiative Shinn has worked on to date, but it’s the latest in a long line of telecommunications projects that he’s helmed at Nokia, Ericsson and Vodafone in Australia and the UK in a career that spans more than 25 years.

In 1997, while he was with Vodafone in Sydney, Shinn enrolled in the UTS Master of Project Management. He completed the qualification while working full-time – in fact, the degree had been developed to support working professionals in precisely this way. He says the course equipped him with a fundamental understanding of project management, including three key pieces of knowledge that continue to shape his work today.

“The first concept was project initiation – the difficult thing to grasp was writing the initial project brief. Knowing what, why and how the project delivers is absolutely crucial; you must know that before you embark on delivery. That’s stayed with me ever since,” he says.

“And then the other big thing would be – and it sounds really obvious – work breakdown structures. If you have a detailed work breakdown structure, you can control cost, scope, resource, risk and business benefits. It’s the fundamental project management tool that make the biggest difference.

“On top of that, my thesis in my final year was on managing customer expectations. You can have a project that delivers on all its metrics, and still have an unhappy customer, or you have one that maybe doesn’t meet what it set out to do but you still have a happy customer, so it’s about managing and understanding stakeholder expectations, especially as they evolve.

“Those would probably be the three things that have stuck with me.”

Since finishing his course in 1999, Shinn has developed a career-long specialty in technology project delivery, in part thanks to his natural curiosity and affinity for how things work. He built his impressive technical skillset on the job, and relies heavily on that same capacity for ‘learning-by-doing’ in a sector that’s being increasingly shaken up by the digital revolution.

But, while a solid understanding of technology is important, Shinn believes good old-fashioned communication is the key to getting complex projects over the line.

“It’s really about the soft skills,” he says.

“You need a technical background, but it’s fundamental to understand your stakeholders  and what’s driving their agendas.”

The best bit, of course, is when it all comes together – when all the hundreds of people, requirements and components and the hours and hours of work all align to deliver the Big Thing that you’ve been working towards, often for years at a time.

So for Shinn, what was it like when the Three UK network finally went live?

“It was the most incredible sense of achievement to have worked on this complex program for two-and-a-half years and see it come to fruition,” he says.