Sailing high with DAV

You don't get awarded Delivery Inner Circle winner and three times Sales Inner Circle winner without having achieved something pretty special. Russell Clifford received these extraordinary accolades on four separate occasions during his long career with EDS, demonstrating the value that he delivered to this organisation and the high esteem he was held in by his colleagues.

We are delighted that Russell has recently joined the DAV team as a Programme Director. He brings with him a wealth of experience as a senior professional, skilled at leading teams in designing and executing innovative solutions to successfully deliver large scale, IT enabled, business transformation programmes.

Russell strongly believes that a creative, pragmatic and commercial outlook contributes to an ability to turn around underperforming operations as well as delivering service improvements and cost savings through innovation. Russell is adept at building cross-discipline multi-cultural virtual teams through strong leadership and motivational coaching skills that ensure the right outcomes are achieved.

Prior to joining DAV, Russell was a Client Delivery Executive for Major Accounts at EDS. Russell was a member of the UK management team, accountable for the delivery of multi-million pound contracts and projects using on, near and off-shore resources. He was responsible for client relationships at all levels, delivery of all contractual obligations, achievement of SLAs and customer satisfaction targets, design and implementation of client solutions, delivery of EDS' financial targets and leadership of the EDS team.

Major projects that Russell worked on during his time with EDS included: a significant international project for GMACFS, where Russell had budget responsibility in excess of £50 million per annum. This three-year programme of work involved delivering business-critical global applications and infrastructure across many geographic boundaries and involved delivering a new EMEA service environment for the organisation. Other projects included a much needed MOD overhaul of legacy systems, and a major desktop and infrastructure deployment programme for BP involving over 20,000 users, where Russell and his team reduced BP's desktop infrastructure costs by 30%. And finally Rolls Royce, where Russell was responsible for the end-to-end delivery of desktop, mainframe and business critical ERP-SAP systems. Other significant programmes of work included the Employment Service where Russell led a change programme to TUPE transfer 300 ex-civil servants, and the Benefits Agency where he led the successful transition of 1000 civil servants into EDS as part of the ITSA (BA) outsourcing.

Prior to joining EDS, Russell held various data centre management roles, starting his career in IT with Unilever Computer Services Ltd back in 1980. In his spare time, Russell enjoys cooking and entertaining. He has a strong appetite for travel and sports interests include sailing, skiing and rugby. Watch this space; we expect Russell will be sailing high with DAV in a relatively short period of time. To read more about DAV's people and our unique approach, The DAV Way, please click on the adjacent link.