Strategic Portfolio · Business Relationship · AI Enablement

Projects.
Relationships.
Delivery.

Business Relationship Manager — IT Project & Portfolio Delivery at Deloitte Canada

I sit between the business and the technology that serves it. Ten-plus years turning ambiguous business needs into funded, delivered outcomes across professional services, insurance, and banking — today owning demand management, investment prioritisation, and budget development for a $15M+ enterprise technology portfolio spanning four of Deloitte Canada's core businesses.

Career timeline Personal projects

Toronto, ON · Open to senior portfolio & relationship leadership roles

Tolut Bako — Strategic Portfolio & Business Relationship Leader
$15M+ Enterprise portfolio owned
$8M+ Annual investment approvals informed
4 Core businesses served
30+ Executive stakeholders
Demand Management Investment Prioritisation Business Relationship Management Executive Advisory Budget & Forecasting Cyber & Technology Risk SAFe® Agile GenAI & Agentic Automation NetSuite ERP Mentoring

Profile

Where the business meets the technology that serves it

I am a Strategic Portfolio and Business Relationship Leader with 10+ years turning ambiguous business needs into funded, delivered technology outcomes across professional services, insurance, and banking — promoted from Portfolio Lead to Business Relationship Manager at Deloitte Canada in under two years, on a trajectory built by being a trusted executive partner rather than an order-taker.

I own demand management, investment prioritisation, and budget development for a $15M+ enterprise technology portfolio spanning Deloitte Canada's four core businesses — Audit & Assurance; Strategy, Risk & Transactions; Tax & Legal; and Technology & Transformation — informing senior leadership's funding and delivery decisions.

Leadership recognises me as the go-to resource for GenAI and agentic AI enablement, translating emerging technology into practical, adopted solutions rather than pilots that stall. I also mentor a small cohort of junior consultants on portfolio and stakeholder practices, and bring a financial analyst's rigour to budget, forecasting, and risk conversations at the executive table.

Certified SAFe® 6 Lean Portfolio Manager with PMP in progress, RIBO registration, and CFA Level I passed. Based in Toronto, Ontario.

Core competencies

Portfolio intake & delivery management
Business relationship management (BRM)
Demand management & investment prioritisation
Executive advisory & stakeholder influence
Budget development & portfolio forecasting
Enterprise PMO & portfolio governance
Cyber & technology risk enablement
Agile & hybrid delivery (SAFe, Scrum)
Steering committee & stage-gate reporting
Business analysis & process improvement
GenAI & agentic automation enablement
ERP implementation support (NetSuite)
Vendor & contract management
Change management
Strategic & annual planning
Mentoring & team development

Career Timeline

Professional experience

Ten-plus years of progressive delivery across professional services, insurance, banking, and regulated field operations.

Deloitte Canada

Mar 2023 – Present

Business Relationship Manager

Toronto, ON

Business Relationship Manager — IT Project & Portfolio Delivery

Sep 2025 – Present Promoted
  • Own demand management and end-to-end intake for technology requests across Deloitte Canada's four core businesses — Audit & Assurance; Strategy, Risk & Transactions; Tax & Legal; and Technology & Transformation — translating business needs into structured requirement statements defining in-scope, out-of-scope, and key assumptions.
  • Lead investment prioritisation and budget development for a $15M+ enterprise technology portfolio, informing senior leadership's funding decisions and supporting an estimated $8M+ in annual technology investment approvals.
  • Serve as trusted executive advisor to Cyber leadership within Technology & Transformation, supporting 15+ senior partners on security and risk investment priorities and contributing to more disciplined stage-gate reporting.
  • Recognised by leadership as the go-to resource for GenAI and agentic AI enablement — piloting agentic AI use cases, advising business-line teams on responsible automation adoption, and supporting NetSuite ERP enablement and implementation initiatives for clients.
  • Mentor a small cohort of junior consultants on portfolio intake, stakeholder management, and requirement-scoping practices.
  • Build and maintain executive-level relationships across 30+ stakeholders spanning the core businesses, positioning IT as a trusted delivery partner, and present portfolio status, budget performance, and risk updates to senior leadership.

