Emma Somers
Change Consultant
Emma is a respected leader with a passion for helping individuals and teams make positive and lasting change to maximise performance and improve workplace cultures.
Emma has over 15 years’ experience in managing and leading the people and change work streams for projects and programmes in the rail industry. She has seen what happens when there isn’t enough focus on the people impacted by change. When teams get left behind or change is done to them. The change doesn’t stick, engagement drops, and the benefits never materialize. Emma made it her job (and the job of a whole team) to put people at the heart of change and challenge the traditional approaches to project delivery in the rail industry. With a team of like-minded change agents, she pioneered a new and different way to managing change across the rail industry and embedded people-centred approaches to many of our national and strategic projects and programmes.
Experience:
Rail Operations
Actively supported the National Operations Strategy to introduce Traffic Management technology into GB Rail: Managed the development, validation and industry sign-off of the original concept of operations for Traffic Management (TM), which has been accepted by the Trades Unions as the blueprint for TM. Managed a team of track and train operators at 3 model offices to test the functionality and useability of 3 prototype TM systems and trial the new roles and processes in the Concept of Operations. Published the Traffic Management Lessons Learned report, outlining the key learnings and considerations for TM schemes over the duration of the project.
During her time at Network Rail, Emma led Trades Union engagement forums for Operations and Maintenance to support meaningful, two-way dialogue with TSSA and RMT ahead of formal consultation.
Change, Projects & Engineering Management
Emma has over 15 years’ experience in managing and leading the people and change work streams for projects and programmes in the rail industry. She has held various leadership roles in change management, including Head of Business Change for the Digital Railway Programme and Head of Change for a £1.2bn portfolio of national, operational programmes. She set the change strategy and standardised and integrated people-centred change approaches to build awareness and buy-in for change; positively manage change resistance and the impact of change; plan for operational readiness and increase adoption of new technology and ways of working.
In 2020 Emma established a centre of excellence for change, an internal practice providing change management leadership, services and best practice tools and approaches to set rail projects and programmes up for success. This followed the earlier success of her team’s work producing and implementation the Rail Change Guide, a change framework with best practice tools, templates and guidance to standardise and enhance how the rail sector manages change. Their core service was designing and delivering tailored change strategies on a range of projects and programmes at different stages of the Lifecyle. Client delivery work included partnering the regional leadership team in East Anglia to initiate, design and implement a new operating model for operational teams. Also, delivering tailored engagement activity with frontline teams following the introduction of new operational systems, resulting in significant increase in sustained adoption amongst users.
Leading the internal change practice at Network Rail and, more recently, at Turner & Townsend, Emma was responsible for writing and managing bids and proposals for change services. She has also evaluated a number of supplier bids over the years and in 2021 led the specification and evaluation for a new procurement framework for change services at Network Rail, for which she was the client lead.
Rail Training
Emma worked in the Professional Development & Training function at Network Rail between 2010 and 2013 and is familiar with the ADDIE model due to her time project managing the design and development of technical training materials.
Emma is passionate about supporting the development of leaders and designed and implemented a development programme for band 2 leaders within a major rail programme to improve the delivery of programme outcomes through effective leadership.
Emma uses her skills, knowledge and training in change management to develop capability in change management principles and people-centred change approaches to successfully deliver project outcomes through briefings, knowledge share sessions and mentoring.
