Nedbank Technology - Infrastructure

Nedbank is one of South Africa’s major banks with large-scale technology estates and complex infrastructure requirements. The bank made the strategic decision to relocate its Disaster Recovery (DR) site to a new specialist provider with global best-practice capability. This required the full migration of the bank’s applications, servers, networks, connectivity and hardware — all while both sites remained fully operational.

Programme & Transformation Manager

I joined the Infrastructure division in August 2018 to lead the programme responsible for relocating Nedbank’s entire Disaster Recovery environment to a new data centre provider. The programme carried a non-negotiable completion deadline and involved moving and re-establishing over 28 technical streams, spanning servers, storage, networks, applications, security components and vendor-managed systems.

Working with technical owners across every stream, I coordinated dependency mapping, hardware assessments, migration planning and vendor engagement. I also partnered with the relocation provider responsible for the physical movement of equipment, ensuring every device, cable and system was accounted for and sequenced correctly.

The programme required detailed planning of connectivity lines, network design, SAN and Hitachi Vantara storage migrations, and mainframe movement, much of which had to occur during weekend change windows at 30-minute intervals to minimise operational risk.

I managed extensive risk mitigation, including the breakdown of lift equipment at the original site, power outages, and civil unrest in Johannesburg’s CBD which required armed protection for staff and hardware in transit. As the single point of contact for the entire programme, I coordinated all escalations, concerns and business stakeholder communications.

With over 100 technical specialists, 5 Project Managers, 10 vendors and multiple security/operations leads involved, delivery required intense coordination. Working 18-hour days across 6-day weeks, the team successfully completed the programme on time, within budget, and with only two incidents logged — both mitigated without customer impact.

I maintained weekly reporting on budget status, risks, issues, progress and stream performance to senior leadership, ensuring complete transparency across the programme lifecycle.

To ensure long-term stability, I authored a full BAU and handover playbook, enabling operational teams to manage the estate independently after programme completion.