Project Management Professional (PMP®) with almost fifteen years experience in project leadership.
Professional Experience
Real-Life Projects, Inc.
President and Owner
Started a new company to provide project management services to a wide variety of clients. Provide training and keynote speeches on various topics to improve communication and cooperation with their businesses. Help companies execute to their strategic plans and organizational goals. Provide consulting services to build skills, policies, and procedures within the company. Ensure that improvements fit the company culture and can be sustained by existing staff.
Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Group, USA
Manager, Strategic Planning Office
Responsible for administering the MSIG Strategic Plan. Train and mentor over 40 project managers in the 400-person company. Report on the overall status of all projects and programs in the plan to senior executives, including the CEO and President.
- Oversaw a quickly-changing portfolio of between 15 and 30 projects
- Helped resistant managers to successfully follow the new procedures to get executive support for all new cross-departmental projects
- Developed graphical “health check” reports to summarize the status active projects, including business and IT initiatives
- Encouraged project managers to resolve their own issues, reducing unnecessary senior management intervention
- Established an efficient process to approve and control more than $7 million per year in project budgets — typical budget and project approvals took less than 10 minutes of time in senior management meetings and budget variances were accurately forecast more than six months in advance
Chubb & Son
Project Manager
Manage the development of the web-based front-end for the Claims Financial System, a part of the Genesys Claim IT initiative. System developed in partnership with Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting). Providing expert guidance for the full software-development lifecycle, from design to construction to functional testing (unit, assembly, and product) to performance testing to implementation.
- Pilot began on-time, meeting the #1 goal for the project. Pilot date was set over 16 months ahead of time, and system was pilot-ready for the target month. Aggressively negotiated features and functions with business partners to achieve the date.
- Successfully split the team to both support the production pilot and begin development on a major new release to support the Casualty line of business. Planned requirements of both efforts in detail, to ensure that each one is well staffed and that each schedule is realistic.
- Managing the work of eight Chubb employees and co-managed a Chubb/Accenture team of over 20. Total work-hours invested from Conceptual Design to Product Test is over 30 programmer-years. Each project phase was completed on time and within 10% budget variance, with an overall positive variance.
- Served as Project Manager for the cross-team Claims Financial System Product Test effort, reporting on over 35,000-hours of activity during that period. Lead five development teams over a 17- week period, including my own team. Product Test ended on schedule, approximately 5% under budget.
- Monitored Accenture performance over 10 months. System quality at contract end was extremely high, passing user acceptance tests and two rounds of regression tests. System flaws found and fixed in the two months following contract end were under 20, compared to over 1500 found and fixed in the seventeen weeks before the contract ended.
- Independently established techniques to monitor progress closely. Pioneered Earned Value and statistical analysis of post-project results. The new tools provided accurate forecasts two to three weeks earlier than previous methods.
- Mentored eight direct reports through difficult cultural transitions. The entire staff worked at an Accenture office, reporting to Accenture managers, for approximately one year. Five of the eight were hired at the project start and had never worked in a Chubb office. Held one-on-one discussions and staff meetings to build their awareness of Chubb culture and values. Built a support network within the group, so the Chubb team was self-reliant. Implemented a detailed knowledge- transfer plan. Achieved 100% staff retention to date; no one left the team, despite a mid-project move of 30 miles, from Accenture to Chubb offices. Chubb staff of eight now successfully enhancing a system created by a team of over 30.
- Responsible for troubleshooting complex problems. The multi- platform architecture included Microsoft IIS, Visual Basic, IBM MQ Series, IBM DB2, IBM CICS, IBM System/390 batch programs, and IBM IMS programs.
- Managed the release plan for the Claim Financial System, coordinating eleven teams contributing code to a single release of software. Communicated changing priorities and milestones in a highly constrained schedule. Negotiated solutions to complex scheduling problems that affect up to five different teams. Release delivered on time.
Merrill Lynch & Co, Inc.
Vice President, Senior Applications Manager
Managed two intranet sites and two components of the ML Direct Internet site. The two intranet sites provided on-line training and on-line marketing materials for the 14,000 U.S. Financial Consultants and their assistants. Developed the Tour and real-time market data components of ML Direct (www.mldirect.ml.com) to service tens of thousands of Merrill Lynch customers. Managed staff responsible for supervising and helping developers, testers, and production-systems operations. Instituted change control and business requirements processes to successfully control scope creep.
