Cindy Bessette

A dynamic, results-orientated Senior Professional that brings more than 25 years of technology, change management, marketing and business alliance management experience to Summit Consulting. She has broad industry knowledge having worked in High Tech as an Alliance Manager in Financial Services, Healthcare, High Performance Computing, Media and Entertainment, Video Surveillance and the Manufacturing market segments.

Cindy joined Summit in 2013 to help lead a large enterprise wide technology change management project. Her deep level of understanding across the technology stack uniquely positions her to help organizations manage through large technology transitions.

Her background includes senior level positions working for technology giants such as Oracle, Sun Microsystems and most recently, Hewlett-Packard Company where she served as the Americas Strategic ISV Business Development manager for HP Storage owning both the video surveillance and financial services verticals for the organization. Prior to Oracle, Cindy held numerous partner and alliance management roles at Sun Microsystems, Inc. within the global market development organization for the Financial Services, HPC and Manufacturing segments.

Cindy has both an MBA and an MSW from Boston College where she was inducted into the Beta Gamma Sigma National Honor Society, and received her Bachelor of Science undergraduate degree at Brown University.

She lives in Rhode Island and is an avid New England sports fan. She enjoys cooking, golfing, and spending time with her family.

SEE WHAT OUR CLIENTS ARE SAYING...

