Kevin Carstens

Prior to joining Ankura, Kevin was a principal partner at Sharp Sky Partners in Minnesota, providing management consulting services in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. His work emphasized creative approaches to guiding clients through significant change and helping them improve their operational, security, and management structures. Kevin began his professional career as a systems analyst who leveraged his combination of management and advanced technological skills to transition into consulting.

Kevin’s professional experience includes:

• Strategic Business Definition, National Agriculture Bank: Facilitated the development of the business plans and service delivery structures for the institution as it spun-off its operational services into a separate company. The resulting business strategy included the products and services to provide and built a message platform for communicating the benefits of the reorganization to customers, the parent organization, and the internal team.
• Change Program Management, National Financial Services Company: Facilitated the transition of debit card production to a new vendor, focusing on establishing the migration process, preparing an effective change validation strategy, and revising the operational processes.
• Organizational Redefinition, National Financial Services Company: Reviewed and updated processes for a mortgage group as it centralized and consolidated quality assurance. Under Kevin’s guidance, the quality assurance responsibilities were defined and restructured. The redefinition resulted in an improved alignment of processes and the clarification of responsibilities for the organization.
• Merger Program Management, Financial Services Company: Defined and managed the integration of debit card systems during the merger of two national banks. Kevin led the re-architecting of the conversion tools and events to improve the transition process and to eliminate disruptions to customers.
• Program Management, National Insurance and Healthcare Company: Guided an initiative to centralize user-access operations across the company into one organization. Kevin defined the centralization program, built the tools and processes for the migrations, and then managed the implementation. He also provided interim management to the combined teams during the transition to the new structure.
• Release and Program Management, Financial Planning Company: Served as the overall release manager for the technology separation program for the company as it was spun off from its parent, a global financial services firm. Kevin defined the processes and implemented tools that managed them, while also overseeing the mainframe separation project.
• Project Management, National Manufacturing and Services Firm: Led efforts to upgrade handheld technologies used in the field and to consolidate the supporting infrastructure. He worked with the business lines to establish and prioritize their requirements, develop a staged build and implementation plan, and mapped out a budget and cost-allocation strategy. Kevin also led a technical team that developed and bought various components and managed communications with both technical staff and employees in the affected business units.
• Program Management, National Financial Services Company: Oversaw the combination of the security departments of two merging banks, focusing on tools, processes, and managing the team responsible for the implementation. This project encompassed overall migration planning, communications, support integration, branch department liaison services, executive communications, and technology planning, as well as close coordination with the overall merger efforts. He defined and led the conversion of more than 70 percent of the bank’s personnel to role-based access management to facilitate the conversion and to ensure consistency.