As senior manager resource category at BT Group, Nigel Shadbolt is responsible for global category strategy and UK procurement of IT services, business process outsource and agency workers for BT. Working collaboratively with HR, Shadbolt leads the procurement side of BT’s CW program, which is being rolled out across BT Group’s six key business units and to more than 30 countries.

Shadbolt recently led a cross-functional team in BT to define and develop the company’s contingent workforce sourcing strategy, which provided the building blocks of the current program. This was followed by securing executive sponsorship to implement a consistent approach companywide in the face of disparate requirements and operating practices across business units.

“It’s important to me that we recognize our achievements to date have been the result of a strong team effort between procurement and HR,” Shadbolt says. “I’m very proud to have played a key role providing direction and support to the program development and implementation.” Although it’s still early days in the rollout, when it is fully implemented, Shadbolt and his team expect the program to deliver significant benefits by transforming the company’s end-to-end sourcing of key populations of its contingent workforce.

With a background originally in project management and then commercial/contract management of some of BT’s biggest global network deals, he moved into contingent management when he took on a commercial management role for BT’s larger outsource IT and BPO contracts; this later led to a procurement role.