Your team

Gerard O'Hara, Managing Partner and founder of 451 Consulting

Gerard O'Hara is a career management consultant. After completing his MBA he managed the General IT Consulting and Cost & Performance Management teams for Price Waterhouse Brisbane. He was later headhunted to join PA Consulting as Queensland Practice Manager for Strategy, Finance, and Technology Services. Gerard then joined SuncorpMetway to establish an internal Management Consulting department of 48 staff to assist through the merger of Suncorp, Metway, and QIDC. Gerard has conducted over 250 hours of lectures to MBA students at University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology, and has been a speaker at over 20 Conferences on topics ranging from Benchmarking, eCommerce, Change Management, Benefits Realisation, Cultural Change and Investment Management.

Mark Hocknell, Associate Director

Mark holds an MBA and is a business consultant with more than 20 years executive management experience with large corporations and small-to-medium sized businesses.  Mark specialises in strategy development, execution and marketing, business planning, performance improvement and performance measurement. For the last five years Mark has been a successful practitioner in Sales Management and Customer Relationship Management (CRM), he has developed and delivers courses for these subjects in the MBA program at the Brisbane Graduate School of Business (QUT).  Mark led the Suncorp CRM initiatives, where he created, developed and implemented, change and technology initiatives to support corporate sales strategies and establish Suncorp with the highest cross-selling rate and the highest customer retention rate of the major financial services groups in Australia.  During this time Mark developed expert skills in change and project management, along with the strategic use of IT to achieve business goals.  Prior to this, Mark was the Manager of a 600-seat Call Centre and a Regional Manager with one of Australia's largest financial institutions.  Mark has extensive speaking experience on CRM and Sales Management in Australia and South East Asia. 

Richard Ponsonby, Associate Director

Prior to joining 451 Consulting, Richard was an Executive Manager for IBM in the UK for six years where he helped clients set strategic business plans, change their businesses and resolve conflict. Richard is a Chartered Engineer (MIMechE, CEng) and a Chartered Management Accountant (CIMA). He was also trained by, and has worked with, behavioural psychologists to build substantial organisational change management capability. Richard has consulted to major organisations across a range of sectors (e.g. UK Government, Retail, Banking, Industrial) and focused in facilitating senior executive groups. He specialises in guiding management and delivery teams, helping to structure complex unstructured problems, dealing with risk and developing action plans to execute solutions.  The majority of Richard's consulting assignments have focused on: helping management teams change their business activities to support new strategic directions through change management and measurement. He is also experienced in strategic workforce planning.

Wayne Marchant, Associate Director

Wayne is a highly experienced ICT CIO who has strong capability in transforming ICT functions to materially raise efficiency and effectiveness yielding improved cost management, customer service and better staff satisfaction.  Wayne has held executive ICT roles for Flight Centre, Woolworths, Lend Lease and Ampol.

Wayne has retained his hands-on management style and in 2005 became a management consultant with 451 Consulting, assisting organisations to transform their ICT function, based on the application of ITIL.

Nick Griffin, Associate Director

Nick's track record demonstrates his proven leadership and well-developed people management skills, which has enabled him to bring together diverse functional groups to focus on key business objectives and customer driven outcomes. He has been able to develop and motivate multi-disciplinary teams to achieve clear objectives and targets while building strong business relationships.  

Nick's background in delivering quality project outcomes and objectives on time and within budget has been achieved by utilising my significant project/program management experience and expertise gained in over 20 years of implementing business improvement projects, major change initiatives and key strategic initiatives across all facets of business. During his time Nick has directed and managed major complex projects, cultural change programs, and the implementation of many business improvement initiatives.

Bill Davis, Associate Director

Bill is a management consultant with a specialisation in group facilitation and leadership capability development. Bill has an extraordinary depth of experience spanning the defence force, large corporations and international SME's. Following a 13 year career in the Army, in a succession of line and corporate management roles, Bill pursued academic and commercial interests.

His primary focus since has been in the Human Resources field although in recent years he has been working in start up companies as CEO/COO. He has extensive involvement in organisation change and transformation and continues to work in this field with small and large organisations that are attempting to achieve greater market alignment. Part of this transformation experience is a growing network of senior managers and executives that he coaches.

Bryan Quant, Associate Director

Bryan is a business consultant with more than 20 years ICT executive management experience within a diverse range of larger and small-to-medium size organisations. Bryan's commitment to establishing effective, valued business partnerships has been a key foundation for achieving substantial reform and business transformation.

In the dual role of Strategy Leader and ICT Services Manager for a range of organisations, Bryan has been responsible for transformation of key business processes, information systems and services to deliver sustained cultural change for both business and technology environments.

He has extensive experience across a range of business models servicing a variety of industry types in both government and commercial sectors. Bryan has an established track record of building and sustaining high performance management teams and ICT service delivery organisations.

Lynn Dudgeon, Associate Director

Lynn has a Juris Doctor in Law from the University of Michigan combined with 15 years experience in line management, project management, resource management and practicing law.

