HROTodayGlobal

HEROS The Transformer For Michael Sherdian, change is constant. By Katie Kuehner-Hebert Perhaps the most important lesson that Michael Sheridan has learned in his roles as customer, adviser, and consultant, is that changes in human resource practices—even sweeping transformations—should be considered business as usual. "Treat change as just 'this is the way it is'—you just need a process for managing it," says Sheridan, now a consultant and the interim resourcing solutions programme manager for Care UK, a provider of heath and social services. "There are lots of transactional things being done on an everyday basis, but on a higher level 'business as usual' companies should make sure that the transformational changes, as opposed to transactional activity, are planned, managed, and embraced," he says. Sheridan started his work life in information technology in 1981, after receiving a degree at the University of Liverpool, where he studied classics. For students in the United Kingdom, that means studying Latin, Greek, ancient history, and some archeology. There are some similarities between IT and these disciplines, he says. "IT was a growth area, an area of opportunity, and I was attracted to the combination of rigour and discipline, plus creativity," Sheridan says. "That's why I liked studying classics —the rigour of learning languages, but there's also creativity to exploring another historical context through literature, which is pretty inaccessible unless you learn those languages." His first professional job was as a business analyst and programmer for the U.K. telecommunications company, BT. While there, Sheridan took a computer "retraining" course at the National Computing Centre to learn more about computer software programming, as BT was transitioning its telephone service from analogue to digital. "In the 1980s, there was a huge growth in the deployment of IT solutions into business, but there were not a lot of graduates who could do it," he says. "Computer science wasn't an established discipline in the U.K., so there was a shortage of people with IT backgrounds to support this deployment in business. So it was a growth sector in the retraining of people—in fact, the government paid to retrain me for three months. It was the beginning of my IT career." In 1987, Sheridan took on the job of programme manager at ICI Pharmaceuticals (now AstraZeneca), leading the implementation of various computer systems. "I got a little bit more interested in the people aspects of change, rather than the technical aspects of change," he says. "Maybe it was the time of my life. I had become a project manager, as opposed to a technician, when managing POS [point of sale] was important, but nowhere near as interesting and challenging as managing the people aspect. So I started to develop my expertise around both IT and HR." Sheridan spent the next two decades rising within ICI, as it transitioned to Zeneca Pharmaceuticals and then AstraZeneca. He rose to senior level positions in HR, and was instrumental in the implementation of SAP HR across the Zeneca Group in the U.K. In 1998, Sheridan began to focus on the IS/IT function within the company's emerging markets in Asia Pacific (APAC), Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. A year later, he worked out of Singapore and Shanghai, directing all aspects of IS/IT within 11 countries in APAC. In 2001, Sheridan became a member of AstraZeneca's global HR leadership team. He supervised the establishment of the global HR information systems support function to provide in-house and offshored/outsourced application services, software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor management, and support for the programme management office (PMO). "What a great company that was!" Sheridan says. "It was a privilege to work with them, in different parts of the business and in different parts of the world." During his tenure there, the pharmaceuticals giant went through "wave after wave of transformation" of its HR operations, he says. "The lesson for me was that there's no right model," Sheridan says. "The type of change and model that works for one organisation might be very different for another organisation, or might be very different for the same organisation five or 10 years later." [8] HRO TODAY GLOBAL | FALL 2011

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