SUMMARY

Executive-level Project Manager with eighteen years of progressively responsible travel-industry and software related experience in Global Release and Project Management, Billing and Telecommunications, Vendor Management, Call Centre Infrastructure, Program Management, Training, Sales and Customer Service. Exceptional analytical experience in defining global consumer needs, coordinating resources and leading teams to implement projects. Successfully maintained high customer satisfaction through responsive communication, quality assurance measures and creative problem solving skills. Multi-lingual, fluent in German and English.

EMPLOYMENT HISTORY

Confidential

• Client Engagement: Engage with client to identify release objectives, requirements, schedule, and budget. Write detailed business cases for project kick-off.
• Sponsor / Stakeholder Management: Identify and engage appropriate sponsors and stakeholders to obtain plan of record POR agreement, funding, and support of release.
• Communication Management: Communicate status to clients and stakeholders according to established service level agreements. Ensure timely and appropriate generation, collection, dissemination, storage, and ultimate disposition of release information. Manage all business reviews with appropriate stakeholders.
• Collaboration / Virtual Team Leadership: Identify and manage a cross-group team for appropriate work streams with deliverables and milestones to enable the release. Work directly with management and cross-divisional groups to ensure that the right information, resources, processes, and communications are deployed to support specific business objectives.
• Schedule Management: Ensure coordinated scheduling and timely completion of the release activities across all work streams and in the appropriate region s . Manage milestones and drive releases to on-time delivery and completion, allowing for successful implementation across all groups and geographies.
• Release Governance/Framework: Engage key stakeholders and executive sponsors through an established release framework and ongoing rhythm of the business for consistency and repeatable release processes. Apply lessons-learned/best practices and post-mortem feedback to ensure continuous improvements through a standardized release management toolset.
• Benefits Management: Identify, ensure proper analysis, quantify, baseline and enable benefits or improvements tracking financial, KPIs etc. .
• Customer Partner Experience CPE : Ensure the design and implementation of the release delivers the most positive customer partner experience. Project Management:
• Project Management:
• Scope / Change Management: Define and control what is included and not included in the release while ensuring all work required to complete the release successfully is included.
• Risk / Issue Management: Identify, analyze, respond to, and track release issues and risks.
• Quality Management: Ensure the release meets the defined quality standards.
• Cost Management: Manage the release within approved budget.
• Overall Integration: Ensure the various elements of the release are properly coordinated. It may involve making or driving tradeoffs among competing objectives and alternatives to meet or exceed stakeholder needs and expectations.
• Accountable for planning, organizing, and controlling all activities associated with the releases of the DES products to support sites that are of larger in scope and are typically longer in duration.
• Accountable for the delivery of the business and IT aspects of the project, ensuring the project is delivered on time, within budget, having realized the benefits to the business as outlined in the project Business Case.
• Managed several large releases within the XBOX CSS team with an international environment
• Responsible for projects that require special attention due to the sensitivity and critical nature
• Manage All up DES projects which include Surface, WP and Xbox across multiple LOB's
• Strategically and effectively positions services in the mind of BG/PG, Partners and Customers.
• Proven experience in driving change through influence

Confidential

• Quality Program:
• Create and implement Quality reports for analysts' performance measurement and improvement / coaching plans
• Drive cross-operational synchronization and collaboration regarding common alert scoring
• Establish QA scorecard as part of analysts' scorecards to include QA scores, feedback and escalations
• Develop Kudos program for Front line to drive motivation and healthy competition
• Develop coaching plans for areas of opportunities
• KPI and Scorecard creation and management:
• Work with the Front Line to understand requirements for reporting out of the new tool.
• Work with Frontline to establish a RFO process and data analysis.
• Review scorecard metrics during the monthly business review.
• Create performance measurements and coaching plans
• Release Management:
• Manage XBOX releases through war room facilitation, issue tracking and regular internal and external communications
• Facilitation of pre-launch Dry-runs to ensure awareness and reiteration of the escalation tree
• Process Improvement and Change Management Process:
• Create a tracking mechanism where members will be accountable to input their current projects, key deliverables and dates , issues, risks, help needed.
• This same process/meeting will act as the Change Management board where any changes to the specific project will be approved, approved with modifications, sent back, rejected, etc.
• Collaborate with key members of service delivery, release management, tools and infrastructure teams, to ensure Mission Control is meeting the expectations of those external teams and stakeholders
• Onboarding of new Microsoft LOBs lines of businesses and tools to Mission Control
• Drive internal satisfaction, credibility and trust by developing partnerships with various groups across the business
• Create, test and implement Mission Control Redundancy Plan to ensure 24/7 coverage between US and India group

Confidential

• Supported the German Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing Platform launch
• Assisted in ensuring the quality of translated materials, and performed direct translation of English Kindle support into German support material
• Managed communications with self-publishers in German and English
• Drove expedient resolution and root cause analysis for critical issues affecting Kindle publishing
• Monitored community discussion boards in both English and German , aggregated information and conducted data analysis to demonstrate customer trends and needs, conveying publisher sentiments, and suggesting improvements
• Managed all operations requirements, timelines and deliverables regarding to web site and tools team projects, enhancements, upgrades and code pushes.
• Owner of German Email Communication Blurbs, Help Pages and Customer Forums

Confidential

• Managed Project Management Group PMG

• Oversaw the Project Managers' assignment of day-to-day and on-going duties.
• Designed, built and managed PMG resource planning and capacity process.
• Designed, developed, implemented and managed the PMG business plan.
• Identified, implemented and managed a standard set of PMG document templates to ensure consistent enterprise standards.
• Managed Project and Product roadmap through regular interaction with Product Planning.
• Designed, built, implemented and managed a PMG intake and priority process for business, technical and customer service teams.

