Shanti Govender

Shanti has more than 10 years of professional experience in the banking and finance sector, as well as the public management and development sector. She started her career in 2000 in the private sector with Nedbank in its electronic banking division where she worked on the mapping of business processes as the basis for digitising these processes. She left Nedcor in 2002 and joined the Umsobomvu Youth Fund (UYF). The early phase of her stay primarily focused on designing and documenting service delivery processes and setting up the infrastructure through which the organisation could deliver its services. When she left in 2009, she achieved the position as Director of Operations overseeing the operational support for the delivery of organisation-wide products and services. In this position, she was responsible for ensuring that the organisation implemented the ISO quality management system and received quality management certification. This involved defining the business management system, setting quality standards, documenting the business processes and monitoring these to ensure adherence.

In early 2010, Shanti joined the Property Division of the Public Investment Corporation (PIC) as Senior Manager Operations. Here she was responsible for the legal, human resources, information technology, marketing and communications corporate services functions.

Shanti has since left the PIC to focus on pursuing her two passions – art and improving organisational operations. She says that her art has taught her much about improving operational performance in organisations. The discipline required to deconstruct a vision of possibilities and bringing it to life on canvas is similar to understanding where an organisation needs to be in the future and seeing how all the operating parts should fit to take it to that destination. “Working with Development@Work has provided me with an opportunity to demonstrate how creativity and structure can co-exist to improve organisational life”, she says.

Shanti holds a BA (Honours) Fine Arts degree obtained from Wits University. In addition, she has completed several courses in Quality Management Systems, Internal Quality Auditing, Business Process Management and Marketing.