Portfolio Lead, Technology Portfolio

Mar 2023 – Sep 2025
  • Led portfolio management for a segment of Deloitte Canada's cross-business technology portfolio valued at $6M+, establishing standardised intake, prioritisation, and tracking practices for business-driven initiatives.
  • Partnered with business and technology stakeholders to gather requirements and define scope, assumptions, and budget parameters for 20+ initiatives annually, strengthening demand management discipline across the portfolio.
  • Supported development of portfolio budgets and financial forecasting, contributing to more disciplined capacity planning, cost oversight, and stage-gate reporting.
  • Produced portfolio dashboards, KPI summaries, and executive status reporting that improved visibility into initiative health and delivery risk — and built the cross-functional relationships, including a strong foothold in cyber technology, that led to promotion.

Hagerty Insurance Canada

Jun 2022 – Mar 2023

Business Solutions Consultant

Ontario, Canada

  • Partnered with underwriting, claims, and operations stakeholders over a 9-month engagement, leading discovery workshops and deep-dive sessions with 15+ business and technology stakeholders.
  • Documented and mapped current-state processes across underwriting and claims operations, analysing 10+ core workflows to identify inefficiencies and improvement opportunities.
  • Translated findings into future-state process designs and requirements documentation, reducing average process cycle time by approximately 18%.
  • Facilitated structured requirements-gathering sessions, ensuring alignment between business objectives and proposed process and technology changes.
  • Delivered current-state and future-state documentation adopted across 3 operating units to guide downstream implementation planning.

Access Bank PLC

Apr 2017 – Jun 2022

Business & Financial Analyst

Nigeria

  • Analysed income statements, financial reports, and business performance data to support budgeting, forecasting, and variance analysis across retail and corporate banking divisions.
  • Delivered project management and business analysis support for enterprise banking initiatives — digital payment platforms, fraud prevention systems, and regulatory reporting across front- and back-office functions.
  • Supported delivery of AML/KYC compliance initiatives aligned with CBN and international regulatory standards, contributing documentation, requirements gathering, and stakeholder coordination.
  • Enabled core banking and reporting automation improvements, increasing reporting turnaround by approximately 20% while supporting budgeting and financial tracking for a technology-enabled program area valued at $5M+.
  • Standardised project documentation and status reporting practices bank-wide, supporting improvements to delivery success rates from roughly 70% → 92% over the engagement.
  • Prepared financial and project status summaries for senior stakeholders across treasury, retail, and enterprise business units.

Joint Marine Environ Guard Ltd.

Jul 2013 – Oct 2016

PM — Environmental Compliance
  • Led environmental compliance projects ensuring adherence to regulatory standards and sustainability guidelines.
  • Coordinated cross-functional teams executing environmental risk assessments and remediation initiatives.
  • Managed project budgets, vendor contracts, and procurement activities for field operations.
  • Implemented process improvements that reduced compliance violations and enhanced operational efficiency.
  • Prepared regulatory reports, audits, and documentation for government and environmental agencies.

Selected Work

Signature engagements

Four bodies of professional work that define how I operate — portfolio ownership, executive advisory in a risk-heavy domain, AI and ERP enablement, and end-to-end process redesign. Independent and personal projects are covered further down.

Portfolio Ownership

$15M+ Enterprise Technology Portfolio

Deloitte Canada  ·  2023 – Present  ·  Four core businesses

Demand management, investment prioritisation, and budget development across Deloitte Canada's four core businesses — Audit & Assurance; Strategy, Risk & Transactions; Tax & Legal; and Technology & Transformation. Every request arrives as a business problem and leaves as a scoped requirement statement — in-scope, out-of-scope, assumptions — with a funding decision attached to it.

What it involves

An estimated $8M+ in annual technology investment approvals informed

20+ initiatives scoped annually with defined assumptions and budget parameters

Portfolio status, budget performance, and risk presented directly to senior leadership

Executive Advisory

Trusted Advisor — Cyber Leadership

Deloitte Canada  ·  2025 – Present  ·  Technology & Transformation

Trusted executive advisor to Cyber leadership within Technology & Transformation, supporting 15+ senior partners on security and risk investment priorities. The foothold built here during my portfolio lead tenure is what drove the promotion into the BRM role.

What it involves

Executive relationships maintained across 30+ stakeholders spanning the core businesses

More disciplined stage-gate reporting on security and risk investments

IT positioned as a trusted delivery partner rather than an order-taking function

GenAI & ERP

GenAI, Agentic AI & NetSuite ERP Enablement

Deloitte Canada  ·  Ongoing  ·  Go-to resource for AI enablement

Recognised by leadership as the go-to resource for GenAI and agentic AI enablement — piloting agentic AI use cases and translating emerging technology into practical, adopted solutions rather than pilots that stall. Runs alongside NetSuite ERP enablement and implementation work for clients.