• Managed the Operations stage gate process, including oversight of impact analysis and project scheduling.
• Conducted Business Assessments as a subject matter expert.
• Coordinated the implementation of new projects/initiatives within Business Operations

• Defined/validated the opportunity
• Finalized agreed approach and timeline
• Determined measurement, today and in the future, tangible results, and intangible soft results.
• Evaluated current measurement systems with understanding of variation causes, problems.
• Created data collection plans
• Determined scope
• Created and managed a project plan set milestones
• Created a communications plan and maintained communications with key stakeholders

• Facilitated a process focused perspective leveraging Lean Six Sigma

• Defined/mapped processes to be improved
• Defined what is critical to travelers and link to Voice of Customer data
• Integrated new process into the contact centers

• Continuous Improvement: Determined necessary project improvements, facilitated solutions, coordinated updates to centers, enhanced process maps.

Confidential

• Created and executed full partner communication plans to drive incremental revenue and overall partner growth.
• Drove measurement and ROI analysis internally on various objectives and deliver results for partners.
• Developed partner marketing plans to integrate new tools/services into existing partner sites.
• Provided on-going financial forecasting for partner business.
• Renegotiated contract extensions for partner base that may include new business models or unique retention opportunities.
• Contributed to monthly newsletter content including partner opportunities, site changes/upgrades and revenue benefits and growth opportunities.
• Worked to successfully resolve partner issues related to all aspects of the relationship.
• Provided detailed monthly and quarterly performance reports for key partners along with ongoing site/technology improvement recommendations.
• Ensured partner delivers on contractual merchandising placement commitments.
• Worked with various teams and key players within Expedia, Inc. to ensure partners' needs are met.
• Worked within marketing and merchandising budgets set for each partner.
• Maintained partner performance trending statistics.
• Defined objectives, executed plans to achieve them and measure the overall and incremental impact of these initiatives.
• Proactively developed feature/functionality ROI analysis, product planning, and execution/measurement for scalable, profitable R D/process initiatives for partnership. Clearly quantified and communicated project benefits through business requirement summaries.
• Participated in the spec review process and championed requirements through implementation.
• Implemented new features/functionality/processes.
• Took leadership role in developing near and long-term strategy for feature/functionality investments based on market opportunities.

Confidential

• Managed all operations requirements, timelines and deliverables regarding out sourced daily centre operations with regard to web site and tools team projects, upgrades and hot fixes.
• Reviewed upcoming specifications provided feedback to Program Managers regarding potential impact to call center and fulfillment operations
• Managed the release process as it affects North America fulfillment partners by coordinating and overseeing the requirements gathering, development, testing and deployment processes
• Managed all aspects of rolling out new features from web site and tools teams, including upgrades or hot fixes to the call center and fulfillment operations.
• Provided triage and troubleshooting for web site and IT Systems issues as appropriate
• Gathered feedback from call center operations, analyzed feedback and provided consolidated, prioritized recommendations on software development requirements to Product Strategy, web site development and tools development teams
• Drove standardisation, where appropriate, into Operations teams across North American cruise sales and service to minimize initial and on-going costs in areas such as process, systems and tool development.

Confidential

• Six years experience of implementation of both recurrent and new hire call center training for customer service performing at 80 of full time employee level, and sales performing at 110 of full time employee level.
• Developed and maintained training curriculum, including new hire manuals in leisure and corporate travel environment.
• Delivered and developed call center wide web site release training and support.
• Developed, implemented and coordinated recurrent and niche training for non-call center departments and management.
• Managed, developed, and utilized several teams of Training Advocates.
• Tracked, reported, and evaluated the effectiveness of training solutions and make changes to programs based on feedback provided ROI analysis and recommendations.

Confidential

• Sixteen years of customer service experience in retail, hospitality and call center environment.
• Ten years of management experience in a call center environment predominantly in the travel industry.
• Managed airline reservation team of 30 employees including bi-lingual desks supporting two centers.
• Provided account service and corporate air-, car- and hotel reservations for Lockheed Martin.
• Developed, trained and practiced CEM customer experience management for customer retention.
• Extended excellent customer service to the Elite Gold members and assisting with frequent flyer questions and upgrades.

• Ten years of sales experience in retail, hospitality and call center environment.
• Received Top Sales Person award for three consecutive quarters with major airline.
• Developed and delivered extensive sales training for call center of 80 employees.