SUMMARY:

• Solutions architect with diversified background and 23 years of IT experience.
• Strategic and out of the box thinker.
• Strong analytical, troubleshooting, project management, training and development skills.
• Strong mainframe background.
• Development experience with Cobol, Java, Visual Basic, Natural and Rexx. Additional experience includes SQL and SQL Server Reporting Services.
• Experience building interfaces between multiple systems in a complex distributed environment.
• 23 years experience in financial services company and student loan industry
• Experience in call center/customer service environment
• Experienced in most aspects of student loan life cycle with special emphasis on acquisitions and merger activities; transferring large portfolios of loans to and from contrary systems through automation.
• Conversion Expert, instrumental in merger and acquisition activities. Led many conversion efforts under very aggressive time frames. One effort involved rewriting a system during the same time we built new automated processes. Project was completed on time and manager at the time said 'it was one of the cleanest conversions we had ever had'. Effort saved thousands of hours of work by multiple departments and was the largest conversion the company had done.
• 5 years experience as Solutions Architect in distributed environment
• Experience developing prototypes, re - engineering and reverse engineering processes
• Designed interest only payment process in legacy system
• Designed a solution to introduce participation loans in student loan arena
• Designed an interface to create loan data from commonline information. Solution would allow lenders to use external originators and our company for servicing OR if the lender chose to do so, we could do it all. Process allows more options to drive revenue.
• Designed "Board Ready Reports" to increase revenue from serviced lenders using SQL and SSRS
• Implemented a process to decommission home grown accounting package and replace with Great Plains
• Implemented a COTS product to handle automated report delivery and bursting and monitoring in a distributed environment.
• Designed interface to link imaging and phone systems to mainframe environment
• Out of the box thinking often leads to quick solutions to complex problems. Led effort to use open source software for borrower statements which generated results in 5 days.
• Over 10 years experience as Technical/Team Lead
• Led design efforts in distributed environment; worked with individual teams and as part of a larger architecture group to develop solutions.
• Helped build standardized design process; rolled out to development team
• Mentored and trained less experienced developers. Experience leading workers at remote sites.
• Led combined working sessions with the business and development teams to work through complicated requirements and process flow.
• Implemented development environments; Microfocus, Revolve and Netbeans. Developed repeatable processes and templates.
• Implemented night run recovery training to help build our team skills.
• Over 10 years experience managing projects
• Managed projects of varying size from days to many months.
• Projects included staffing of myself and up to 10 programmers and multiple technologies. Users both internal and external to the company.
• Good at communicating status to management
• Over 10 years experience training and facilitating
• Created in house training tailored to company practices.
• Facilitate working sessions between business and architects to discuss solutions to new problems
• Provide mentoring to developers on a daily basis and help teach best practices
• Good at drawing out requirements; brainstorming and documenting processes
• Quick learner, good at sharing skills with others. Consistently seek out learning opportunities; including training on my own time and expense. Often seek out webinars and tutorials to learn new skills when training dollars are tight.
• Strong development and troubleshooting skills
• Self starter and take initiative to propose permanent solutions to problems
• Good project estimating skills
• Good at identifying root cause. Concentrating on the real cause of the problem saved maintenance costs and provided permanent solutions to errors.
• Developed recovery processes where none previously existed or where existing processes would not function; mostly during night run and system down situations.

TECHNICAL SKILLS:

Hardware: IBM; System 36, System 38, 4361, 4381, ES/9221, X235 VSE emulation on Unix; Windows servers

Mainframe skills: COBOL, CICS, BMS, AFP printing, JCL, Ditto, Viaserv, SyncSort, VSAM, Natural/Adabas, Rexx, ICCF, E - business connectors, FTP, TCPIP, System Definitions and supplied transactions Natural, Java, Visual Basic, Rexx, SQL, SQL Reporting Services, Vitria (EAI/BPM messaging platform)

Windows applications: Word, Excel, Power Point, Visio, Visual Studio, Subversion/Tortoise, Source Safe, Microfocus, Revolve, Netbeans DOC1 software (Letter and form generation), ACH processing, credit bureau reporting, Octotools (Bursting/Form generation)

EXPERIENCE:

Confidential, Aberdeen, SD

Software Engineer

Responsibilities:

• Software Architecture duties; conceptual designs, building prototypes, streamlining processes, reverse engineering
• Leading team of developers in distributed environment, implementing code and design reviews
• Proposing solutions for complex business needs, streamlining and reengineering processes; proposing solutions to resolve government regulations with vague guidance.
• Assisted in implementation of standards for documentation; night run support, procedures, design and estimation process.
• Initial point of contact for business users that report problems with the systems; analyze problem and turn around solutions quickly to support call center
• Standardized end user documentation, skilled technical writer