"The Summit Team partnered with me on a project to transform our marketing organization to play an even bigger role in driving the growth of our business. We shifted from a creative services function and evolved to be a more strategic marketing organization. Summit helped us bring our new operating model to life complete with marketing discipline centers of excellence, stronger partnerships within the broader company to deliver better metrics and results, and the empowerment of our middle management, just to name a few. We strengthened our leadership team, evolved our culture, implemented robust career pathing and onboarding programs, and formalized our curriculum. As a result of these efforts, we saw a marked increase in our engagement survey across all dimensions. Summit is an outstanding partner who delivers best-in-class change management and HR solutions, and I would highly recommend them"
—CMO, Fortune 100 Health Care Company
"The Summit Team led an organizational change management initiative to evolve our marketing team. They helped us to define our vision to become a more data-driven organization and a better partner to our business teams, with the goal of more effectively driving our business results through marketing. The Summit team partnered with us to create a number of key deliverables including a KPI dashboard, a detailed change management and communication plan focused on our people and their engagement, a process optimization framework and plan, and a more effective organizational design. What impressed me about Summit was their passion to help us solve complex change challenges, while always being a supportive partner throughout our transformation."
—CMO, Large Retailer
"Summit Consulting has been an indispensable partner in so many ways. Summit helped me, as a new leader on a very matrixed project, ensure alignment with our stakeholders and business partners and provided continuous communication through significant challenge and change. Summit helped my direct team, as well as the broader project team, remain focused and navigate through the organizational changes they were experiencing to deliver their projects on time. I have come to realize that no matter what the challenge our organization faces, Summit has the necessary expertise to not only function as trusted advisers, but they also have the resources to come in and put feet on the ground to strengthen any area we need. Continuing to deliver on every level, I know that Summit will be the cornerstone to all our success on this initiative."
—Director, Client Services, Large PBM
"I had my first experience working Summit Consulting on a top priority, high exposure project that consisted of many cross functional teams and leaders. From day one, I was extremely impressed with their passion for the project, commitment to digging deep to ensure they understood the business and challenges we were looking to solve for, always having a point of view or creative suggestion, and their amazing ability to bring a large, cross-functional team together and keep us all on track. Their efforts have contributed to increased colleague engagement and retention."
—VP, Human Resources, Large Healthcare Organization
"Summit Consulting was a critical partner for me on two large scale initiatives. For both, they developed a plan that provided our leaders with the information, tools and resources to fully understand, manage and lead their teams through change. They provided knowledge, skills and initiative to develop and execute a plan across multiple stakeholders within the framework of concurrent organizational, process and technology changes. Summit’s efforts resulted in highly engaged teams, rapid adoption of changes and successful outcomes for all stakeholders."
—VP, Benefit Operations, Large PBM
"Summit has proven to be an invaluable resource for my team as we help leaders navigate complex organizational change. Their ability to dive in and understand the complex business challenges we face is what makes them so successful. They don’t just come in and propose a one size fits all solution, but craft an approach that will ensure our objectives are met. During a particularly difficult project that had broad and far reaching implications to the organization, they were able to assess the issues and develop a thoughtful strategic plan to get cross functional buy in where others had failed in the past. This was a huge accomplishment given our complex matrixed structure. I am convinced many of the projects and initiatives we have launched would not have been successful had Summit not been involved from strategy to execution. I view them as critical thought partners and valuable extensions of my team."
Senior Director, HR Business Partnering, Large Healthcare Company
"Summit Consulting has been an incredible partner in a number of ways. Summit helped with the development of a Career Path program designed to respond to colleague feedback that navigating career opportunities was confusing or unclear. We developed a program to help colleagues understand the career paths available to them in our large organization. Summit offered valuable thought partnership on process and design of the program as well as critical project management support. Their expertise and willingness and ability to come in and quickly learn the culture of the organization was exceptional. The best part is that we saw measurable double digit improvement in colleague engagement as a result of the work!"
Director, HR Business Partnering, Large Retail Organization
"Summit Consulting partnered with my team to develop a detailed project plan that enabled us to successfully engage diverse stakeholders and business partners and execute against critical deliverables on schedule. As a team, we were able to be more proactive in our approach with our stakeholders and develop targets that align with the organization’s goals and stakeholder expectations."
Director, Strategic Product Management
"My team has worked alongside Summit Consulting on numerous change management projects over the years. It’s no surprise that we keep bringing them in for these critical projects – they have shown time and again that they have the skills and business savvy to positively affect outcomes. They dig in deep to understand our business and objectives and then develop and execute creative, yet sensible, plans that have gotten teams over some pretty steep change curves"
Executive Advisor, Corporate Internal Communications, Fortune 50 Company
"Summit Consulting has been an indispensable partner in so many ways. Summit helped me, as a new leader on a very matrixed project, ensure alignment with our stakeholders and business partners and provided continuous communication through significant challenge and change. Summit helped my direct team, as well as the broader project team, remain focused and navigate through the organizational changes they were experiencing to deliver their projects on time. I have come to realize that no matter what the challenge our organization faces, Summit has the necessary expertise to not only function as trusted advisors, but they also have the resources to come in and put feet on the ground to strengthen any area we need. Continuing to deliver on every level, I know that Summit will be the cornerstone to all our success in this project!"
Director, Client Services Organization
“Summit Consulting has played an integral role with helping to set the change management strategy related to our high profile platform migration. I oversee the project’s Training and Communications team, and Summit has been an invaluable resource that has allowed my team to more effectively navigate through many of the challenging aspects of the migration. Summit quickly learned the best approach for strategically partnering with key stakeholders in order to make an immediate impact and drive positive change. They are extremely knowledgeable, have an unyielding work ethic and are dedicated to ensuring our migration initiative is highly successful.”
Director, Training & Communication, Fortune 10 Company
"I didn't realize that I needed help in managing change until Summit Consulting joined our team, propelling us forward and helping our company overcome previously unforeseen barriers to change."
—Senior Director, Fortune 100 Company
"At a time when leading through change became a critical role we needed to play as HR Professionals, Summit Consulting was instrumental in developing and executing our strategy. Our Summit partners took the time to develop a deep understanding of our business and relationships with key stakeholders. Their dedication to our company, culture, and the long-term success of our project has made them a valuable part of our team and is the reason we continue our ongoing relationship with them."
—OD Manager, Leadership & Change Management Team
"Summit Consulting has been a key partner in our change management activities related to a large scale system migration. They were able to understand our organization's culture in order to creatively lead the organization through the change. Their team is comprised of seasoned professionals who have been critical contributors to the success of this project."
—Director, Fortune 20 Company
“As we undertook significant change in our company, we knew it was important to keep our fingers on the pulse of our organization. Summit helped us to develop and deploy a pulse survey to determine where our leadership team needed to adjust change management and communications efforts to better address the needs of our colleagues. Summit partnered with us on developing a specific strategy to address concerns that initially surfaced in the survey. As a result, we saw a marked improvement in our annual engagement survey in the communication index.”
-Senior Vice President, HR Business Partnering, Fortune 10 Company
"Summit Consulting helped my leadership team take change management concepts and translate them into actionable recommendations that fit with our company's culture. From aligning our senior leadership to ensuring our stakeholders were engaged and ready for the change, they have been there every step of the way, providing guidance and recommendations to ensure our change is successful."
—VP, Fortune 20 Company

CONNECT WITH US

Contact Us

Phone: 617.794.3995 | Fax: 781.293.4602
info@summitconsultingma.com