Grant LusherSenior technology leaderEmail Grant

Critical service continuity

Supporting rapid organisational growth for a critical national telehealth service

Organisation
Whakarongorau Aotearoa
Period
2018–2021
Disclosure
Named

Context

Whakarongorau Aotearoa provides critical national telehealth services. During the COVID-19 response, demand changed rapidly and the organisation needed to expand its workforce and technology capability without compromising the continuity of essential services.

My remit

As a senior infrastructure engineer, I combined hands-on delivery with technical leadership, mentoring, incident coordination, vendor engagement, and infrastructure planning.

What I focused on

  • Designed and delivered Azure Virtual Desktop capability that helped the organisation scale from approximately 400 to 4,000 staff during the COVID-19 response, supporting critical national telehealth services.
  • Acted as incident lead during critical events, coordinating response and maintaining service continuity.
  • Provided technical leadership and mentoring to a team of five engineers.
  • Led infrastructure planning, procurement, vendor engagement, and delivery for a 70-seat contact centre and training site completed within one week.
  • Identified opportunities to improve reliability, automation, cost control, and operational maturity.

Outcome

Technology enabled a rapid organisational response at a time when service availability mattered nationally. The work demonstrates my ability to lead urgent delivery while maintaining an operational view of reliability, support, and team capability.

A note on scale

The change from approximately 400 to 4,000 refers to organisational staff growth supported by the Azure Virtual Desktop capability. It is not presented as a claim of 4,000 concurrent virtual-desktop users.