Lynne Pascal Email & Phone Number

Edinburgh, Scotland, Gb

I am responsible for creating and executing a strategy aimed at designing EMEA's customer experience to be a competitive advantage. I work with customers and partners across Europe, Middle East & Africa to understand their passions, pain points and changing expectations. I champion their voice within Ciena while working closely with stakeholders and account teams to drive systemic action on feedback. I have a deep understanding of what it takes to drive customer and partner intimacy acquired through previous roles; I bring strong operational knowledge of the business, and a proven ability to deliver change.

As the global owner of Ciena’s Service Accreditation Program, I managed a team and together we enabled Solution Provider Channel Partners to deliver results their end customers loved. I found it rewarding to create skilled engineers, closer partnerships and ultimately happier end customers in the process. Concise clear communication and good processes were key components to ensure that the program was well understood and consistently applied across multiple languages and cultures.

In this customer-facing role, I acted as a key interface into Ciena for a major UK customer covering all aspects of the account including projects, support and maintenance. I was responsible for managing the customer relationship for operations, proactively fostering productive relationships with our customer to understand and align service delivery with their business priorities. In addition, I created a communication forum to bring together peers operating within other EMEA accounts to share common issues and drive for consistent and efficient solutions. It was the first time I really influenced outside my team, developing an open communication culture where people could ask for help, work collectively and resolve issues.

Delivered multiple end-to-end projects simultaneously by closely tracking project status, managing around anticipated issues and reaching across the organisation to remove blockers. I focused my communication with all stakeholders (technical and business / internal and external) to an appropriate audience, which kept them engaged throughout the process. My approach to project management allowed us to adapt to changes in priority and constraints while delivering to requirements in terms of content, quality and time. Business goals and imperatives were clearly identified where compromises and trade-offs had to be taken. As a PMI qualified professional, I brought consistency and strict project governance (initiate, plan, execute, control and close) to multi-skilled teams. This I balanced with an eye on business, tracking program revenue streams and contributing to the ongoing development of new service revenue opportunities. A key moment of pride for me was taking the lead in developing processes and governance for the whole Project Management group.