PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY

• Dedicated Program/Project Management professional offering more than 15 years’ experience in managing complex, enterprise - wide technical and business projects through all phases of the project lifecycle from requirements gathering to post-production support
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills with a propensity for facilitating clear lines of communication between stakeholder and end-user communities and related project teams
• References will attest to my ability to successfully deliver in high pressure, high visibility environments with aggressive timelines

CORE COMPETENCIES

• Program/Project Management
• Project Planning & Tracking
• Change Management
• Client/Customer Engagement
• Release Planning & Management
• Staffing & Resource Management
• Requirements Elicitation & Analysis
• Vendor Management
• Risk & Issue Management
• Mentoring, Training & Team Development
• Incident Management
• On-shore/Off-shore Management
• Cohesive Team Building & Leadership
• Negotiation
• Budget Management & Cost Containment

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Confidential, Cary, NC

Program Manager

Responsibilities:

• Managed a global cross-functional SL3 Production Support team of 32, which consisted of resources from two external vendors and full-time employees for a “follow the sun” model
• Supported an Oracle database of over 70TB, as well as over 50 applications/reports
• Envisioned strategy to reduce external vendor headcount, which resulted in cost savings of $500K/year
• Defined, documented and enforced the group’s standard KPIs, reporting and key controls
• Negotiated statements of work (SOW), SLAs and RACIs with external vendors, as well as IT & Business stakeholders
• Ensured all release documentation was updated on JIRA, as well as uploaded to SharePoint by Developers and Analysts
• Created and maintained group charter, team information, release details, status updates and issue/incident tracking on Confluence
• Managed yearly budget requests, as well as monthly budget updates and forecasts of up to $5MM within the Project Portfolio Management tool of Clarity
• Led end-to-end delivery of quarterly and monthly code releases needed to resolve Production incidents/tasks, as well as monthly backloading releases to address trades that require additional handling or that needed to be re-loaded due to technical issues
• Responsible for resolving any Production incidents to get the Business able to resume work, as well as any remaining tasks to get the Business back to normal
• Ensured team updated ServiceNow with updates on open incident/problem tasks, as well as tickets from Business clients
• Established and maintained relationships with key Business stakeholders, external vendors and other IT counterparts
• Improved customer satisfaction (achieving 90% rating up from below 50% when hired) by concentrating on backlog ticket reviews and assigning tickets to developers with the most appropriate expertise
• Created and led the process to identify the group’s backlog and gain Business stakeholder agreement for upcoming release scope
• Led process to create monthly metric reports and reviewed with Business stakeholders of tickets resolved, JIRAs deployed & trades backloaded
• Worked with SL2 Production Support team to develop a more cohesive working relationship, as well as gained agreement for them to handle the initial investigation/analysis of questions/issues that come through as tickets
• Managed decommissioning of applications that have been deemed end-of-life or have been replaced by other tools/reports

Confidential,NC

Release Management/Change Control

Responsibilities:

• Led two Change Control Boards to manage changes to over 100+ Customer Care applications with 9000+ global users on one of the world’s largest Oracle platforms supporting $6B of annual Services revenue
• Reviewed and enforced 1000+ change requests/ quarter to reduce disruptions to service attributable to change. Prevented incident related costs of $575K/quarter
• Liaised between IT Operations and Application Management functions in areas of Release Management and Change Control
• Planned release activities with global Business Operations and Support teams to ensure readiness
• Planned Release Management Office’s release warranty/normalization period based upon size and complexity
• Implemented a Central Command Center for post Go-Live issue support coordination
• Led smoke test creation, walk-throughs and execution for Practice Runs and Go-Live
• Worked with global Business Operations and Support to define, measure and communicate normalization and stabilization metrics
• Worked with Production Support team to develop business continuity plans for major quarterly releases

Vendor Lead/Project Management/Program Management

Confidential

Responsibilities:

• Successfully managed aggressive schedules in high-pressure environments while liaising between internal development teams, business stakeholders, QA, infrastructure, Support and Security
• Managed a Business Objects upgrade from R2 to R3, which includes communications and live sessions to discuss impacts, next steps and timelines to over 700 Business users
• Managed a business rules engine (Drools) and skills management database/tools integrated with Salesforce.com to provide skills-based service request routing for global support organization
• Managed business requirements, changes to business requirements, created and maintained project plans, tracked timelines, issues lists and deliverables
• Obtained and consolidated funding for projects, managed approved project budgets totaling over $2MM annually
• Hired Project Managers, on behalf of Links Technology, based on required skill-set
• Led an IT Project Management team of 16 people on various projects
• Mentored new and existing Links IT Project Managers on internal Cisco processes and tools
• Managed the first project within Connected IT Services to use Agile (SCRUM) methodology
• Responsible for creation of road maps for Unified Call Center Enterprise program (skills-based routing)
• Collaborated with IT and Business teams to report status to senior management
• Tested applications for functionality; logged, updated and closed bugs
• Assisted in planning and coordinating the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) strategy
• Assisted in the creation of training plans for P1/P2 (customer-facing) applications

