Lara Simmons Email & Phone Number

Bristol, England, United Kingdom

• Managed end-to-end office optimisation project, liaising with logistics and facilities teams, moving companies, external architects and service companies to consolidation two office spaces into one workspace. This.
• Delivered an optimised resourcing model, reallocating workloads between the UK and India, which included managing training and monitoring programmes to assess competence and effectiveness against target.
• Responsible for the implementation of the post COVID-19 Return to Office programme
• Financial management of key projects and programmes across Vistra and providing company-wide updates on overarching programme of work.

Bristol, England, United Kingdom

• Responsible for delivery of all incoming client projects within Fund Communication Services UK, including external client management for multiple stakeholders including Coutts & RBS
• Delivered largest European fund platform for MFEX, developing leading-edge digital onboarding solution technology and regulatory reporting.
• Managed organisation-wide rebrand programme following the acquisition of Funds Library by Broadridge
• Designed and delivered new strategic approach to project management for the organisation, standardising operating model, templates and management reporting.

Bristol

• Designed the delivery and communication approach and successfully managed the migration of the finance data platforms from the Data Warehouse into the Amazon Cloud (the largest migration completed by Aviva)
• Established a roadmap and regular reporting for management of the Vulnerabilities programme of work
• Supported team members in Agile and Project Management methodology, providing guidance on best practice and use / adaption of project artefacts.
• Led two of four critical workstreams on the Agile Digital Transformation programme via a full systems-thinking approach to redesign customer experience online, including the Health Team, the first business area to go.
• Managed Systems Thinking on largest protection product on the UK market (ALPs)
• Worked with HMRC to define the route to paperless for the first Chargeable Event Certificate in the industry to go live

Cardiff, United Kingdom

• Managed multiple large projects in parallel associated with credit card customer journey improvements, across both waterfall and agile methodologies.
• Co-ordinated and led strategies throughout the lifecycle of the project including facilitating workshops to shape and design and project structure and governance
• Awarded the 2016 Consumer Finance Division Change Excellence Award Business Change Manager & Delivery Lead (Digital Wallets)

Cardiff, United Kingdom

• Led the Business Readiness and IT Implementation workstreams for Apple Pay and Android Pay for Lloyds Banking Group supporting both credit and debit cards.
• Represented Lloyds Banking Group at key meetings with 3rd party suppliers, presenting to Apple, Google, First Data and other multi-national businesses on go live strategies and partnership development

City Of Bristol, England, United Kingdom

• Managed onshore and offshore business critical activities within the Operational Change Workstream where Friends Life opened their business to new customers from their closed book portfolio and in parallel introduced.
• Delivery Management: Managed the delivery of a new Call Centre telephony system (Live Ops) Including designing call routing, IVR options, resource allocation and incident management post go live
• Requirements Definition: Defined requirements for and obtaining system access and coordinated delivery across multiple programmes to ensure all teams were fully equipped to deliver service
• Onshore / Offshore Management: Managed the offshore development team to deliver the telephony operations required to support the new call centre, including development and delivery of all associated business processes
• Resourcing co-ordination: Managed HR recruitment processes and mobilisation of circa 200 staff across the 8 workstreams in the programme
• Process development: Accountable for the business process improvement of the new pension business unit

Bristol, United Kingdom

• Managed Operational Readiness and delivery of activities relating to Inter Bank Agency Agreements nationally for Lloyds and Bank of Scotland customers into TSB branches.
• Stakeholder Management: Established and managed regular Commercial stakeholder engagement, including the creation and delivery of presentation analysis outlining the impacts of key events on customers and colleagues
• Scheduling and Control: Commercial Workstream Lead for Schedule of Events (SOE) to support the successful delivery of AG9 where divesting commercial customer accounts were ring-fenced into new sort codes. Commercial.
• Testing: Commercial Wellness Testing Workstream Lead across key events, separating Lloyds TSB into separate banks and rebranding Lloyds TSB to Lloyds Bank, coordinating 10 key Commercial projects and touch points.
• Implementation Planning: Created and maintained the project implementation roadmap of all programme touch points and streamlined implementation reporting to optimise and automate existing reports, reducing FTE by.

Bristol, United Kingdom

• Managed Implementation Readiness, Event Delivery, Post Implementation Support and stakeholdercommunication within an ITIL framework to separate, rebrand and migrate critical applications from AXAto Friends Life..
• Managed Implementation Readiness, Event Delivery, Post Implementation Support and stakeholder communication within an ITIL framework to separate, rebrand and migrate critical applications from AXA to Friends Life.

Bristol, United Kingdom

• Led 1 of 3 PMO Workstreams on a £25 million programme, moving AXA’s critical applications to acentralised European Data Centre. Managed Implementation Readiness and coordinated technicalweekend migrations, managing.
• At the end of the project was voted “Most Effective Person on the Project”, voted by all project participants
• All technical migrations delivered successfully
• Change Management: Within six months I was assigned to the largest programme in AXA to manage Change Management within the PMO, which resulted in a promotion to PMO Lead
• Release Management: Show cased Change and Release Management processes via national roadshows
• Governance: Managed end to end governance of the programme including risks & issues

Sydney, Australia

London GHQ

Sydney, Australia

Sydney, Australia