What it involves

Agentic AI use cases piloted against real business-line workflows

Business-line teams advised on responsible automation adoption

ERP configuration, adoption, and change readiness supported with finance and technology partners

Process Transformation

Underwriting & Claims Process Redesign

Hagerty Insurance Canada  ·  2022 – 2023  ·  9-month engagement

Discovery workshops and deep-dive sessions with 15+ business and technology stakeholders across underwriting, claims, and operations — mapping 10+ core workflows in their current state, then translating the findings into future-state designs and requirements documentation.

Outcomes

Average process cycle time reduced by approximately 18%

Current- and future-state documentation adopted across 3 operating units

Business objectives and proposed technology changes kept aligned through structured requirements sessions

Personal Projects

Work I took on because it mattered

Six projects undertaken independently over the past fifteen years — outside formal employment, largely unpaid, and among the work I am most proud of. Healthcare access, early-stage investment, community technology, and small businesses that needed enterprise thinking they could not otherwise afford.

Healthcare

Healthcare Access Initiative

Independent  ·  Volunteer project

A personally driven initiative to improve access to healthcare services for underserved communities — bringing project structure, coordination, and technology thinking to an effort that began without either. Undertaken entirely outside formal employment.

Focus areas

Coordination and delivery structure applied to a volunteer-run health initiative

Technology used to widen reach and reduce administrative burden

Sustainable processes handed to the people who run the programme day to day

Venture Capital

Early-Stage Venture Evaluation & Investment Support

Independent  ·  Unpaid advisory

Hands-on experience on the venture capital side of the table — evaluating early-stage ventures, pressure-testing business models and financial assumptions, and supporting founders through the diligence and readiness work that sits between an idea and an investable proposition.

Focus areas

Business model and financial assumption stress-testing brought from an analyst background

Investment readiness and diligence preparation for founding teams

Commercial judgement applied where enthusiasm needed a second opinion

Community & Technology

Program Governance & Digital Enablement — Diaspora Community Organization

Toronto, ON  ·  2021 – 2022  ·  Volunteer consulting

Volunteered as a strategic advisor to a registered nonprofit focused on skills development and economic integration for newcomer Africans in the Greater Toronto Area. Led a governance redesign to improve programme accountability, donor reporting, and volunteer coordination — using simple technology to replace the manual work that was consuming the team.

Outcomes

Program governance charter and accountability matrix introduced across four active programs

Donor reporting templates built, improving funder confidence and enabling a grant application cycle

Volunteer coordination structure redesigned, reducing coordinator time spent on scheduling by ~40%

SME Advisory

Operational Restructuring — Retail Distribution Business

Ontario, Canada  ·  2023 – 2024  ·  Independent engagement

Engaged by a family-owned multi-location retail distribution company facing margin pressure and operational inefficiency. Conducted a full process audit, redesigned inventory and procurement workflows, and introduced a basic performance management framework for the leadership team of eight.

Outcomes

Inventory carrying costs reduced by approximately 18% within 6 months of new workflow adoption

Standardized SOPs delivered across three locations, reducing onboarding time for new staff

Monthly management reporting cadence introduced, replacing ad hoc owner reviews

Startup Advisory

Go-to-Market & Delivery Framework — Nigerian Fintech Startup

Lagos / Remote  ·  2022 – 2023  ·  Pro-bono advisory

Provided strategic advisory support to an early-stage digital savings and lending startup preparing for its seed round. Scope included business model stress-testing, go-to-market planning, regulatory readiness assessment against CBN guidelines, and a lightweight project delivery framework for the founding team.

Outcomes

Investor-ready GTM narrative and delivery roadmap developed ahead of seed fundraise

Regulatory gap analysis completed; CBN licensing pathway documented with remediation steps

Founding team adopted Agile sprint cadence for product development, reducing feature cycle time

Fractional PM

Technology Procurement & Vendor Selection — Professional Services Firm

Ontario, Canada  ·  2024  ·  Fractional engagement

Served as fractional project manager for a mid-sized professional services firm selecting and implementing a new practice management platform. Led requirements gathering, vendor evaluation (RFP design and scoring), contract negotiation support, and change management planning for a team of 35 staff.