- Managed between two and six direct reports. Directed the work of 17 people with an annual budget of $1.5 million
- Delivered market data on the ML Direct web site on time with no major flaws in a high-pressure, six-month development cycle.
- Initiated performance testing for an on-line testing application. Negotiated technical solutions with vendor, bringing the system from a consistent timeout with a 10-user load to a three-second response time for a 20-user load.
- Year-2000 certified an unfamiliar, 20-year-old system in less than six weeks. Spearheaded a mainframe-centric team to test six distinct tiers and four platforms: DOS PC, Windows NT, MVS, and Unix RS/6000. System ran without problems on 1/3/2000.
- Extensive experience integrating custom code with vendor-supplied products on web sites. Technologies included DB2, VB, MS Content Replication, HTML Content, custom C++ code, web-based 3270 emulators, XML, and JavaScript. Vendor components include Docent testing engine, Documentum, and ILX Quote Server.
- Resolved a crisis in a Documentum publishing system. System response time and reliability became unacceptable as the site grew. Kept users and business sponsors calm. Helped find business and technical solutions to critical problems while programmers improved performance ten-fold in a month.
Applications Manager
Led order management and collaborative computing projects. Recommended appropriate uses for software, including QSM SLIM, BroadVision One-to-One, and Haley Eclipse/Rete++. Projects included managing enhancements to an intranet order-entry system (Visual Basic and C++), and analyzing moving a message editing and routing system from Stratus VOS to NT (rules/inference engines, C++, and queuing).
Automatic Data Processing, Inc.
Product Manager
Coordinated large-scale computing projects for the brokerage industry. Involved in a variety of back-office, accounting, and regulatory reporting systems, working with dozens of broker-dealers. Negotiated feature requirements directly with clients. Reported project status to internal and external management. Produced project plans and estimates.
- Managed a team of three professionals to create a mutual fund sub-accounting system, in partnership with a vendor (FAL SuRPAS). System architecture included a DEC VAX as the server, IBM MQ Series for inter-platform communication, an MVS CICS 3270 front-end, and a Windows PC front-end.
- Directed the effort to clean up the security description on the Master Securities Database used by over 100 ADP clients. MVS batch routines changed 1.7 million securities our of 4.3 million over a single weekend without incident.
- Worked closely with programmers to deliver a Visual Basic and C++ program to calculate broker/dealer’s accounting charges from mainframe-based data. Extensively researched the rules and regulations, providing system design, business requirements, and overall project guidance.
- Other responsibilities included analyzing Wilco GLOSS, a Unix-based, multi-currency clearance and settlement product, representing ADP at Year 2000 meetings, and developing requirements for phone-based order-entry system.
Education
Princeton University Princeton, NJ, Bachelor of Arts, U.S. History
Professional Affiliations
Project Management Institute Member since 2000. Awarded Project Manager Professional (PMP) designation in June 2001. Participated in the development of the Information Technology Certificate of Added Qualification (IT CAQ) in 2001 and 2002. Contributor to the Information Systems SIG Newsletter, the Financial Services SIG Newsletter. Web Director for FSSIG 2002-2003.
Spoke and presented papers at
- 2002 NJ PMI Chapter Symposium.
- 2002 PMI Seminar and Symposium
- 2003 PMI Global Congress — North America
- 2004 PMI Global Congress — North America
- 2005 PMI College of Scheduling Conference
- 2005 PMI Global Congress — North America
- 2006 PMI College of Scheduling Conference
- 2006 PMI Global Congress — North America
- 2006 PMI New York City Chapter featured presenter at both an evening Chapter Meeting and a Breakfast Roundtable
- 2006 PMI Long Island Chapter featured presenter at an evening Chapter Meeting
- 2007 PMI Global Congress — Asia Pacific
American Society for the Advancement of Project Management (asapm) (the US affiliate of the International Project Management Association (IPMA)) Member since 2006
Toastmasters International Member since 2001. Club Secretary 2001-2002. Club President 2002-2003. Club Secretary 2004-2005. Competent Toastmaster (CTM) award 2004. Three Competent Leader (CL) awards 2005-2006. Advanced Toastmaster Bronze (ATM-B) award 2005. Advanced Toastmaster Silver (ATM-S) award 2006. Awarded Area Governor of the Year for District 46 2005-2006. Advanced Communicator Gold (AC-G), Advanced Leader Silver (ALS), and Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM) award in 2007.
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Member since 2001
IEEE Computer Society (IEEE CS) Member since 2001
Association for Computing Machinery Member since 2001