Know-how DScribed

Lara’s key strengths lie in many areas from discovery & advisory, communication & collaboration, adaptability, to leadership, management, & implementation.

Digital Consultancy

  • Lead business analyst & UX, product expert.

  • Led cross-functional tech team’s - design, development, and release of a variety of fundamental products & projects from concept to implementation.

  • Making sure our products UX, and UI designs meet the needs of New Zealand’s students, parents & caregivers, education professionals, service providers.

  • Led UX primary research (quant. & qual.) and insights – for audience segmentation, content & channel discovery, painpoints & wishlists establishment, demographic insights, wellbeing, learning & behavioural challenges, and much more.

  • Led the replacement of the flagship Education.govt.nz website (to Drupal), amalgamating six sites into one to improve the UX/UI and mitigate issues with stability, maintenance, poor performance & searchability, and potential loss of all data in an outage.

    The current site doesn’t meet the audience needs, it’s unreliable and outdated. The new website is headless on the EWP (Education Web Platform on AWS).

    The headless website architecture separates the user-facing website from the content management system letting us leverage the best of both worlds.

    The digital eco-system is so disbanded the audience in the sector struggle with discoverability and navigability of the multitude of sites and platforms.

  • Concurrently, led the build of the Ka Ora, Ka Ako | Healthy School Lunches website (on Laravel) with integrations with Salesforce, to ensure a single source of truth for a raft of data. kaorakaako.education.govt.nz

  • Exceptional leadership, time management, organisation & planning skills.

  • Extensive stakeholder & relationship management.

  • Gathering, analysing, circulating & presenting detailed evidence & info in a user-friendly way.

  • Defines requirements, keeps the team aligned to the product roadmap, manages the backlog, represents the stakeholders, and delivers features and user stories.

  • Channel strategy, content strategy & audience listen and respond.

  • Persona building of audience to truly understand who’s who & what’s what.

  • Product management & ownership.

  • SCRUM master & agile ceremony facilitation.

  • Human-centric design & consideration.

  • Complying with Government Web Standards - sharing knowledge of web accessibility, usability standards.

Discovery & Advisories (DnA)

  • Lead analyst for DnAs (Discovery & Advisory) projects across New Zealand.

  • Focuses on scoping & developing an unconventional approach to people management & an innovative people centric solution which manages HR & payroll, changing the HR & payroll landscape in ANZ.

  • Product ownership of UX & interaction for Jemini.

  • Create eLearning material to train others to carry out DnAs in a succinct way.

Discovery

Coordinate discovery planning with customer and key stakeholders.

Carry out business goals workshops with key players & SMEs.

Interview or survey key actors in the business to build out personas that cover each user type.

Recording the exact process that are performed and providing them as visual experience maps.

Surveying to grasp quantitative research for the facts, happy withs, wishlists and painpoints with their current solutions or processes.

Analyse the discovery activities and results, reach out if further information is required.

Establish the current state and the expected future state.

Communicate and keep everyone in the loop while leading into the advisory. Continue to keep everyone in the loop while pulling together the final advisory deliverable.

Advisory

Draw up business goals - facts, happy withs, wishlists and painpoints with all aspects of their current environment / solution.

Consolidate findings reports into visual aids to resonate with stakesholders and strengthen the need for change.

Create a variety of personas that give a high-level view of the people who make up the customers’ business, the devices they have access to and some details to personalise the user types.

Show the personas in action by using experience maps that combine empathy mapping, journey mapping, experience mapping and service blueprinting.

Show the personas in action within the future solution, showcasing product features & user stories.

Overview the vision and strategy going forward backed by an organisation change management (OCM) strategy and phased approach for implementation.

Pull together & deliver DnA presentation for sign off.

Communication

  • Creative, approachable, personable and friendly with a professional, courteous and diplomatic character. 

  • Communicates with excellent written, verbal, interpersonal & drawn communication skills, at a technical level, a general business level & in laymen’s term.

  • Collaborates & works closely with stakeholders (up to C level) to produce and implement high quality, crucial digital products.

  • Logophile (lover of words) with a high level of both written, drawn and verbal communication.

  • Values concise, clear and simple communication in plain English.  Translates technical code and methodologies into laymen’s terms.

  • Motivated, thorough and accurate with a fastidious eye for detail; identifying, documenting and creating new process and procedures while carrying out continuous gap analysis.

  • Effectively communicate in situations which require a tactful, diplomatic or an informal approach.

  • Quick to establish the best means of communication, be it via email, meetings, informal discussions, shoulder tapping or surveys.

  • Enjoys designing and developing websites from both the backend (MadCap Flare, MS SharePoint) and frontend (SquareSpace, WordPress and Wix)

Adaptability

  • Adaptable to new positions, environments, processes, practices, teams and projects.

  • Quick to learn new technologies, systems and software.

  • Outstandingly analytical eye for detail in all scenarios – proof twice, release once.

  • Ability to translate and consolidate technical information, while quickly learning and retaining information.

  • Focuses on deliverables, multitasking, prioritising and meeting deadlines; effectively carrying out and completing all tasks.

Leadership

  • Effectively builds a sound level of rapport within a short period of time.

  • Lead a team of discovery engineers and testers, to discover and test 400+ applications (across 3 District Health Boards / Hospitals) to package the applications for an upgrade of the entire operating environment.

  • A valued contributor to the functioning of a team, with sound judgement and discretion (including assisting with conflict management).  Solutions and judgements are made and supported by reasoned analysis, critical thinking and research.

  • Able to identify, document and inform others of roles and responsibilities as needed within teams of individuals.

  • KANBAN board establishment and monitoring to completion (using JIRA and Scrum boards).

  • Experienced in Agile, Waterfall and ITIL methodologies including being a scrum master.

Management

  • Cyclical deliverables for clients, including the content strategy – Release Notes, Hints & Tips, general comms, and website content.

  • Strong leadership, coordination and enthusiasm while building successful relationships with stakeholders and management.

  • Over 5 years of experience in complex environments within the Australasian private and public sector, and the European private sector.

  • Driven for excellence; forecasting, identifying, mitigating and resolving risks, issues and problems.

  • Managing content and documentation across an array of solutions simultaneously; using multiple publishing tools (including HTML5).

  • Establishing documentation architecture, styles (including CSS) and templates.

  • Effectively manage the change and release of upgrades and migrations.

Sales

  • Strong customer service skills, always consider the UX (User Experience) and the ultimate usability of the deliverables (website, email, online help, marketing material). 

  • Communicating with customers at least twice a month via eMarketing; keeping customers informed of new functionality (release notes) and generating sales and registrations.

  • Understanding and valuing Intellectual Property Rights, contractual obligations, confidentiality agreements and service level agreements.

Find out more about DScribe…