about

Jeremy Marchant

Professional experience

I gained fourteen years' experience in IT, before becoming a business consultant and coach, which I have been doing for sixteen years.

Having graduated with an honours degree in mathematics from the University of Kent, I spent five years with BT in the seventies, working on huge billing systems and gaining a jolly good training in systems analysis.

Ten years with Marks and Spencer followed.  Seven of these were in IT, in team- and project-leading and management roles.  The high spot was as one of the two project leaders on M&S's first (pre-EPOS) instore IT system.  I learnt then, if I hadn't already grasped it, that having the system do what the client needs is paramount.  Having exhausted the possibilities within the IT division, I moved to Finance and became an IT auditor which was a hugely beneficial preparatory experience for my subsequent consultancy work.

I joined Catalyst Systems in 1989, a small IT consultancy SME founded by one of my managers in M&S.  I worked with an extraordinary lineup of bluechip clients, including the BBC, Harrods, Littlewoods, a number of utilities including Scottish Power, not forgetting Normans Superwarehouses.  In that time I worked with an iterative prototyping methodology which was designed to enable clients to move from a position of knowing what they wanted to knowing what they (or, better, their business) needed.  I still believe that getting that right, at the start of a project, is essential if the final system is going to meet the client's needs.  Plenty of contemporary high visibility system implementations appear to attest to that.

Catalyst turned out not to be able to weather the storm of the early nineties' recession and I moved to Admiral Management Services where I had a number of very varied consultancy assignments (with Rothmans, HP, Boots, the MoD, EWS railways, GCHQ, more utilities, and so on).  Eventually AMS was taken over by CMG, itself to be swallowed shortly after by Logica.

By this time I felt I had had enough of consultancy, but was still interested in working with businesses.  When the opportunity came in 2003 to join Shirlaws, an international coaching firm working in the SME sector, I readily took it. 

A year later, I set up my own coaching business now offering coaching services in two streams:
(a)  'whole business coaching' for SMEs
(b)  Breaking the Mould^TM change management coaching for larger businesses, corporates and the public sector.

More recently, my long term involvement with Psychology of Vision has happily coincided with the release of their VisionWorks programme The fundamentals of success, enabling me to offer
(c) training and coaching in emotional intelligence at work for any organisation. 

Jeremy Marchant Limited
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