Introducing the 2018 Consultants of the Year

Published On - 25th April 2018 Member News, Updates

Individual consultants from Deloitte, GE Healthcare Partners and North Highland have all been recognised as the best in their discipline at the 2018 MCA Awards. Categories included Digtial & Technology, Change Management, Performance Improvement and Strategy with an award going to the Young Consultant of the Year and an overall prize for The Consultant of the Year, sponsored by The Times.

Please join us in congratulating the 2018 Consultants of the Year.

Martin Aspeli, Deloitte – Consultant of the Year (sponsored by The Times)

Martin Aspeli, Deloitte – Digital & Technology Consultant of the Year (sponsored by Thales Cyber and Consulting)

Martin is a digital and technology consultant with over 12 years’ experience delivering innovative technology solutions for clients in banking, media and most recently the public sector.

Martin is:

  • Deloitte Digital’s Head of Engineering: Growing and running a £30m+ business with a team of 150. Martin is responsible for strategy, diversity and inclusion, recruitment, capability building, and pastoral care.
  • Deloitte UK’s leading Agile software development expert: Advancing the theory and practice of Agile delivery in a professional services context. Martin works globally to define and evolve Deloitte’s delivery methodology and associated training. He also chairs project review boards and speaks at conferences about Agile and technical leadership.
  • A senior delivery lead for complex programmes of work in the public sector, where the influence of the Government Digital Service has created an impetus to deliver better, more user-centric services to citizens.

With a passion for great teams in building great software, Martin has delivered solutions that have positively impacted the lives of millions of people. He moves fluidly between sales, planning, client and team leadership, project management, architecture, and writing software to help automate away the boring parts of his job.

Martin is a cerebral, but highly animated consultant. His quest for quality and his application of the universal principles underpinning modern digital delivery is infectious to his colleagues and clients alike, in a sales pitch as much as in the challenging times of a project.

Elisabeth Coates, North Highland – Change Management Consultant of the Year (sponsored by Change Management Institute)

Elisabeth leads the People and Change practice at North Highland UK, as well as advising her clients and delivering on large transformation programmes. Her particular strengths lie in leading and building capability within blended teams to deliver goals and problem solve together so that greater impact can be achieved for her clients.
 
Elisabeth has delivered real impacts for her clients, including:
 
• Working with a rapidly growing online Retailer to transform their Retail function, specifically how they plan, buy and trade with an increasingly global focus
• Shaping the target operating model for change management as part of a complex transformation for a leading telecommunications provider
• Delivering a large-scale (circa 20,000 people) technology-led behaviour change programme to a disparate workforce at a top 6 energy provider
• Mobilising and shaping the change management required to successfully deliver a global HR transformation in a post-merger environment
 
She has also further advanced the People and Change practice she runs, through:
 
• Launching new capability development initiatives including formal learning, bitesize knowledge sharing, curriculum creation and mentoring programmes
• Developing a programme of thought leadership pieces to both stretch her Consultants’ thinking and tap into clients’ challenges
• Creating a community that people want to be part of, attracting some of the best talent from across the organisation

Jason Coke, GE Healthcare Partners – Performance Improvement Consultant of the Year

Jason is an experienced consulting leader in GE Healthcare Finnamore. He led two separate, 12 month transformation projects, at Ministerial level, in the Saudi Arabian healthcare system, serving a population of 32 million. 

The first year (2015-2016) involved transformation across 33 hospitals and the second year (2016-2017) covered an expanded transformation scope across 70 hospitals. More than 1,000 hospital staff were involved.

Each individual hospital transformation included door-to door-activities, delivering 600 focused improvements supported by the team Jason led in patient experience, achieving £300m of efficiency savings, which is a ROI of 40:1.

Jason has passion for focusing on “what matters most” and eliminates unnecessary work, optimising the value added. His rigour and attention to detail made it possible to organise, track and report the success of this nationwide, gaining ministerial level recognition for engagement of hospital and government leaders. 

Jason’s creativity and imagination pioneered the use of social media (WhatsApp) to organise many of the programme communications – highly applicable in Saudi Arabia, where email adoption with the client is around 13%. He also trials other apps and technologies to optimise efficiencies in communications and reporting.  

Jason continues his professional development and that of his colleagues and clients, desiring to build up the next generation of management consultants. He regularly offers them group and individual coaching sessions on relevant topics. In the context of both training others, and dealing with culturally diverse clients in Saudi Arabia, it has been noted on multiple occasions that “Jason is the most patient person I know”.

 Rachael Holtzberg, Deloitte – Strategy Consultant of the Year

Rachael is a senior manager in Monitor Deloitte’s Digital Strategy practice. She is passionate about helping companies in traditional businesses to create and capture new sources of value and uses her energy and authenticity to excite clients about the potential to change the way they do business. Rachael believes in making strategy consulting more real, shortening the time to see results and getting quickly into the market to test the assumptions that underpin strategic choices. 

Using her experience from innovation and growth consulting, Rachael created the Deloitte GrowthLabs proposition: an approach for helping corporates turn their strategic choices into actionable businesses and propositions. This is now a tool that Deloitte uses to help move its clients into the digital era, ensuring that their strategies step off the paper and lead quickly to executable ventures.

Rachael’s approach blends deep strategic capability with practicality. Her clients are often impressed with her pragmatism and responsiveness when addressing complex problems and she has been known to build a prototype in a day to provide evidence in addressing a major strategic unknown. Rachael runs a weekly GrowthLabs working group to encourage her colleagues to bring innovation and lean start up techniques into their work.

Rachael is relentlessly focused on creating new value, and treats every client challenge as if it were her own business. She has a contagious passion for consulting, and insists on having fun every day, saying, ‘the best days are the ones when we laugh the most.’

Sawood Pearce, Deloitte – Young Consultant of the Year (sponsored by Vendigital)

Sawood is a Manager in Deloitte Digital, a digital advisory and advertising agency within Deloitte's Consulting practice.

He is the only individual in Deloitte to win two of three CEO-selected awards for impactful teamwork. This year, he combined leading the delivery of one of the firm’s most impactful client projects with leading one of Deloitte’s most active and prominent diversity and inclusion networks.

Sawood, a graphic design graduate, brings a creative skillset to professional services, supporting Deloitte’s talent agenda to draw on different perspectives and encourage greater diversity of thought. His work has delivered measurable success at AstraZeneca, where he led the design and delivery of its contract management platform, known as ‘Falcon’.

Sawood also leads Deloitte’s Muslim Network (DMN) of 1,300 members. DMN delivers societal, educational and profile-building activities throughout the UK. In 2014, he received Deloitte’s Leaders in Society award for increasing the network’s regional and student engagement.

Sawood was recently appointed by Deloitte’s CEO to the firm’s new executive advisory board, Steer. Its 12 members represent 16,000 peers and are tasked with bringing fresh perspectives directly to Deloitte’s UK Executive and supporting decision-making on priority challenges.