Job Title : IT director

Organization : Thames Water

Execution and delivery against challenging deadlines has been a feature of Andy Hooper’s career, most notably in his last role on BAA’s Terminal 5 construction project at Heathrow Airport where missing milestone target dates for the deployment of telecoms, fire alarm and building control management systems was simply not an option.

At Thames Water, Hooper’s brief under the Macquarie-led consortium – which bought the utility from RWE for £8bn last year – is to work more closely with the business to implement rapid changes to make Thames Water a more customer-focused company.

Hooper’s early career was spent in the energy industry and included a spell as a demand forecaster in the National Grid Control Centre.

More recently in 2000 he was IT director for 24seven Utility Services, a ground-breaking joint-venture services company between the then London Electricity and TXU, where he established a new IT function carved out of two legacy inheritances and completed a 12-month SAP rollout at the same time.