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Garfield JK Thompson

Hello, I'm Garf

Transformation leadership for programmes that can't afford a slow start.

For more than 22 years I've led change across banking, energy, aviation, retail and manufacturing, from Vice President at Citigroup to Principal of Janus Volantis, my independent transformation practice.

My work sits where product ownership, programme delivery, data governance, SAP and Workday, and practical AI meet. I translate between the boardroom, the regulator and the delivery team, and keep all three moving in the same direction.

View CV editionsBook a call Work with me → Janus Volantis
years leading change
22+
years leading change
organisations, from Citigroup to Boeing
21
organisations, from Citigroup to Boeing
sourcing savings at Citigroup
$15M
sourcing savings at Citigroup
days invoice lead time, Cargotec
45 → 2
days invoice lead time, Cargotec
01

Zero Ramp-Up Adaptability

Nearly twenty organisations across the UK, the EU and APAC have taught me to read the politics, the data and the system landscape fast. Sponsors get momentum in week one, not an onboarding plan.

02

Cross-Border Regulatory Governance

KYC/AML, GDPR, SOX, MiFID II, Basel and Dutch employment law are design inputs in my programmes, not footnotes. Governance that satisfies regulators in London, Amsterdam and Brussels without strangling delivery.

03

Enterprise Tech Modernisation

SAP ECC to S/4HANA, Workday HCM, cloud data platforms and Copilot-era AI. I modernise the core without losing the controls, the data lineage or the people who run it.

My story

Vice President at 28. Then I got bored.

By 28 I was a Vice President at Citigroup, then America's largest bank, leading data procurement programmes that saved $15M across more than 250 vendor sourcing projects. It was the job I was supposed to want, and I was bored.

So I went independent. Consulting let me chase the hardest change problems instead of waiting for them to land on my desk, first across UK banking with RBS, Lloyds, UBS and Deutsche Bank.

Then came the move to the Netherlands, and with it the rest of Europe. Banks, an energy grid operator, an airline, retailers and manufacturers, each with a different regulator and a different reason to change, and programmes that reached across the EU and into APAC.

Today I bring that range to every engagement through Janus Volantis: the pattern recognition of nearly twenty organisations, and the patience to make change stick.

Where I've delivered

  • Delivered
  • Not yet: Americas & Africa
Where I've delivered Delivered: United Kingdom, Netherlands & Benelux, Wider EU, APAC. The Americas and Africa: not yet. Open to the right mandate.
United KingdomNetherlands & BeneluxWider EUAPAC

The Americas and Africa: not yet. Open to the right mandate.

Clients & impact

Janus Volantis | Independent Consulting & Transformation Services

Selected client assignments, grouped by client. Where I worked through a consultancy or partner, they're named too.

Ayvens (Société Générale)

via Darwin Recruitment

Leasing & mobility

HR Office Project Manager

Mastering HR operations end to end: Dutch sickness-absence management, the full employee lifecycle in Workday, and process improvements built with the team, including automating a 15–30 minute manual HR process in the Netherlands. Also took on project plans and documentation, and championed the Microsoft Copilot rollout.

STS Aviation / Boeing

Personal recommendation

Aviation

Programme Manager

Programme management in Birmingham, reporting to the Programme Director; brought in on personal recommendation.

Booking.com

Travel tech

Senior Product Manager, Data Governance Platform

Data governance on Booking.com's Collibra platform: metadata, stewardship workflows and privacy controls.

Albert Heijn (Ahold Delhaize)

Fixed-term employment

Retail

Senior Product Owner / Project Manager

Multi-cloud migration onto Azure with a 20–25% efficiency gain; the voice of stores and customers for home delivery.

Nike

via TEKsystems

Retail

Senior Technical Product Owner

Inbound shipment visibility for EMEA and the USA on AWS microservices linked to SAP S/4HANA: inventory data accuracy up 40%, cloud compute costs down 15%.

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines

via YER

Aviation

Senior Product Owner, Finance & HR Data

Finance Decision Support and the Finance Data Hub: self-service BI cut ad-hoc reporting requests by 25%; supported a pilot testing SAP S/4HANA migration for further legal entities.

bol.com

via Vibe Group

E-commerce

Senior Business Analyst

Business analysis for the Benelux's largest online retailer.

TenneT

via The Compliance Factory

Energy

Senior Product Owner

SAP S/4HANA migration (c. €1.2m budget) for a transmission system operator; regulatory reporting accuracy up around 40%, OPEX down 35% and fewer daily reporting errors.

AEG

Manufacturing

SAP Project Manager

S/4HANA implementation across warehouse and supply chain: process analysis, data migration, UAT and training.

Shell

via Wipro

Energy

Lead Data Project Manager

Unified SAP and Workday payroll data, improving payroll accuracy and efficiency by 25–40%.

ING Belgium

via Amoria Bond

Banking

Interim IT Programme Manager (IT Integrator) / Product Owner

Global KYC screening: took over a programme stuck at proof of concept, agreed an MVP release plan with the vendor and moved two squads to agile delivery.

ABN AMRO

Banking

Lead Product Owner

Centralised KYC/AML data lake that cut compliance review times by around 40%.

Cargotec / Kalmar

via Next Ventures

Industrial equipment

SAP Programme Manager

Digitalised service and finance processes: invoice lead time cut from an average of 45 days to 2, financial performance up 35%.

Cargill

Agri-commodities

SAP Project Manager

Digitalised processes and automated reporting, cutting operating costs by 20%. The roles it made redundant included my own.