Confidential

Project Manager

Responsibilities:

• Managed projects ranging from data center move, internal systems redesign and internal application enhancements
• Created project plans, tracking timelines and deliverables, maintained issues lists and reporting weekly status to senior management, as well as daily status to development team members and internal customers
• Created use-cases and process flows after accessing the status and scope of the project and business processes
• Managed release of all changes into the Production environment to ensure needed documentation (files to be moved, rollback steps and release notes) and tracking of changes
• Developed and managed necessary audit parameters to ensure all Production changes were deployed, maintained a high standard of accuracy in accordance to the Business unit’s objectives
• Monitored various IT and business metrics to ensure data integrity
• Worked with development to create alerts on key business metrics as required
• Developed and managed User Acceptance Testing process
• Managed a Help Desk team of 7, which included junior programmers, DBAs and junior system infrastructure engineers for support of website and applications on 24x7 basis at 4 locations across country & internationally
• Managed the internal IT Request system where internal customers enter tasks for IT to complete that are outside of project scope
• Managed IT Request Customer survey results, which were completed after every task, in order to manage team performance and discover weaknesses. Maintained an average Customer Satisfaction Rate of 4.37 (out of 5.0) between 6 internal groups.
• Developed staff through training and succession plans
• SME and trainer for new hires within all divisions on in-house CRM and inventory/purchasing applications
• Managed a 3-person QA team responsible for testing all in-house applications and website changes
• Managed testing cycles, test plan development and implementation of test and software distribution environments
• Managed deployment of client-based software packages

Confidential

Business Systems Analyst/Project Manager

Responsibilities:

• Created project plans, tracked timelines and deliverables, created and maintained issues lists
• Created game plans and reported weekly status to senior management, as well as daily status to team members
• Served as a liaison between the business proponents, cross-divisional development teams and QA
• Created business requirements for the Business Online Banking Customer Clean-up Project
• Designed and documented use cases for business requirements
• Created servicing strategy for Bankers when troubleshooting customer issues
• Assisted in writing text for new screens and error messages
• Liaison to Lines of Business, as well as other groups for all QA questions, issues or concerns
• Worked closely with Lines of Business and developers to communicate changing requirements to WEB QA Analysts.
• Created multiple estimates, which included scenario planning, for WEB QA effort
• Responsible for coordinating QA testing strategy
• Participated in daily Lines of Business meetings to discuss failed URLs and logged bugs
• Participated in testing URLs, as well as logging, updating and closing known bugs
• Created procedures for installation upgrades, maintenance and unplanned outages
• Coordinated creating Security plan and gathering needed approvals
• Developed and maintained application request process between 12 internal customers and 20 service providers
• Developed and maintained internal customer application sponsorship process, which guided Customers responsible for licensing, vendor management and Y2K application(s) certification for the NT 4.0 platform
• Developed and maintained an application “check-out” process that allows Product Management to install and launch applications once in Production before software is distributed to customers
• Served as an Application Subject Matter Expert supporting internal groups and customers with application-specific information
• Developed Product Request Tool, a web-based application, which allows customers to become their own Project Manager
• Led an engineering team of 15 for $29M Windows NT 4.0 conversion from Windows 95/Novell 3.x platform impacting 14,000 users
• Ensured that all applications were engineered for NT platform and delivered to internal Customers
• Worked closely with end-users and engineers to communicate application requirements
• Supported all field technicians and Implementation Project Managers during migration effort, including tracking status of applications, reported bugs and corresponding fixes
• Developed and led User Acceptance Testing process that allowed Customers to test application(s) before released into Production
• Managed in-house network service request queue (NSR) that varied from 35 to 80 requests/month. Met with the assigned resources regarding customer requirements, coordinated the work from other groups, and monitored progress on specific requests
• Resolved licensing issues with various vendors and communicated with vendors regarding software and hardware needs
• Engaged Customers to measure satisfaction
• Served as Workflow Coordinator to a technical staff of 19
• Coordinated personnel issues with engineering leads, including screening potential employees and contractors, liaison with recruiting agencies, maintaining personnel files, and assisting with hiring and firing for the group
• Responsibilities included extensive travel to remotely managed staff in Arizona
• Prepared monthly team budgets and conferred with financial officer each quarter to discuss projected costs and accrued invoicing
• Coordination of cross-divisional projects, which included organization of standard operating systems for 200 servers in multiple states
• Organized the selection, testing and support of $750k enterprise deployment of products to standardize open database connectivity
• Produced Customer Service Agreements for internal/external groups; outlined responsibility and timelines for information and escalation procedures