Museveni nominee for top NOC job is a decorated global executive

May 27, 2016 in Business, Companies, Energy, Hydrocarbons by Editor

KAMPALA, MAY 27 – Dr. Josephine Wapakabulo who has been tapped to head the National Oil Company is an accomplished high flyer whose credentials include serving in executive positions in western blue-chip corporations and international charities.

256BN broke the news of Ms. Wapakabulo’s ascendance yesterday reporting that she had among others places worked for British luxury car maker Rolls Royce. Information coming into our possession however indicates that she worked with the aerospace division of the British engineering house which develops power and propulsion systems for the aerospace, marine and energy sectors. Here she was part of an organization with a headcount of 54,000 employees and $14 billion in annual turnover in 2014.

Her career with Rolls Royce where she worked as a Business Process and Information Engineering Specialist began in 2006 where she was hired to manage a cross-functional Global Team to implement change management features of a global design and manufacturing improvement programme. On completion, the initiative delivered over £40million worth of benefits across the company’s Civil, Defence Aerospace, Energy and Marine divisions.

Back then, Rolls Royce’s energy sector was worth $1billion supplying aero-derivative gas turbines for oil and gas applications particularly for pipeline compression projects, power generation and civil nuclear applications. She coordinated the investment portfolio process and negotiated with IT directors across the civil aerospace, defence, energy and Marine divisions to reduce the initial IT investment request by 50 percent to better align with the overall IT strategy and save costs.

She also led the investment acquisition process for a global Business Process Management and Enterprise Architecture Management tool, dealing with over 20 external vendors. She has led a team across government, business and universities to successfully deliver a section of the £3.9 million UK Department of Trade & Industry funded research project on innovative IT optimisation techniques.

Josephine also claims credit for creating a strategy to exploit a modelling and simulation technology called Intelligent Agents and persuading staff at different levels of the business up to Rolls-Royce Board Directors of the benefits of Intelligent Agents, which resulted in funding for a successful pilot project.

In 2010, Josephine was transferred to Rolls Royce’s German subsidiary where she worked as a Quality and Improvement Executive. The German division employed 12,000 people, worked with 650 suppliers and generated $3 billion in revenues annually.

Here she led development and communication planning for an updated Civil Small and Medium Engine (CSME) Sector strategy using the balanced scorecard approach focusing on four perspectives  -Financial, Customer, Business Processes, Learning & Growth.  She also led all quality-related negotiations and working practice agreements for the USD$1.5billion sale of Rolls-Royce equity and shares in the V2500 programme to Pratt & Whitney.  The V2500 engine was the product of a joint venture with Pratt and Whitney that today powers a fleet of more than 2500 Airbus A320 family aircraft.

After her career with Rolls Royce, Josephine was hired as Chief Operating Officer for the Walk Free Foundation, an Australian non-profit focused on stopping modern slavery and human trafficking.  The job involved high level diplomatic lobbying  that saw her  successfully mobilise 20 diplomatic missions at the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva to launch the Global Fund to End Slavery that resulted in agreement for an information session with over 150 States at the November 2014 Governing Body of the ILO.

Earlier, between 2002 and 2006, Josephine worked as Research Associate with LSC Group Consulting in the UK. The outfit specialized in the defence and energy markets  and employed 250 people.

While here, she led a project co-sponsored by Loughborough University that addressed the factors critical to the successful creation and adoption of data-exchange standards and knowledge management technologies to optimise performance of the UK Ministry of Defence Logistics Sector and Oil & Gas companies.

One of the standards analysed during the project was ISO 15926-2: Integration of life-cycle data for oil and gas production facilities, which involved meetings at SHELL headquarters in London and KBR Inc. offices in the UK.

Prior to this, she had worked as a Leadership Trainee and Community Organiser for Together Charity in Coventry, united Kingdom.

Josephine who turns 40 this December, earned her Phd in Information Science from Loughborough University  and a Global Executive MBA from INSEAD.

She is also the holder of an Msc in Information Technology with a Distinction, also from Loughborough University and a BEng Electronic & Electrical Engineering from the same college.

She is affiliated to the Chartered Engineer Institute of Engineering & Technology UK.