Outcomes

Vendor selection completed within 10 weeks against a structured scoring framework across five shortlisted platforms

Change management plan and training schedule delivered ahead of go-live, achieving 90%+ staff adoption within 30 days

Implementation delivered on time and within the agreed fixed-fee budget with no scope overruns

Tolut Bako with his wife and their baby son

Off the clock

Married, and dad to a baby boy — the part of my life that keeps everything else in proportion. When time allows, we are outdoors or somewhere new.

FamilyOutdoorsTravel

How I Work

The operating disciplines behind the portfolio

Not theoretical exposure — these are the practices applied daily across a $15M+ cross-business technology portfolio and the engagements that preceded it.

01

Demand Management & Intake

A single front door for technology demand across four core businesses — requests captured, assessed, sequenced, and tracked, so leadership sees one prioritised portfolio rather than four competing queues.

02

Requirements Definition & Scoping

Business needs translated into structured technology requirement statements that state what is in scope, what is explicitly out of scope, and which assumptions the estimate depends on. Ambiguity gets resolved before the budget is committed, not after.

03

Investment Prioritisation & Forecasting

Budgets, business cases, and portfolio forecasting that inform real funding decisions — an estimated $8M+ in annual investment approvals. Grounded in an analyst background of forecasting, variance analysis, and financial modelling.

04

Executive Advisory & Influence

Relationships treated as delivery infrastructure. 30+ stakeholders across the core businesses, 15+ senior partners in cyber alone — maintained deliberately so that demand is understood early and IT is positioned as a partner, not a queue.

05

Governance & Stage-Gate Reporting

Certified SAFe® 6 Lean Portfolio Manager. Agile where the work is discovery-heavy, structured where the deadline is external — with portfolio Kanban, KPI dashboards, and steering committee and stage-gate reporting spanning both.

06

Cyber, Risk & GenAI Enablement

Technology risk enablement against NIST CSF and ISO 27001 frameworks, alongside GenAI and agentic AI enablement — assessing which use cases are real, and what responsible adoption looks like inside a regulated professional services environment.

Credentials

Qualifications & technical tools

Certifications

SAFe® 6 Lean Portfolio Manager
PMP — Project Management Professional (in progress)
Registered Insurance Brokers of Ontario (RIBO)
Scrum Professional Certificate
CFA Program — Level I Passed
Lean Six Sigma White Belt
Process Improvement Certificate — Productivity Engineering

Education

MSc, Marine Pollution & Management

University of Lagos  ·  2015

BSc, Plant Biology & Biotechnology

University of Benin  ·  2012

Tools & Platforms

Portfolio & project delivery

Jira Jira Align Azure DevOps MS Project / Project for the Web Smartsheet Planview Monday.com Asana

Business analysis & process mapping

Visio Lucidchart Miro Confluence SAP Signavio

Reporting & analytics

Power BI Tableau Advanced Excel / Financial Modeling SQL

Enterprise & collaboration

SharePoint SAP Salesforce NetSuite ServiceNow (ITBM, SPM) Ascend Microsoft Teams Power Platform

Governance, risk & cyber

Risk Registers NIST CSF ISO 27001 Portfolio Dashboards KPI Reporting

AI & emerging tools

Microsoft Copilot ChatGPT Enterprise (BA/PM workflows) Agentic AI Piloting Prompt Engineering Fundamentals

AI Enablement

Emerging technology, applied with judgement

Recognised by leadership at Deloitte Canada as the go-to resource for GenAI and agentic AI enablement. The value is not enthusiasm for the technology — it is translating it into practical, adopted solutions, and knowing what responsible adoption requires before a pilot becomes a dependency.

GenAI & agentic AI piloting

Hands-on piloting of agentic AI use cases against real business-line workflows — separating those with a defensible business case from those that add tooling without removing effort.

Responsible adoption advisory

Advising business-line teams on responsible automation adoption, informed by working inside a regulated professional services environment with genuine risk and confidentiality constraints.

AI in BA & PM workflows

Daily use of Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT Enterprise across business analysis and project management work — requirements drafting, documentation, and reporting — with a clear view of where the output still needs an expert.

ERP & platform enablement

NetSuite ERP enablement and implementation for clients alongside the AI work: configuration, adoption, and change readiness delivered with finance and technology stakeholders rather than handed over as a system.

Contact

Let's talk delivery

Open to senior portfolio delivery and business relationship leadership opportunities, and to conversations about the personal projects above. Based in Toronto, Ontario — available across North America.

Email tolutbako@gmail.com Phone +1 (647) 832-7149 LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/tolutbako Portfolio tolutbako.com
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