Lynn has worked in a variety of organisations including Goldman, Sachs & Co.  (New York) as Vice President, the Federal Government and Suncorp before joining 451 Consulting in 2007.

She brings extensive experience in developing and implementing strategy; evaluation and diagnosis of the operational efficiency of organisations; managing complex projects and negotiations; developing resourcing models; and implementing performance improvement programs.

Kerry Fortescue, Principal Consultant

Kerry is an energetic and results-focused organisational change professional with well-rounded business experience and qualifications in corporate, operational and change management arenas. From a solid chartered accounting platform with Deloitte, Kerry has broadened and strenghtened her professional capabilities encompassing project management, business improvement and organisational change management.

Her recent experience is rich with diverse and challenging change management acheivements with organisations including Brisbane City Council, Commerce Queensland, Darling Downs Foods Limited and Golden Casket Lottery Corporation Limited. Kerry has completed a Masters of Business Administation (General Management) and holds professional memberships with the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia, the Australian Institute of Company Directors and Chartered Secretaries Australia.

Ian Peter, Principal Consultant

Ian works in the areas of strategy, policy, business analysis and project management, with a proud history of successfully managing change in government, large and medium sized organisations, and of innovative approaches to business transformation across a wide range of areas including information technology management, human resource management, and communications management.

Internet technology related projects are a specialty. Ian Peter has pursued a number of Internet technology based initiatives and managed projects across information management, content management and knowledge management for a range of clients. He has also provided specialist services in Internet and Intranet site establishment, and advised successive federal governments in Australia and international organisations on Internet and telecommunications issues.

Debra Mitterer, Principal Consultant

Debra has a strong State Government and Financial Services industry background with 20+ years professional business experience in a number of strategic roles and diverse industries.  Debra's significant Program and Project Management experience , coupled with his extensive line management experience, provides a strong foundation for re-positioning an PMO, analysing business performance, IT solutions, and developing business strategies for the e-Business world.

Cathie Cross, Corporate Services Manager

Prior to joining 451 Consulting in 2006, Cathie held a number of key roles for organisations including Office Manager, Project Manager, Recruitment Manager and Executive and Administrative Support. Cathie holds Diploma's in Business Management and in Business Administration.

Cathie manages the 451 Financial and Administration activities including Human Resources, Contracts, ICT and Consulting Support.

Trevor Lynn, Principal Consultant

Trevor is a true multi-disciplinary management consultant with over fifteen years experience spanning Australia and the UK.  His experience ranges from project and program management to performance improvement, risk management, business re-engineering and organisational change. He provides a clear focus on the needs of businesses, developing appropriate and pragmatic interventions that maximise value whilst managing risk.

Trevor draws upon deep organisational change management skills to quickly build a strong rapport with staff, managers, and executives to build a positive groundswell for change.   He specialises in Programme and Project Management.

Jann Cunningham, Principal Consultant

Jann is a senior business analyst who has more than 10 years experience in the information and knowledge management domains across the legal, private and public service sectors.

Jann's experience includes Enterprise Content Management including records and document management, web content management, business process management and workflow design.  Jann has developed from best practice; benefits realisation frameworks, governance support models and a performance management framework. Jann has also developed detailed business and benefit cases for enterprise systems implementations.

Shane Knight, Principal Consultant

Shane is a senior business analyst and project manager with 25 years experience in Civil Engineering, Information Technology and Transport Operations gained working in private industry, public service and a Government Owned Corporation (GOC).

His speciality is in business analysis, stakeholder engagement, change management and project management; introducing new work practices and technologies, including Computer Aided Design and Drafting (CADD), spatial / GIS, Internet / Intranet, mobile technologies, Assets Management (AM), Document Management (DM) and Information Management (IM).

Shane has managed business areas in attaining ISO Quality Accreditation and undertaking International Customer Service Standard (ICSS) accreditation while introducing Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Along with accreditation as a Registered Project Manager (RPM) with AIPM Shane also has a strong interest and experience in coaching and mentoring in personal development and business awareness.

Francois van der Walt, Principal Consultant

Francois specialises in the implementation of Performance Measurement, Business Intelligence Systems and Statistical Data Analysis and Reporting for Businesses. He brings to every assignment a rich experience gained from working on three different continents.

During his ten years with Ernst and Young in South Africa, he was National Director of a new service-line (Data Engineering Services.) This was later deployed world-wide, when he was the leader of an International team of professionals focusing on Continuous Audit and Audit by Exception, as part of Ernst & Young's Audit Innovation Project in Cleveland, Ohio.

During the course of his career, he has consulted over a wide range of industries and companies, in both the public and private sectors. Currently, he consults to major clients in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. With his unique background he can confidently handle any assignment to satisfy his clients' need for information.

Francois is a regular conference speaker and he is highly competent at running facilitated sessions for groups of people. He is also a lecturer in Business Statistics and IT fundamentals at Christian Heritage College in Brisbane.