My name is Sara.
With over 20 years experience I bring a wealth of senior financial leadership skills and capability. I have worked across multiple disciplines ranging from business performance analysis, ministerial support, project management and strategic and operation financial leadership. My extensive breadth of roles has enabled me to have responsibility for or significant involvement in functional disciplines of asset management, property, procurement, risk management, contract negotiation, financial and business performance reporting, and governance.
I hold a Top Secret clearance and can be trusted to demonstrate the integrity and discretion required for a senior leadership role. My experience in government and in a Ministers office means I have comprehensive knowledge of legislative, legal policies, procedures, processes and codes of conduct for the operation of the Government and public sector. Moving across roles, organisations and different public sectors has required constantly learning about different business and operating environments. I have completed three full financial systems implementations so fully understand the technology capability available to ensure strong internal controls and facilitate business information and process improvement.
Over the last five years, I have operated at a Chief Financial Officer level responsible, through the Central Agencies Shared Services (CASS – hosted within Treasury), for the strategic financial management of The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, State Services Commission and NZ Treasury. This role has required me to not only fully develop and demonstrate financial leadership but also to navigate through complex internal and senior stakeholder relationships with conflicting priorities. The shared services environment required a planned approach to customer liaison and expectation management. At the inception of CASS, the finance teams were reduced by 30%. I needed to be motivational and inspiring to my team to encourage the extra effort that was needed to deliver all results while undertaking process improvements. The role continued to be extremely busy as DPMC in particular, inherited the Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management and the Canterbury Earthquake Authority. This required the application of exceptional prioritisation. In this role I constantly needed to adapt and change and to learn on the fly given the speed of the introduction of the shared services and the pace of new activities coming into the central agencies. I have been privileged to have numerous opportunities in NZ and overseas to give presentations about the achievements in this role.
Prior to my experience at NZ Treasury, I worked for 9 years at the Ministry of Justice (formerly Department for Courts) holding 5 secondment or project roles but with my most substantial position as the Business Analysis and Finance Manager for the Collections business unit. In this role I was instrumental in obtaining additional funding to substantially expand the Collections contact centre and ‘track and trace’ processing unit and in managing the financial reporting and debt collection risks subsequent to the go-live to a new Collections IT system.
I have an affable positive approach and I am able to successfully work with my staff, peers and senior leaders to solve problems in a collaborative way. I am extremely customer focused, very aware of the outcomes that my customers need to deliver and the importance of my team providing high quality and on-time support.