SUMMARY:

• Technology Project Manager and People Manager with more than 20 years of global expertise leading and supporting initiatives to create, localize, and deploy new, innovative technology products.
• Experience includes Agile / Scrum / Waterfall and end to end leadership through the SDLC.

TECHNICAL SKILLS:

• C#.NET, T - SQL, VSTS, VSO, TFS, XML, HTML, Perl, COBOL, JCL, CICS, PowerShell
• Microsoft Office, Microsoft Project, SharePoint, Visio, JIRA
• Automated Identification and Marking of New and Changed Content in Structured Documents

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:

Confidential, Redmond, WA

Technical Project Manager

• Managed public updates (Patch Tuesday) for Microsoft Office. This is a critical path, high profile, $4 billion business requiring strong cross-organization communication, coordination and partnership.
• Partnered with Senior Leadership, Engineering and Release Management to implement system changes that reduced the manual effort to release monthly updates by 40%.
• Designed, coded, tested and implemented a series tools to reduce the manual effort to release periodic updates by 60% by developing a strong technical understanding of existing systems, their business impact, dependencies and stakeholders.
• Analyzed the project space to proactively identify potential risks and took action to mitigate these risks before they became a significant issue.
• Readily implemented course correction to adapt to changes in schedule, team composition, deliverables and business priority.
• Communicated and documented the progress of critical path releases including implementation, timelines, issues, successes, risks and actions taken.
• Documented processes and procedures to ensure business continuity.

Technical Project Manager

• Managed the SDLC for the U-Verse Mobile application for iOS and Windows (a combined user base of 1.6 million)
• Coached team members on the reasons behind Scrum / Agile to raise the maturity of the organization and promote employee engagement.
• Built a productive, trusting and safe environment where problems can be raised without fear of blame, retribution, or being judged, with an emphasis of healing and problem solving.
• Ensured that retrospectives produced actionable tasks and worked with the team to implement recommendations successfully and in a timely manner.
• Worked with the Product Owner to clarify business requirements (Stories) and align cross functional teams to the defined needs of internal and external customers.
• Worked across organizational boundaries (Engineering, Marketing, Data Strategy, Client Services, Legal, External Vendors, etc.) to remove impediments and facilitate cross-group collaboration.
• Coordinated review of last minute change requests and their introduction to the Product Backlog while allowing the project team to focus on the current sprint.
• Led backlog grooming sessions, release planning, sprint planning, daily standup, and retrospectives.
• Created and implemented a stakeholder engagement plan to communicate the health of the project, focus efforts, identify & address risks, foster cross-group collaboration and to make sure projects continued to meet business needs.
• Managed regular system maintenance projects using traditional PM methodologies - created detailed project plans, resource estimates, measurable deliverables, milestones, KPIs, identified dependencies, critical path, success criteria and release schedules to ensure transparency.

Senior Content Engineering Manager

• Managed a 26 person engineering team (5 Full time, 21 Vendors) to produce and publish content updates to the 10th most visited site in the world
• Built a healthy, highly productive team of engineers from a group that was on the edge of collapse.
• Created system roadmaps for successfully delivering product goals along with budget and forecasting.
• Managed successful execution of large-scale, multi-functional projects to support strategic initiatives across enterprise, in partnership with business leadership.
• Prioritized workload across what were often conflicting business needs.
• Provided tactical and strategic direction to improve focus and reduce randomization.
• Introduced actionable KPIs, analytics, and metrics to quantitatively track project progress.
• Introduced and drove a series of scalable project management changes which significantly increased the transparency, predictability and efficiency of the engineering team and consumer space
• Implemented a targeted communication plan to ensure visibility for disparate stakeholders for project health, risks, mitigation, action items and key decisions.
• Managed a $1.6 million budget
• Reviewed and approved contracts, purchase orders, and schedules submitted by outside parties contributing to the project.

Senior Program Manager

• Managed the SDLC for the Customer Care Framework system (used by Xbox support agents) using best practices from Agile and Waterfall Methodology.
• Led a cross-functional team focused on process redesign and software development to significantly increase the scope of work delivered by the CCF engineering team (~43%) while maintaining costs.
• Ensured system availability (+99.9%) and reliability (system incidents impacting users <= 2%, our goal was <4%)
• Partnered with business and engineering leadership to understand organizational priorities, functional requirements, technical constraints and identify highest value deliverables to meet customer needs
• Worked with senior leadership to address significant cultural issues which were negatively impacting the space by promoting transparency, collaboration, prioritization, and results focus.
• Led scope definition, requirements gathering and spec reviews.
• Identified critical path, managed external and inter-team dependencies, and coordinated timelines for all dependency deliverables to minimize time to market.
• Delivered the single biggest customer request for Windows XP Embedded SP 2 by programmatically generating 11,000+ help topics and integrating them with content provided by authors.
• Created and delivered a series of tools to address customer request to identify new and changed content in compiled help modules (see patent).
• Created new reports to summarize and detail status by due date, deliverable and owner. This greatly improved the team’s ability to manage workflow by identifying potential problems weeks in advance rather than days.
• Designed and coded structured, easily maintained programs in C# to support critical path business needs.
• Architected and deployed in-house production SQL Server. Wrote stored procedures and views, implemented security and backup procedures.
• Implemented quick start training for new employees reducing ramp up time by as much as 25%.

Manager, Application Systems

• Directly supervised 1 Unit Manager and 9 Programmer Analysts. Responsible for a 15 member technical department comprised of mainframe Programmer Analysts, Systems Analysts, Technical Analysts and PC Programmer Analysts.
• Ensured production availability of critical path corporate enterprise systems (Agency Management, Policy Rating, Leasing, Bankcard and Retail Loan Systems).
• Partnered with business customers to create strategic plans, objectives, determine implementation schedules and project deliverables.
• Analyzed customer software needs to advance companywide technology strategy.

Programmer Analyst & Manager

• Assumed leadership of a unit in crisis and built a productive, cooperative team and fostered positive relationships with business partners.
• Delivered a company-wide software solution within 4 months of taking leadership of the development team. This project had been overdue by 2 1/2 years.
• Managed the Associate Programmer Analyst program, a training program for entry level programmers. APA graduates were considered among the most successful employees with over 85% company retention rate.
• Ensured production availability of critical path corporate financial systems (General Ledger, Cash Disbursement, and Tax Reporting).
• Designed and coded structured, easily maintained programs in COBOL, Assembler CICS and JCL. Provided on-call support to crucial path enterprise financial systems.
• Project Lead for a multi-departmental team (Technical Support, Network Support, Security, and Human Resources) in evaluating business needs, analyzing options, developing proposals, and implementing system to allow Life Co. Human Resources to work with confidential data in a network environment.
• Provided technical and coding support for the company's overhead departments, comprising over 200 users (HR, Controllers, Legal, Actuarial, Management, Training & Development, Library, Campus Services, and Systems Associate Training).
• Managed projects through Business Analysis, Requirements Gathering, Logical Design, Physical Design, Programming, Testing, Implementation and follow-up.