Management team

Malcolm MacMillan

National Manager, Standards New Zealand

Malcolm MacMillan leads Standards New Zealand and holds delegated authority for the statutory role of New Zealand Standards Executive under the Standards and Accreditation Act 2015. He is responsible for the strategic direction and operational leadership of the organisation, ensuring its continued role as the independent and internationally recognised national standards body of New Zealand.

Malcolm brings experience in strategic and operational leadership across a range of government agencies. His career has encompassed the design and implementation of regulatory reform, programme delivery, and performance monitoring and review functions. He has expertise in the standards and conformance ecosystem, with hands-on experience in standards development, accreditation, certification, licensing, registration, auditing, performance evaluation, and quality assurance frameworks and operations.

Central to Malcolm’s leadership is a commitment to stakeholder engagement, collaboration, and relationship management. He has witnessed the tangible benefits of standards across diverse sectors he has worked in, including building and construction, health and safety, primary industries, housing, emergency response and recovery, aviation, and both central and local government regulatory functions.

Throughout his career, Malcolm has also represented New Zealand’s interest and needs on the international stage, including at inter-governmental forums, general assemblies and various multi-lateral engagements, fronted select committees, and served on a range of industry and government advisory, inquiry, or oversight groups or committees.

Malcolm is responsible for providing strategic and operational leadership, setting the overall direction, and ensuring the effective implementation of the organization’s mission and goals. Key functions include:

• strategic leadership
• statutory compliance and accountability
• operational oversight
• stakeholder engagement and relationship management
• organisational culture
• risk management
• operational performance and impact
• international representation
• promotion and advocacy

Lynda Poletti

Manager, Products and Services

Lynda is an effective and experienced leader with a career spanning both the private and public sectors in ICT. She brings hands-on technical expertise in networking, system administration, and application support, complemented by deep capability in service management, programme and project delivery, and operational leadership. She has led large teams and managed significant budgets, while overseeing complex supplier and contractor relationships.

Her leadership style is grounded in building collaborative and supportive team cultures, with a strong focus on capability development and continuous improvement. As an IT and digital professional, Lynda embraces change and is committed to learning and innovation. She prioritises customer-centric collaboration to build trust and deliver value and is driven by the challenge of exceeding expectations and achieving exceptional outcomes. 

Lynda leads the Business Systems and Operations team at Standards New Zealand – a team of four dedicated professionals who ensure SNZ’s systems and services run smoothly, securely, and in alignment with organisational priorities. 

The team manages SNZ’s digital infrastructure, including the website, webshop, and CRM systems, and drives continuous improvement and automation. They oversee ICT service delivery, vendor relationships, and provide frontline customer support, handling subscriptions, sales, and escalated queries. The team also ensures data accuracy for performance reporting and manages SNZ’s standards catalogue and product collections.

Roy Pryer

Standards Development Manager

Roy is a people leader with experience in capability development, operational delivery, and business process improvement across diverse sectors including health and transport.

He has a strong background in delivering high quality, effective capability development programmes, and overseeing specialist projects bringing subject matter experts and project teams together to deliver. Roy creates and fosters an open and inclusive environment, managing team and stakeholder expectations, and holds himself to work in a culturally safe and equitable way.

Roy leads the Standards Development team, the engine room of Standards New Zealand, responsible for facilitating and driving the work to develop, revise, and adopt standards for Aotearoa New Zealand.

The team of project managers, project coordinators, international standards project teams, editing, and design staff work with subject matter experts across multiple sectors and government agencies to ensure New Zealand standards are accurate, high quality, and support safety, growth, and economic development for Aotearoa New Zealand.

The Standards Development team deliver a range of products supporting Aotearoa, including scoping workshops to clarify issues that standards solutions can address, standards related documents including technical reports providing key information and research findings, technical specifications setting out current consensus of opinion in areas of developing knowledge and expertise, publicly available specifications providing normative information responding to a developing market need, handbooks that provide supplementary information to support a standard or group of standards, as well as standards themselves

Clare Francis

Principal Advisor

Raised in rural New Zealand, Clare is driven by a passion for pragmatic policy that delivers real-world value. She holds a postgraduate Honours degree in Science from Victoria University of Wellington and spent over a decade at the Ministry for Primary Industries, where she held a range of roles across biosecurity and animal welfare.

Clare is widely travelled, having lived in Argentina and the United States, and brings a global perspective to her work. She is known for her critical thinking and brings deep expertise in policy development, business analysis and improvement, performance reporting, and relationship management. Her approach is grounded, thoughtful, and focused on making policy work where it matters most – in practice.

As Principal Advisor, Clare's role spans all the business teams within Standards New Zealand, and is responsible for operational policy, strategic and business planning, business and organisational development and performance reporting.

With much of Standards New Zealand focused on service delivery and standards development, this role is focused on our other types of customers, including our Minister and MBIE leadership who want to support and make sure we continue to meet our legal, policy and business obligations and objectives. Both internal and external relationship management is critical to this role.

Nick Ascroft

Acting Manager Commercial and Sectors

Within Standards New Zealand, Nick Ascroft has held important roles across standards development, products and projects, and commercial and sector engagement.

Nick has a strong working knowledge of the standards development system, with more than 10 years’ experience at Standards New Zealand, including knowledge of the standards catalogue, ISO directives, the IEC and ISO relationships, international adoptions, standards development best practices, and protocols.

His background also includes project management in the publishing industry, where he has managed projects from inception to publication, working with in-house teams, authors, freelance specialists and external companies. Nick is also a published author in his own right.

Wider leadership