3 days ago
- Business
- Otago Daily Times
Veteran project manager keen to help
The project manager who helped lead award-winning projects such as the digitalization of New Zealand's arrival cards has swapped Wellington for the much quieter Cromwell and hopes to bring her skills to the district.
Pip Rudhall Hyett runs her own project management company, with her niche being leading projects in a people-first manner.
A lot of project managers were hard taskmasters, where just getting things done was the focus, she said.
Where she differs in her approach was focusing on making relationships and leading projects with a emphasis on people.
Mrs Rudhall Hyett originally started off as a operations manager before moving to become a project co-ordinator.
It was as a project co-ordinator where she found that she was good at the people side of the job, which involved talking and getting other people to talk with one another.
With lots of encouragement from others, she decided to take up project management six years ago.
She has worked on various government projects, which included the digitalization of the New Zealand arrival card and for the Commerce Commission.
The arrival card project was a massive programme which involved more than 150 people working together, spread out over four different agencies, with three different teams in each agency she said.
"So different legal people, different policies, different law and aligning all of that to the technology that we were building, which is now in your phone, for when you arrive in New Zealand.
"Very complex, lots of different objectives, and people that ... weren't used to working together," she said.
Mrs Rudhall Hyett led the policy, legal and privacy work streams.
The arrival card project went on to win two major national awards, the project of the year and technology project of the year at the 2025 Project Management Institute Awards.
The work was satisfying as she would help groups navigate through issues, show them how it can be done and then get them talking and trusting one another, she said.
Mrs Rudhall Hyett would then begin to step back little by little and see the relationships continue.
"It's quite emotional to actually leave them, if I'm honest. But that's the whole plan, is to leave them in a better place than when I started, I love what I do, I love the success of delivering a project."
The move to Cromwell was inspired in part by the fact that she and her family had already been vacationing there for 20 years.
Now after living in the region for six months full-time, she hoped to apply her experience to regional projects.
The more complex projects were the ones that Mrs Rudhall Hyett liked the most
"I'm always looking for a good challenge ... I like to kind of keep stretching my brain"
While she liked to work larger more complex projects, now, she was hoping to take on some smaller projects to help understand the Central Otago market better and to see what was actually needed in the region.
"You've got some pretty amazing organisations here, lots of amazing small businesses, some really large businesses as well, but also those organisations that need help you know, they're struggling to get people to talk to each other or they've got so many different stakeholders that they don't know where to start," she said.
Mrs Rudhall Hyett said the thing she enjoyed about her job the most was the people.
"It is the people. It's the people that keep me coming back to do a project every day."
