Peter Laird Email & Phone Number

England, United Kingdom

United Kingdom

London, United Kingdom

London, United Kingdom

In this role I was the Head of IT for Unilever Corporate Centres (UK and NL) and VIP (senior exec/board). In this role I am responsible for the Business Engagement and the delivery of Service Excellence for all employees at the Corporate sites. I am the face of IT, managing the relationship with the Global Corporate teams. This involves operational delivery and strategic focus. I have successfully built and scaled the VIP team and service. I also manage the Corporate budgets looking for opportunities to drive efficiencies throughout.

London, United Kingdom

From November 2016 – September 2017 I was responsible for owning the senior IT Business Partner & Innovation relationship with the Dove brand, the largest brand in Unilever. I partnered the digital capability team in their ambitious rollout of updating approximately 60 brand.com websites to Adobe Experience Manager at scale and in a repeatable model. This forms part of a wider initiative in Unilever to enhance how we do marketing in a digital world. As such this crossed many areas surrounding content, ecommerce, communities, connections and the consumer journey – essentially how we connect with consumers in a data driven world. Navigating the various teams, stakeholders and the complexity is where I played a pivotal role. Building strong, trusted relationships with Brand Directors, VPs, managing 3rd parties and partners. I unblocked issues, managed situations and people, constantly being proactive and strategically focussed.In addition to this demanding role I ran the PMO for our global IT graduate intake programme, coordinating all activities. I also ran the UK intern placement scheme for University students, assigning placements, managing and mentoring individuals and reviewing appropriateness for the full graduate programme.

London, United Kingdom

In my previous role as ITBP manager Marketing Europe I successfully ran a team of digital experts in partnering Marketing in Europe. I established the European strategy for Digital Marketing Services providing clear direction to not only the immediate team, but important partners like Brand teams, European IT, Legal, Privacy, Media and Ecommerce. Notable successes in this role are developing talented individuals, ensuring all digital foundations are in place for our European consumer facing websites (example: I drove mobile optimisation from 34% to 80%), reducing the number of our websites by 30% and bringing greater alignment to all of our European agencies. I would often visit key countries and meet with country chairman, heads of IT, Media Directors and align on initiatives.In this role I was also the digital 2.0 (programme to focus digital marketing globally) lead for Europe driving capability change in 4 key markets. This involved strong partnerships and influencing individuals on global capabilities.

100Ve London

During this role I was responsible for owning the IT Business Partner & Innovation relationship to the global Communications function. My success in this role has been the ability to form sound working relationships within the function and help to understand and interpret business requirements. I am responsible for ensuring requirements are catalogued and where appropriate driving these through into solutions. I leverage my IT network base and consider myself to be a key member of the function, building relationships at the most senior level in both IT and Communications. My subject matter expertise in many fields of IT helps gain both the respect of IT but also builds the confidence level within Communications. A notable success in this role has been leading the Communications strategy team in defining, designing, developing and delivering a Salesforce application to support the planning of the entire function. This required an agile approach and a key integration of the social layer Chatter. I work extremely closely with the Corporate Digital Channels team and manage a team of implementation analysts, testers and project managers, overseeing all work and key projects to support the groups strategic roadmap.

During the past year I have been responsible for managing an array of Global Innovation projects with a particular focus on the global implementation of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 within Unilever. In this role I have been supporting the Global Programme Office in leading key projects to pave the way for further implementation and adoption of SharePoint. This includes Project Managing the first business function migration into the SharePoint platform and a project focused upon the My Site implementation and activation with a user base of 95,000 Users.In these projects I have been responsible for the plan and that supporting risk and issue management processes are in place, with progress being tracked against key milestones and critical path, whilst undertaking appropriate risk/issue management where and when required.The role has required an excellent level of interaction with the Business, Business Partners, Regional and Global IT, and external vendors.In this role I have continued to demonstrate my abilities in Project Management, including Project Risk Management, Change Management and Stakeholder Management.During the end of 2007 and throughout 2008 I worked as a Project Manager within Workplace Solutions. In this role my focus was upon key solutions surrounding connectivity, in particular Video Conferencing.A major responsibility in this role was as Global Project Manager on the implementation of Telepresence (High end Video Conferencing solution) rooms in the following locations; London, Rotterdam, Singapore, New York, Sao Paulo, Bangkok, Mexico City and Tokyo. The project achieved extremely high acclaim and recognition within Unilever and demonstrated a significant investment into changing the way in which Unilever communicates and collaborates.

During my time at the Trust I was the main contact for all IT support issues and managed the internal support desk for 350 users. I was instrumental in the migration of the mail sweeping system and the main Print Server. The migration of the mail sweeping system had an immediate effect of saving the business user’s time and helped alleviate significant demands placed upon the internal support desk.I also instigated a project to change the internal naming conventions of the Workstations and Printers, whilst introducing third party software to remotely support client PC’s. I reorganised the Trust’s Active Directory, creating a greater controlled environment allowing a more efficient use of Group Policy.

During my time at Avocet I was actively involved in various areas within the IT department. My core system admin responsibilities included the administration of Active Directory, ensuring Antivirus software and Windows patches were updated on all Servers and Clients, central backups were running precisely and the live ERP system (Epicor) was available and stable.I was responsible for the creation of all new system accounts and maintenance of the Active Directory; including the use of Group Policy to control user accounts, password complexity and other SOX compliancy issues.My Sarbanes Oxley duties also extended to weekly reviews of the internal servers via Insight Manager, SQL 2000 maintenance; checking SQL backups and logs combined with checking failed scheduled jobs and any modified SQL jobs. I also collated and distributed quarterly periodic access reviews ensuring all users were current and had suitable access to both the Domain and the ERP system.I also headed a company wide migration of all desktops (100+) to new Dell desktops. The project involved a high level of planning and organisation. This was delivered within the projected time scale and caused minimal disruption.Another major achievement in this period was the Company wide migration to Exchange 2003 from Eudora World mail system. The Exchange Server was clustered for extra resilience and a Front-End Server was implemented for OWA and OMA. The migration was delivered within the projected time scale and helped the company with increased efficiency for its email communications. I also played a fundamental role in the upgrade of the internal ERP system. The project was executed professionally and benefited heavily from not outsourcing to the distributor. I was the main contact for all procurement within the IT department and negotiated new cost efficient contracts for the Server, SAN hardware and support of the internal network.

During this period of my career I witnessed the growth of a young Internet Application Service Provider from a company of 40 employees, and one office based in London, to a company of 120 employees with offices throughout Europe. Within this period I was actively involved in the overall IT support of the entire company. Whilst dealing with the day-to-day IT support issues that arise, I also managed the successful migration of the company to Windows 2000 workstation and helped in the migration of the File, Print, SQL and Exchange Servers.For six months of this period I was primary contact in the IT Services department, this left me solely responsible for the maintenance, administration and overall running of the NT network. I was also in charge of all IT procurement and purchasing which enabled me to develop sound external relationships with various suppliers.