PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY:

• Strong qualifications in full - cycle project management and cross-functional leadership highlighted by a track record of building motivated project teams that top performers want to join and working effectively within each organization’s unique culture.
• PMI certified Project Manager with more than 18 years of IT experience with 7 years of progressive experience in Project Management and team management.
• Deep understanding of software development life cycle (SDLC) and project management methodologies, processes and tools, including PMBOK and Agile/Scrum.
• Project Management experience preceded by more than 11 years of hands-on development experience.
• Designed, developed, tested, implemented and maintained (object-oriented) business and technical applications.
• Solid educational foundation with dual M.S. degrees, including in Computer and Information Science.
• Served as Technical Program/Project Manager and Scrum Master running multiple sprint teams on large and complex information technology projects.
• Managed development teams (onshore/nearshore/offshore) and concurrent customer-facing application development projects including Business Intelligence applications; worked closely with business partners and stakeholders from various internal, vendor, and client departments. Utilized a collaborative management style to gain cooperation, motivate and focus technical teams on innovation, speed and business value.
• Maintained a high customer satisfaction rate by keeping projects on track, proactively addressing risks/issues and implementing business practices to reduce operating expenses and increase efficiencies, which included introducing checks and balances for managing effort/time and task reporting.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT & LEADERSHIP STRENGTHS:

• Project Strategizing and Planning
• Program/Project Management
• Vendor/Contract Management
• Client Interface
• SOWs Requirements Gathering
• Global Sourcing
• Cross-Functional/Onshore-Offshore Team Leadership
• Risk Mitigation
• Solution Design/Delivery
• Application Development - Web and Client/Server
• Waterfall, Agile/Scrum and Incremental development
• Business Intelligence
• Process improvement
• Budgeting and Reporting
• Compliance and Regulatory projects

TECHNICAL SKILLS:

Operating systems: Windows 7/XP/2000/NT, Unix/Linux

Languages: C# (Visual Studio), .NET, ASP.NET, ASP, XML, XSL, HTML, VB.Net, VB/Java Script, Java, VSS VC++/MFC, VB, Visual Install Professional, SQL, Delphi.

Software tools: Microsoft Project, Visio, MS Office suite (PowerPoint, Outlook, Excel, Word), Clarity, Plan View, STAMP, CREST, Macromedia 8, SharePoint, Applix, Answerlink, CATIA, I-DEAS, AutoCAD, Accusoft, IBM Lotus Notes.

Databases: MongoDB, MS-SQL Server, AS, SSIS, ORACLE, Pervasive, DB2, MS Access

EXPERIENCE:

Confidential, Phoenix, AZ

Senior IT P roject Manager

Responsibilities:

• Leading a talented team of managers, engineers, architects, user experience designers, and quality engineers to develop new products efficiently in an Agile/Scrum software development environment.
• Managing highly visible and complex program/projects partnering with business managers, product owners and senior leadership.
• Scheduled and conducted daily stand-ups, retrospectives, sprint planning sessions, and weekly status meetings with engineering, product and business.
• Tracked/Communicated sprint/release progress and documented/updated status of defects in JIRA.
• Selectively escalated issues and managed risk identification and mitigation efforts.
• Conducted reviews of user stories and design/code/test walk thru to resolve impediments for meeting the acceptance criteria.
• Managed sprint tasks across dependent teams and aligned the releases from various application teams.
• Motivated the teams for the common goal of building and deploying a high quality application to production on schedule.
• Collaborated with teams across Business, Product, Tech, and QA and quickly turned around the program/projects by establishing a release to production date.
• Managed highly visible and complex applications and deployed them successfully to production and provided post production support - Application Center and Financial Planner.

Confidential, Phoenix, AZ

Project Manager - Senior

Responsibilities:

• Managed complex multi-million dollar projects from project initiation through deployment using the Solution Delivery Life Cycle (SDLC) framework/process.
• Led multiple cross-functional projects concurrently in a matrixed environment with vendor resources from several vendor companies in a distributed environment.
• Tracked, reviewed and approved vendor deliverables and payments.
• Developed and maintained high level and detailed Project plans.
• Identified, tracked and managed critical path and key project milestones.
• Facilitated requirements gathering and functional specification development.
• Ensured project deliverables (including documents) are SDLC compliant and all system of records for project reporting are kept current.
• Communicated project status including financials (Actual/Budget/Forecast), risks/issues and mitigation plans to senior leadership.
• Developed strong relationships with stakeholders across IT, vendors and Business partners.
• Coached and mentored team members including project managers, business analysts and test managers.
• Verified requirements and negotiated estimates from development teams for effort, cost, schedule and scope.
• Proactively identified and managed risks and ensured that the teams followed the mitigation plans.
• Used Agile principles (daily stand-ups, removing delivery impediments on a daily basis) in water fall model projects to ensure close control on scope, schedule and cost. Managed inter dependencies between projects and scope change process (Change Management).
• Facilitated SIT, UAT and PIV efforts including lessons learned. Identified platform enhancement initiatives and process improvements for Confidential .
• Incorporated customer feedback from the BAU processes onto development projects.
• Organized, led, and facilitated system design, project reviews, project planning meetings, weekly status meetings, and other project related workshops like Joint Application Design Review (JADR). Contributed to continual process improvement and re-engineering activities for the portfolio.
• Successfully delivered several large, complex projects including compliance and regulatory projects on aggressive schedules within budget and with high quality and customer satisfaction.
• Completed successful implementation of a complex multi-million ($6M) dollar project - CMLD (Card Member Legal Disclosures). The implementation of this project saves Confidential more than a million dollars a year.
• Successfully managed the merger of a multi-million dollar project - Merged two large projects MEA and Welcome Kit and managed the merged/integrated project through the Analyze phase.
• Successfully reorganized the Pack Engine Foundation project. Within months of taking up this project, was able to turn around the project to a successful one in terms of scope, cost and quality from a state of chaos. Ensured that project performance measured well within the established targets for cost, schedule, scope and quality.
• Successfully managed the projects end-to-end from Initiation through Analyze, Design, Build, Test, Implementation, Warranty and Closure. Projects were delivered on schedule and within the budget with outstanding quality. (List of projects: CMA Archive Phase II, Re-engineer CMA Reorder to BPS, Event Manager migration to Informatica, Migration of select Solar services to Data Power, CMA Service Migration, Conversion of CMA to PDF, NAC Migration, and CMA Archive Phase III).
• Managed various phases of the projects - UDAP MYCA PDF project, UDAP AOT Phase2, International MYCA T&C, Airspace Lounge, Project Garnett, Continental Decomm.

Confidential, Phoenix, AZ

Technical Program/Project Manager

Responsibilities:

• Led team of 50+, including 9 managers (development managers, business analyst manager, production support manager, infrastructure manager, QA lead) supporting Wholesale Line of Business (7000 users) to achieve double-digit growth targets through enhancement of the relationship management and cross-sell processes, reuse of data, electronic retrieval of information, and electronic linkages to other applications.
• Organized and led Daily Scrum (standup), reviews, retrospectives, show-and-tell, and other project- related meetings.
• Led sprint planning and release planning by working with Business Managers/Product Owners to build and maintain a prioritized back log.
• Managed Program/Project financials - Forecast/funding/Actuals.
• Tracked and communicated team velocity, sprint/release progress - through project dashboards, burn down charts, status/progress reports and presentations.
• Identified risks, supported program/project risk mitigation, escalated issues as needed, removed delivery impediments/roadblocks, prevented distractions that interfere with the ability of the team and helped the delivery teams meet their iteration goals/commitments.
• Maintained dependency plans between planned sprints across application teams, infrastructure, and third party vendors and facilitated conflict resolution.
• Maintained process documentation and ensured EPM (Enterprise Process Methodology) compliance.
• Tracked/followed-up project approvals, documents, and deliverables - CREST, Security Plan, Infrastructure, Service accounts, BRDs (Business Requirement Documents), SOW(Statement of Work), PDD (Project Definition Document), iteration sign-offs, issue log, risk log, project status reports, project plan and communication plan.
• Successfully met all objectives: Established project using Agile/Scrum methodologies and tools, and completed iterations to clients' satisfaction.

Confidential, Pittsburgh, PA

Project Manager

Responsibilities:

• Managed and coached large cross-functional teams (Lead Developers, Application Developers, and Quality Analysts) both onsite and offshore on the custom development and deployment of end-to-end ecommerce solutions (customer-facing web applications) at client site - a publicly traded retailer of apparel and accessories with 7 divisions.
• Organized meetings with clients, business users, and vendors to gather requirements and manage project scope; translated
• Business requirements to developers; developed statement of work (SOW), and costs for projects; created and maintained project plan; clearly defined expectations, milestones and deliverables; assessed resource requirements; assembled project teams; managed project tracking (in comparison to project cost/schedule forecasts), identified/mitigated risks; maintained project information repository; provided weekly status reports/updates to senior-management/stakeholders with updated risk management matrix, issues log and actions list; initiated and managed change requests; completed acceptance documentation and obtained client approval.
• Identified root causes of issues and resolved conflicts among vendors and internal development team. Transferred solution to the Operations team for ongoing maintenance.
• Managed the development of functional specifications for an end-to-end ecommerce solution (order capture, order management, fulfillment, site merchandising, reporting and integration to Reitmans corporate backend systems) for Reitmans.com. Oversaw onshore and offshore team members and motivated team to complete project on schedule and within budget despite aggressive deadlines.
• Managed the enhancement of a million dollar project through change requests. Developed and executed a change management plan and successfully implemented change requests which improved website functionality and increased customer satisfaction and conversion rates