95+ years of transformation delivery between us.
We built Optume because we kept seeing the same thing fail. Not in one industry, or one country, but across sectors and continents over four decades. The failure was not strategic. It was structural: transformation programmes that were designed to deliver a system and assumed the organisation would change around it. We come from different corners of the world. Our experience spans four continents and every major sector. That breadth is not background detail. It is why we recognise patterns that organisations inside a single market often cannot see. The bios below do not list credentials. They explain what each of us believes, what we have learned, and why we built this.
Angela Albiston
Angela Albiston built Optume because she kept arriving at the same point in transformation programmes and finding the same thing missing: an honest answer to whether the organisation could actually deliver what it had committed to. She had that conversation in boardrooms in London, Auckland and New York. The answer was almost always the same, and it was almost never the one in the business case.
She is the intellectual originator of the Optume methodology. The Transformation Responsibility Model and the six Invisible Control Engines were not assembled from frameworks. They were built from direct experience of watching organisations fail to deliver transformations they were never honestly capable of delivering, and from asking what a better model would look like.
Her career is defined by the programmes others could not finish.
While leading a major ERP recovery in UK retail, she delivered on time, to a revised budget, with expanded scope including an international launch. While leading a US operational improvement programme in financial services, she brought a US$22m OPEX initiative back on track and generated US$3.5m in Year 1 gross benefits. Additionally, her financial control methodology was adopted across a global professional services organisation, and her Finance Function redesign in banking generated over £2m in combined staff and systems savings.
Lawrence Spence
Lawrence Spence co-founded Optume because he kept watching the same thing happen. A programme would deliver. A system would go live. A new operating model would be signed off by the board. And then, six or twelve months later, the performance improvement would not be there. Not because the strategy was wrong. Not because the system failed. But because nobody had done the work of actually changing how people behaved.
He believes that is a structural failure in how transformation is designed. Change management is routinely treated as a communications workstream or a final-phase activity. He has spent 25 years proving that is wrong, in the environments where it matters most: unionised workforces, safety-critical operations, heavily regulated sectors, organisations where people have seen transformation programmes come and go and have learned not to trust them.
He started his career writing code. That is an unusual foundation for a change leader, and it is the most important thing to understand about how he works. He has never lost the systems thinker's instinct for root cause, and he has never confused the technical delivery of a programme with the human change required to make it stick.
His experience spans the UK, Ireland, North America and the Middle East. While leading workforce transformation at a major international airport group, he has been responsible for change across more than 5,000 operational colleagues on three sites, embedding AI-driven workforce management in a complex employment relations environment. While working in professional services, he established a managed services division, built an integration framework supporting 15 global acquisitions, and delivered an eight-figure margin improvement alongside a significant reduction in attrition. Additionally, in financial services, he embedded a PMO framework that reduced delivery costs by 15% across a substantial annual project portfolio.
Martin Barker
Martin Barker trained as a Chartered Accountant before becoming a financial systems architect. That sequence matters. Most ERP architects understand the delivery consequences of a systems decision. Martin understands the financial consequences, and they are different. When ERP implementations go wrong, the damage is almost always financial before it becomes operational. He has seen that from both sides of the table.
He co-founded Optume because he had spent too long watching organisations commission ERP programmes without first being honest about whether their operating model, their data governance, and their finance function were capable of sustaining what the system required. The system goes live. The organisation has not changed. The benefits disappear. He had seen it in Dublin, in London, in New York, across financial services, media and professional services. The pattern was always structural, never incidental.
While leading financial systems transformation in a multi-entity media group, he architected and delivered a complex ERP consolidation automating intercompany processes and materially reducing month-end close timelines. While operating on a major regulatory transformation programme in insurance, he worked across financial systems architecture under significant compliance pressure at scale. Additionally, he managed financial architecture across one of the largest asset management portfolios in the UK market.
He has also been the person called in when ERP programmes are in serious trouble: restoring delivery trajectory and stakeholder confidence in distressed situations is a specialism, not an afterthought.
He has also been the person called in when ERP programmes are in serious trouble — at a property and professional services firm, a technology scale-up, and others — restoring delivery trajectory and stakeholder confidence in distressed situations.
Callum MacAllister
Callum MacAllister advises boards and executive teams on complex change, helping organisations convert digital, data and AI initiatives into measurable business outcomes. As co-founder of Optume, he brings a distinctive combination of technical depth, transformation leadership and regulatory insight to organisations navigating growth, disruption and rising governance demands.
He believes governance should be designed into the architecture of change from the outset, not added later as control overhead. That belief was formed over a career spanning the UK, North America, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, across industries where the cost of governance failure is not a budget line but an operational or regulatory consequence.
Writing code since 1990, he has retained the technical credibility to operate from architecture and data through to executive decision-making and board governance. That depth underpins his ability to shape transformation that is not only strategically sound, but executable in practice. His career includes several industry firsts spanning decades, in addition to delivering operational transformation in a technology services business and serving as Board Advisor for Data and Analytics to a major US medical services provider.
While leading a technology services transformation, he improved first-time fix rates to above 75%, reduced defect rates from one-in-three to one-in-eight, achieved near-zero staff turnover and moved Net Promoter Score from negative to positive across the organisation. He works across AI governance, digital transformation, optimisation, compliance and operating model design, helping leaders make better decisions and embed governance in ways that support innovation rather than constrain it.
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