Neil Pumphrey

Said the following about Amritpal Brom:

“Since joining CrossCountry Trains, Amritpal has continuously delivered, consistently exceeding all expectations. Amritpal shows great determination and commitment to all projects that he is involved in, driving the project team and ensuring that every member of the team is recognised once the project has been successfully completed.

No matter how many projects are in the pipeline Amritpal will work tirelessly to deliver them, even at times managing 12 projects simultaneously to completion. His flexibility to meet the business needs knows no bounds. An instance which really stands out demonstrating Amritpal’s abilities to pick up anything and deliver, was the migration of a critical business system which was becoming unstable.

The project to migrate had started before Amritpal joined the business but was stagnant for a year. Remarkably, he managed to deliver the project in 3 months and achieved savings of nearly half a million pounds. The project was particularly challenging as the system was extremely complex with interfaces to other systems and has a user base that spans across various rail divisions of Arriva.

Amritpal managed to migrate the system seamlessly with all users commenting only on the positive benefits achieved. This project was a great success story, and one of many that have been completed this year by Amritpal.

I strongly believe Amritpal requires recognition for his work this year as he has consistently shown commitment and great dedication since joining the rail industry. As well as delivering industry first solutions he displays great leadership and poise under extreme pressure. His ability to handle pressure really helps the team around him focus on the job in hand. Amritpal also displays great customer service, and never shy’s away from finding a way to assist business users. He is very much liked within the business and has an ability to really connects with people and always takes the time to understand requirements and work with the business.

Amritpal is supportive to all around and him and relentless in delivering great results. He is never shy of rolling his sleeves up to help the business regardless of whether the task falls outside of his job description. He is a great asset to the IT function within CrossCountry.

Amritpal was tasked to deliver a upgrade of ageing fundamental network hardware within CrossCountry. The project was a huge undertaking and delivering the new solution meant bringing down the entire network access in the business. In a world where IT underpins everything, and in an industry which is 24/7 this meant that very robust planning was required to minimise disruption. In order to minimise risk to business operations

Amritpal decided to use a change window which was in the early hours of the morning. This meant that Amritpal and his team were required to be on site at unsociable hours. Amritpal prioritised restoring critical systems to allow the business to operate whilst then working on restoring the remaining applications. The team stayed on site working on the project from 12am until 3pm the following day, in what was a 15-hour marathon. The project was a huge success and Amritpal is now planning the next phases to deliver further benefits the business. Amritpal lead from the front in this project, ensuring that the business needs were at the forefront of everything that he did and working with his team right until completion.

Throughout the night various challenges presented themselves, but Amritpal effectively managed each challenge and focused his subject matter experts to ensure effective solutions were derived and the project was delivered successfully which no adverse impact to business operations. Another example of Amritpal’s great leadership, and ability to rally the team and thrive in high pressure situations was when there was a critical systems failure.

Although Amritpal was not a subject matter expert or part of the team that was dealing with the outage, he naturally helped lead the team of engineers whilst they worked on the issue. He brought calmness and poise to the highly stressful situation and worked with the business to ensure workarounds were put in place to relieve the strain on the team.

This displays Amritpal’s willingness to go above and beyond and put himself in the firing line in order to allow the team to flourish and the business needs to be met. Other projects include: Consolidation of multiple firewalls into a secure solution that follows best practice guidelines Implementation of a new high-speed internet link Delivery of an automated Delay Repay solution with BACs payment option for customers Migration of key systems to a secure data centre

Amritpal has also worked hard on designing and implementing a solid Change Management process for Arriva UK Trains ensuring that changes are made in a controlled manner and with the correct level of governance. A project manager must display great leadership, great communication, a lot of flexibility, be very consistent and have the ability to solve problems. Amritpal display’s these characteristics on a daily basis and it is difficult to fully portray his incredible project management skills in a nomination, but I am sure all who have met him, worked with him and benefited from the work Amritpal has done, will agreed that he fully deserves to be Project Manager of the Year“