Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
I am passionate about delivering values to customers; and it is particularly motivated and meaningful when I can also grow people around me as we make that happen while having some fun together. I have been in the airport industry and insurance industry for some time now, across many technologies and delivery roles and has been a seasoned leader in this space.
As the organization matures in its service delivery capability and modernises it’s platform, this role is set to embark on a journey of extending these capabilities as products and services to the enterprise, so that we can always focus on delivering the best outcomes to our members within the resources we have, while growing our people.
An extension to the Head of Platforms portfolio, this role is also responsible for user’s technology experiences across the touch points on service delivery, end user compute, infrastructure and service desk for the organization.
Responsible primarily for the platform operations and extending platform engineering capabilities in-house as the organization is adopting modern cloud platforms and engineering practices, while sustaining our support and partnership with the rest of the organization for the heritage platforms. The micro services platform and data cloud analytic platform have been the key modernization focus delivered under my leadership with emphasis on DevSecOps. These platforms underpins the technology foundations to enable the organisarion to achieves its strategic goals at a scalable and sustainable cadence. While the digital transformation journey is still pending on some of the heritage applications and platforms to be modernized, my teams continues to deliver operational excellence by providing services and partnership for various parts of business who are still operating on these platforms. In the meantime, we also work collaboratively with the architectural teams to ensure we are implementing what is intended, and also provide operations feedback to refine the design.
Reporting to the CTO, this role’s key responsibility is to provide technical partnership to support the organization to soft land their acquisition (with Sovereign). The role as technology business partner is to bring in both technical and business expertise to support transition challenges while being an advocate for the Technology teams. The role initially supports the EXCO and SLT team in Products, Strategy and Marketing, and was later extended to also cover Distributions, Operations and Finance teams. One of the key highlights was to implement a digital strategy for the tied agency by leveraging the best of Group and NZ technology aiming for a speedy implementation. This includes migrating all agency tools into cloud, introducing Salesforce (Xplan) into their workflow and reconfig AU Vitality for NZ market. Others include the transitioning and remediate the technology transition across applications and service delivery technologies and processes, such as BCP, DR, infrastructure network, just to name a few.
Leading a program of projects to align AIA AU and NZ synergies to achieve optimum combined company. To date, successful deliveries include financial reporting, operation efficiency and group admin in-sourcing. My role is to engage with stakeholder and project team to align the company values and goals to ensure the program of work are delivered and are adding value to the business. Complex stakeholders and project management with teams from AU, NZ, Malaysia and China - for business units from Finance, Legal, Technology, Operations and various Third Party providers.
I have been focusing on re-building the development team so that AIA NZ is in the best position to adapt Agile, mainly by introducing best practices, using the most relevant design patterns, investment in automated build, test and deployment processes. We have achieved a large share of these initiatives within our first year. This has been made possible by having our focus on growing a high performing team. It has been a rather enjoyable experience to oversee the build up, and now I'm leading a team of 12, including architect, developers, testers and build manager over 2 countries (and 3 regions). We have had some great successes, as we have not only delivered all of the projects on time, but were able to do so by accommodating late requirement changes and also achieve great quality and also on budget. I have also identified and share many improvement areas with the teams to get their buy-in and update upper management on our progress to ensure the continuous improvement are taking place with unanimous support.
Supporting Sonata product enhancement projects for clients such as Ascentric and Fidelity in UK. My involvement in these projects are not only to have the functionality delivered as per requested, but to also ensure these features are built as modular and maintainable as possible. In all projects I have been involved with, there had been substantial savings and some were even delivered earlier than expected. The topics of these projects includes cash reservations, fees and rebates modules, GUI, web services, web, transaction structures, bond/gilt trading life cycles processes. I have also been contributing to a number of internal process enhancements for the company's ongoing continuous improvements incentives, such as training, development, testing and solution presentation approaches.
As a project manager on the fortnightly premium project with team members in 2 countries over 3 regions, with a variety of technologies, including SQL, .Net, Java, mainframe to name a few, effective communications means everything and team collaboration are absolute essential to ensure the project meets both the delivery time and budget and to also exceed the business expectations. The project transit into live smoothly in October 2014.
One of the key projects is to enable the company to evaluate its statuary fund position for governance and IT has come to the scene rapidly. To deliver this effectively, it involves a broad understanding of the business processes and mapping them against various IT applications. It also requires a deep understanding of the strength of each application and to maximise them to the project's advantage. Process enhancement opportunities are often identified and are recommended to the business to help optimising the limited resources. Having to achieve all of the above, it needs excellent stackholder management skills combined with strong technical background and effective communication skills.
Various BAU projects, including enhancement for Insight (premium quotation), underwriting applications, policy administration systems (AS400 mainframe), Commission systems, GL systems, workflow and customer database. Some of these are in-house applications, while some are off the shelf. Having the exposure to a wide range of applications and the opportunity to work closely with business units on how they use them has allowed me to identify business units needs and system improvement opportunities. These opportunities has been transformed into improving business efficiency and lower IT maintenance costs.
Commissioned and developed baggage handling software systems for Adelaide International Airport, Auckland International airport, Christchrch International Airport, Durban International Airport, Montego Bay International Airport. Other software projects involved includes Boise Airport, Toronto Pearson B Airport and Nassau Airport.