Penny Pullan

My background includes…

…a BA in engineering followed by a PhD in nanotechnology at Cambridge. I’m also a chartered engineer with several other professional qualifications in the fields of project management and facilitation. As soon as I moved into industry, I began to enjoy the experience of working in teams. (This also helped to confirm that the individually competitive world of academic research was no longer for me!) As a consultant for Logica I got to work on some very interesting things, like playing with neural networks to predict the stock market and developing first-generation websites. In my next role with Astra Zeneca pharmaceuticals I created a programme that reduced a full day’s pharmaceutical testing work to twenty minutes. After that I spent some ten years with the IT arm of Mars, where my varied responsibilities included – among other things – production planning for petfoods across Europe and running an international consortium-led project to address child-labour issues in West Africa.

What I’m particularly interested in is…

… what really makes projects work successfully. (This is a question that’s stayed with me right from the early stages of my career, when I happened to join a team of technically able people who had already been working on a key project for two years but had effectively been going round in circles!) As my own career started to develop, the focus quickly shifted from purely technical issues as I began to realise the importance of the people factor. Half way through my time at Mars, I had the opportunity to join an international consulting team working on effective business change. This gave me the chance to refine my concept of ‘what makes projects work’ by getting involved in lots of facilitation work, running workshops, and helping to clarify people’s project vision. It also gave me the opportunity to further develop my own skills in identifying organisational needs and devising effective ways to improve projects, processes and systems.

When I’m not working I like to…

…go sailing. It’s something I’m very keen on, and I’m beginning to introduce my two small children to it as well. Living in land-locked Leicestershire, it tends to be the muddy east coast that we sail from – although this has the big advantage that, if you hit anything, it’s usually mud.

Something you’d never guess about me is…

…I once crewed the boat that came last in the Tall Ships Race! However this was the year that a severe hurricane decimated the event, with most entrants pulling out – so we did get presented with a cup for endurance! And I also happen to own a plot of bush – currently infested by millions of mosquitoes and 100-foot native trees – on an island off Auckland in New Zealand.