Bio.Me: Project Management and Process Improvement (Quality Assurance)

My first employer out of college was a shipping company. I enrolled in their Management Trainee program shortly after finishing their internally developed course on customer service and shipping software. The program required a minimum of 3 months in each department within the company. The first department in customer service was simple enough; document the process, nothing more. I’m a strategic thinker, I could not simply do this. It did not take long for me to take note of redundancies, make recommendations to increase efficiency, or gain employees’ trust to solicit insight. After successfully documenting improved procedures for the department, the company sought to achieve this throughout. 

Project managers, policy writers, customer service trainers, business analysts and much more were hired to achieve a firmly documented procedural guide. I worked side-by-side with the business analyst at the heart of every project, providing feedback to the policy writers or taking over as project manager in severe cases. I thrived in this environment. This was probably the most fun I had working at any company in my career. Being a part of a team that helped improve the processes and procedures meant reduced costs, less burden to staff, better service to the client and so on. Sitting in massive board meetings as a recent graduate with the leadership team and C suite of the company was thrilling for me at such a young age.

I wanted to continue this path and returned to school for a master’s in Finance. I also self-studied and read up on Lean Six Sigma, Project Management Institute and Quality Assurance. Unfortunately, after eleven (11) years of a blissful career, I did not survive the third (3rd) round of layoffs. I returned to the Turks and Caicos, where I obtained employment within a month of searching at a Bank as an analyst. Looking at the career progression and various options, understudying many positions, I noticed that the responsibilities of the Anti-Money Laundering Compliance Manager mimicked so much of what I loved working in process improvement projects.

It was love at first sight. 

I treated my financial crime and anti-money laundering compliance journey as a specialised project manager.