Alan Cummings

About Alan Cummings

A seasoned Royal Navy officer (Joined Sep 84) and RYA Yachtmaster (Ocean)/Cruising Instructor, with considerable senior leadership, sea going, maritime operations, SAR and aviation experience, including Command, I have operated across the spectrum of operations from tactical to strategic. Possessing excellent communications skills, I have contributed significantly to policy development and implementation, run multi million pound budgets, led and mentored numerous teams and have been responsible for leading organisational change and managing uncertainty. A strategic thinker, alive to the ‘bigger picture’, but also very much at home in the detail. Well versed in defence and international relations, my recent career has seen me serve at the highest strategy and policy levels, both in the Ministry of Defence and the British Embassy in Washington, DC, where maintaining a strong network to bear influence was essential for success. Likewise, these posts also required considerable diplomacy, patience, initiative and an ability to work unsupervised with the broadest of guidelines but most stringent of budgets; a brief I am entirely comfortable with.Completing a full time MBA at Cranfield University in Sep 2014, my subsequent posting to the MoD saw me responsible for ensuring the coherence of a £7bn portfolio of programmes, ensuring they adhered to time, cost and performance standards. Utilising many of the ‘business school’ tools, a considerable part of the job entailed driving risk out of the programme.Latterly, I have been Head of Operations in a maritime headquarters, accountable for the safe delivery of a complex operational programme involving air, surface and subsurface assets in the highly congested sea areas along the South Coast of England, cooperating closely with stakeholders. As a trustee for the Wetwheels Foundation, I am now using my deep maritime and management experience to deliver effect in the 3rd sector.

Experience

1. Plans and Policy Deterrence Team Lead

   NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT)

   Aug 2023 — Present · Norfolk, VA, US

Education

• UK Civil Service Learning

  Managing Successful Programmes Practitioner

• Fareham Technical College

  STEM

  1982 — 1984

• Cranfield University

  Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.)

  2013 — 2014

• Royal Yachting Association - UKSA

  RYA Cruising Instructor

• U.S. Naval War College

  Diploma

  1999 — 2000

• HQ ACT

  PRINCE 2, Project Management