Simon Telling
Programme Manager & Prosci Business Change Practitioner
Operational experience. Programme discipline. Change built around people.
Simon Telling is a Programme Manager and Prosci Business Change Practitioner with a career spanning the Royal Air Force Regiment, British Airways and major UK airport transformation programmes.
His approach has been shaped by working in operational environments where people need clear roles, effective processes, good leadership and the confidence to perform when it matters.
People → Process → Technology → Construction
Transformation does not start with a system or a building. It starts by understanding the people who run the operation and the processes they use.
Get those foundations right and technology can enable the operation, while the physical environment can be designed around what people actually need. This thinking underpins Simon’s approach through Pro-Tel Services.
Standardise → Simplify → Automate
From operational foundations to transformation leadership
Simon began his career with the Royal Air Force Regiment, serving for 12 years. His military career included becoming an instructor at the Basic Combat Training School (BCTS), training RAF Regiment recruits and drawing on infantry training undertaken at Brecon.
The experience established principles that remain central to his work today: leadership, teamwork, preparation, clear standards, disciplined processes and operational readiness.
An accident brought Simon’s military career to an unexpected end and required a new direction.
That new direction led to British Airways, where Simon moved into Information Management and developed a career in aviation technology and transformation.
His responsibilities grew into the leadership and delivery of major technology and infrastructure programmes, including large-scale data-centre infrastructure moves and work across the wider International Airlines Group environment involving British Airways, Iberia and Aer Lingus.
These programmes reinforced an important lesson: technology alone does not deliver transformation.
Simon subsequently brought operational experience, technology delivery and programme leadership into major airport transformation.
His work increasingly sits where operations, people, process, technology, infrastructure and Business Change meet — particularly where the day-to-day operation cannot simply stop while change is delivered.
Business Change is part of programme delivery
A technically successful project can still fail operationally if people are not ready, processes are not understood or the organisation has not adopted the change.
Rather than treating Business Change as a workstream added towards the end, Simon starts with the operational outcome: Who needs to do what differently?
From there, the process can be understood and simplified, the appropriate technology selected, and the physical environment designed around the people who will operate it. The objective is not simply to deliver a new system, building or capability, but to leave behind an operation that works better and can be sustained by the people who run it.
Experience supported by recognised disciplines
Simon’s practical experience is supported by formal programme, change and continuous-improvement disciplines. Frameworks are applied pragmatically: the objective is better decisions, controlled delivery, operational adoption and sustainable outcomes — not methodology for its own sake.
Programme leadership grounded in operations
Through Pro-Tel Services Ltd, Simon works with organisations delivering complex operational change, particularly within aviation and Critical National Infrastructure.
His role is to bring together elements that are too often managed separately — programme governance, operational requirements, Business Change, technology, infrastructure and operational readiness — and keep them focused on the outcome the organisation is actually trying to achieve.
Transformation is not successful when a project says it is complete. It is successful when the operation and its people can make it work.
© 2026 Pro-Tel Services Ltd — Programme Management · Business Change · Operational Readiness · Airport Transformation