Chris Southwell

Chris Southwell is a partner at The Berkeley Partnership in the UK. Chris has significant project management experience with global IT and business change initiatives, and has been with the company since 2012. In their previous role as consultant, they conducted an independent review of the lessons that have been gathered from 2 country implementations, discussed these ideas with key stakeholders to confirm the criticality of issues to be addressed and/or opportunities to be targeted, and developed an overall model for the fix forward phase, setting out areas where new capability will be required. Chris also created a high level view of the costs and benefits of investing in this area to help articulate ‘a strong case for action’, and ensured central leadership teams are engaged throughout the exercise and support its conclusions. As business change lead for an international SAP HR & payroll transition programme for a global media company, they implemented a global HR operations function (enabled by SAP), established new payrolls and benefits plans, set up new legal entities, and transition 2500+ employees in 32 countries to embed these services. Chris managed the international change management team through four releases, created the training curriculum design, managed the build of 80+ hours of content / 160 products and delivery to the international HR organisation, and executed the end to end communication plan in benefits, HR operations, payroll, and go live communications across 8 languages within the business. This ensured a green rating for people readiness from all the business areas to enable all countries to go live on time within a six month period.

Chris Southwell has a degree in marketing and behaviour from Lancaster University and a course in executive finance from the London Business School. Chris also attended Morgan Academy Dundee.

Chris Southwell reports to Alasdair McGregor, Partner, UK. Chris Southwell works with Andrew Batchelor - Consultant, UK, Kirsty Nethersell - Partner, UK, and Thenuhan Premaruban - Consultant, UK.