Deutsche Bank

via Yacht (Randstad)

Banking

Product Development, Data & Lending

Big-data digitalisation for lending and insurance products: a real-time, cross-country, cross-entity view of total client risk.

Earlier career

Where the foundations were laid: UK banking, then my first Dutch assignments.

Citigroup

Banking

Vice President, Programme Manager, Data Procurement

250+ vendor sourcing projects delivering $15M in savings and $10M in additional revenue; vendor costs down 30% a year across 18 EMEA countries; Cash in Transit losses down 20%.

Barclays

Banking

Senior Change Manager

TUPE and people change through mergers, acquisitions and divestments, including Woolwich and Barclays Life; Cash in Transit losses in Africa down 40%.

GE / TIP Trailer Services

Fleet leasing

Lead PMO

Standalone exit from GE systems, saving $5M; securitised 35% of the asset base; negotiated and rolled out new insurance policies.

ING

via Capgemini

Banking

Interim Senior Business Analyst

My first Dutch assignment: analysis and change for one of the Netherlands' largest banks.

Lloyds Banking Group

Banking

Interim Lead Product Analyst

Separated TSB customers and accounts with no fines or customer complaints; white-label liquidity product lifted sales 25% and brought in $3M of new revenue.

RBS

Banking

Senior Project Manager

Banking change programmes in a period of heavy restructuring.

UBS

Banking

Assistant Vice President, Lean Project Manager

Traders' start-of-day data accuracy up 75%; 25 processes offshored, saving €1M.

Deutsche Bank

Banking

Senior Business Analyst

Business analysis in investment banking.

CV & Portfolio Hub

Four editions, one career.

For executive search partners and hiring teams: pick the edition that matches your mandate. Each is a two-page CV; an ATS plain-text edition is available for agency systems.

UK & Global Outside IR35

Senior Programme & Transformation Director

Programme and portfolio leadership for multi-workstream transformations in regulated environments: steering-committee and design-authority governance, vendor and budget control, and delivery that survives contact with reality.

Selected client assignments

  • STS Aviation / Boeing

    Programme Manager reporting to the Programme Director; brought in on personal recommendation.

  • Citigroup

    VP Programme Manager. Led 250+ vendor sourcing projects delivering $15M in savings and $10M in additional revenue.

  • Barclays

    Led TUPE and people change through mergers, acquisitions and divestments, including Woolwich and Barclays Life.

  • Shell · via Wipro

    Lead Data Project Manager. Unified SAP and Workday payroll, improving accuracy and efficiency by 25–40%.

  • GE / TIP Trailer Services

    Lead PMO. Securitisation and resale of leased fleet; negotiated and rolled out new insurance policies.

Agency or ATS upload? Download the ATS plain-text edition.

Insights

Thought leadership from the delivery floor.

Field notes on HR technology, AI in programme management and the occasional home-lab experiment.

HR Technology8 min read

Navigating Workday HCM & SAP S/4HANA Coexistence in Enterprise HR Strategy

Most large enterprises don't choose between Workday and SAP; they live with both. The organisations that get it right treat coexistence as an operating model, not an integration project.

Key takeaways

  • —Agree the system of record for every data object (worker, position, cost centre, payroll result) before designing a single interface.
  • —Payroll is where coexistence breaks first. Reconcile Workday to SAP payroll and finance every cycle, not at quarter-end.
  • —Govern the boundary with one design authority across both platforms, with GDPR and works-council needs built in.

Coming soon

AI & Delivery7 min read

Practical AI Workflows for Executive PMOs: Slicing Administrative Overhead in $10M+ Programs

Status reports, RAID logs, minutes and steering packs quietly consume PMO capacity that should go on decisions. Used with discipline, AI gives that time back.

Key takeaways

  • —Start with the artefacts nobody reads twice: minutes, action logs and first-draft status reports.
  • —Keep a named human owner on every AI output that reaches a steering committee.
  • —Ground the tools in your own programme data and control what leaves the tenant. Governance comes before the tool choice.

Coming soon

Home Lab10 min read

Building a Privacy-First Smart Home with Home Assistant and Local LLMs

A smart home doesn't have to report to the cloud. Home Assistant, a Raspberry Pi and a local language model deliver automation and voice control that stay inside your own four walls.

Key takeaways

  • —Favour devices and integrations that keep working when the internet doesn't.
  • —Run voice and AI locally where you can; make the cloud optional, not required.
  • —Treat it like an enterprise programme in miniature: backups, a change log and a rollback plan.

Coming soon

Meet Garf

The person behind the programmes.

Outside the steering committees I'm a tinkerer at heart. Most of what I bring to client work I first learned by building something at the kitchen table.

Smart Home Architecture

A Home Assistant Green runs the house; Raspberry Pis and local AI models do the experimenting. Privacy first, cloud optional.

Horticulture & Sustainable Gardening

Growing things slowly and sustainably: the most patient form of change management I know.

Polyglot Language Learning

English native, Dutch at a working level and climbing toward C1, with a lifelong habit of learning the language wherever work takes me.

Technical Tinkering

Self-built devices, privacy-focused Android builds and the latest AI tools, learned hands-on and then brought back to client work.

Contact

Let's talk about your programme.

Book a 30-minute introduction directly, or reach me through Janus Volantis or LinkedIn.

UK Enquiries

Manchester & London

Hybrid or remote. Outside IR35 engagements via Janus Volantis.

Book an introduction →

Book an introduction

Pick a slot that suits you. You'll receive a calendar invite with a video link.

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