PA Consulting Group Strengthens US Leadership Team

PA Consulting Group has bolstered its US management team through the promotion of management group member Chris Steel and the elections of Peter Siggins, Nick Owen, and Mike Hormell to the firm's management group. The firm has also announced the hiring of former Chase Manhattan Corporation executive Gene Swanzey, pharmaceutical and biomedical veteran Blair Hough, and life sciences and healthcare specialist Dr. Roger Edwards. Chris Steel, who has been promoted to a senior membership position within PA's management group, joined PA in London in July 1999. Mr. Steel transferred to Cambridge, MA in January 2001 and leads PA's Information Systems Implementation practice in the US. He has led many significant client engagements since joining PA, including the design and planning of a major shared services initiative at a leading pharmaceutical company, the outsourcing of learning production at a leading pharmaceutical company, the development of a Physical Network Inventory strategy for a leading European telecommunications firm, and the strategic assessment of an outsourced call center for a leading pharmaceutical company. Peter Siggins has been promoted to the management group, as a member of the IT Infrastructure practice based in Washington, DC, specializing in telecommunications. He is a leader in the field of program management and has successfully delivered major strategic initiatives including complex business infrastructure developments, outsourcing programs, digital and 3G communications, product and service development initiatives, network operations, program rescue, and disaster recovery planning. Siggins recently led a team engaged by the top level of a major wireless carrier to develop and implement a single operating 'blueprint' for network engineering and operations that support subscriber growth and improvement in operational reliability and customer satisfaction. Nick Owen has been promoted to the management group, also as a member of the IT Infrastructure practice, based out of the firm's Los Angeles office. Owen joined PA in 1996 as a member of the Project Management practice in the UK. He has extensive experience in IT Strategy, Service Management and IT Program Management, with a specific focus on the Energy sector. Over the past year Owen has led a number of engagements that have supported organizations with the implementation of service management; this has included evaluating benefits realization from service management implementation, and the development of a full service catalog for a media and entertainment organization. Within the energy sector Owen has directly supported the strategy, requirements definition, selection and implementation of energy trading and risk management systems, and has supported a major California utility on the upgrade strategy for a number of their major IT systems. Mike Hormell has been promoted to the management group as a member of the Global Energy Practice, based in Denver. He has worked primarily in the areas of strategic repositioning, risk management, asset valuation and retail business launch in the energy industry for the past 12 years. Hormell has managed several complex engagements across these areas with the most recent focused on major restructuring efforts in the merchant sector. As part of these projects, he has coordinated comprehensive valuation efforts for large domestic and international portfolios. These valuation efforts have centered on the physical and contractual assets of energy merchants as well as mid stream construction projects, secured project debt analysis, and assessment of disposition / roll-off strategies. Gene Swanzey has joined the firm as a member of its management group in the firm's Financial Services practice in the US. Swanzey, who has spent most of his career as a senior executive with the Chase Manhattan Corporation, is currently Chairman of the Board of Advisors of The McLean Group, a Washington, DC based investment bank. Before joining PA, Swanzey headed his own firm, Swanzey Associates, a government relations firm he founded in June of 2000. He was also a founding Partner in Stonecroft Capital, an investment banking firm. In addition, he was a Partner and Managing Director of Global Development Partners, an economic and political advisory firm. The firm has also added Blair Hough as a member of its management group in the firm's Process and Product Engineering practice, based out of Princeton, NJ. Hough has over 25 years experience as a Business Development Manager, Project Engineer, Engineering Supervisor in a wide range of technologies from nuclear submarines, to pharmaceutical and biomedical systems and products. Prior to joining PA, Hough served as business manager for pharmaceutical and biomedical technologies with Foster-Miller, where he was responsible for helping establish the firm as a major player in the pharmaceutical and biomedical fields through the award of $50 million-plus and $16 million-plus in commercial and government contracts for subjects such as laboratory automation, new pharmaceutical instrumentation, artificial hearts, instrumented treadmills, fiber-optic pressure sensors, orthopedic bone lengthening devices, implantable compliance chambers, intravascular ultrasound catheter tracking systems and pediatric feeding system. Finally, PA has hired Dr. Roger Edwards to continue to grow the Life Sciences & Healthcare practice in the US. Edwards' experience covers more than two decades in academia, industry, and government in the diffusion of medical innovations including pharmaceutical and medical device business strategy, health economics/modeling, and outcomes research, pricing, reimbursement, telehealth/telemedicine, quality of care, molecular toxicology, robotics, academic technology transfer, complementary and alternative medicine, economic modeling of health care reforms, and homeland security. Edwards, who is based out of Cambridge, MA, holds an A.B. in Human Biology and an M.S. in Health Services Research from Stanford University, the latter based on an individually designed, multidisciplinary curriculum with coursework from the School of Medicine, School of Engineering, and School of Humanities and Sciences. He received a Sc.D. in Health Policy and Management from the Harvard School of Public Health.