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Program/Project Management

Ideal experience

I have over 20 years of project management experience and roughly 10 years of program managment. My work is highly informed by my years of doing programming, system administration, QA, and the other varied tasks needed to complete a given project.

Program Management

Business Operations Program Manager
As Business Operations Manager, I determined what the overall business needed, and the best way to execute on each of the needed projects. I got buy in on the plans and built what was needed with my team. I pushed the each of the planned project from both a high and low level. This work directly helped the organizations to be more mature, healthy, and data driven.

Program Managing the migration to AWS
Program Managing the project to migrate Vindicias offerings from a datacenters to AWS, required coordination of many teams throuout the company both in building what was needed, followed building and helping ot execute the detailed cutover plan for staging and then production.

PCI and SOC audits
Program Managing the Vindicia audits was far more than just making sure we passed the audits. Rather, I put systems in place to cover everything needed. For every part of both the PCI and SOC audits, I made directions or diagrams to make things clear as can be. Each audit requires me bringing in the heads of each department to cover the parts of the audit that relates to them and their groups. Passing the audits was required for the company to continue to operate, so the stakes were hight, and building a more solid system put the company on a more solid foundation.

Project Management

Each time that I'm doing a Program Managment job, I'm also doing Project Managment as part of that work.

Scrum agile methodology is kind of the default way to run a project these days, along with Kanban. I've spent years project managing teams using the Atlassian tools.

I enjoy writing specifications, making timelines, getting buy in, and helping to clear blockers of any type. I like to keep everybody in sync, on schedule, productive, and happy.

I see out critical feedback and consider it vital. Retrospectives are of course and essential part of doing agile projects.

I am extremely communicative and goal oriented. I'm dedicated, reliable, and my enthusiasm tends to be contagious.

I've project managed teams that were widely distributed around the world as well as teams where everybody resided in the same building.

I'm self driven and tend to ask higher managment the questions they want to be asked.

Project management methods

Below are some of the ways of managing projects I have found helpful. These concepts have worked for me with big teams, small teams, local teams, distributed teams, agile methodology, and waterfall methodology.

Some sample projects

Implement Rearchitecture - Migrating Vindica offerings from datacenters to AWS


Problem:
Vindicia processes millions of credit card transaction for various events, including highly public sporting events where the transactions per minute can be staggering. On-prem datacenters drastically limited how quickly we could scale up for large events.
A rearchitected system needed to be built. We used standard scrum methodology. 

Solution: Used traditional scrum methodology with 2 week sprints. Mapped out the full project ahead of time with deep involvement from the highly skilled team. Each sprint got completed with the work planned, and the entire implementation was done on schedule, including testing.

Cutover - Migrating Vindica offerings from datacenters to AWS


Problem:
The operations and Vindicia product offerings had been re-architected, but cutting over from the physical on prime data centers to the new running AWS system, including a database switchover, was a vital and nontrivial task. With the business that's doing millions of credit card transactions regularly, every second of downtime counts. And risks need to be alleviated as much as possible.

Solution: I made a Google sheet checklist which itemized each step needed, including validation. I had a large number of small meetings to validate and refine each step. Each step was tested with a live system. Anything that could be done to make the transition less risky or faster was done. The spreadsheet showed every persons backup, every persons contact information. Rollback plans were made. Each step was listed with timing and an easy checkbox to check, along with conditional formatting to mark the line as done and then verified. The sheet included a tab for what specific people were on call and working around the clock for the next week. Nothing was left to chance. The migration was not simple, but the exhaustive planning paid off beautifully and the staging cutover went well, latter followed by the production cutover.

Key-O-Matic


Problem: All licenses were being hand generated.  Turn around time was slow.  A large team was required to handle the requests.  Customer satisfaction was low and errors were common.

Solution: I project managed and was primary programmer and designer of a web and email based tool to automatically authorize and distribute permanent and temporary licenses for internal and external use.  Key-O-Matic generates licenses for multiple licensing mechanisms, multiple computer platforms, over 100 products, and for multiple countries.  Evaluation license durations, number of licenses, and marketing letters can be customized by product.  Both web and email forms are easy for customers and license administrators to use.  This tool has vastly improved accuracy, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. It has been in production since 1994 and is still being used by customers today. This was the first system to automatically give out software licenses on the web.

Sales Order Download


Problem:
 The downloading of sales orders into the support database was failing a high percentage of the time due to numerous data errors caused by a variety of sources.  For years this quagmire had been directly affecting support revenue and customer satisfaction.

Solutions: Reduce the percentage of sales orders with errors by over 90%. Vastly improved and clarified the error checking, by breaking errors into distinct "buckets".  Created drill down reports that gave a clear view, from a high level overview, to the low level details of a single sales order.  Got buy-in from throughout the company until every error bucket was owned by a particular responsible group.  Groups also agreed on which team was causing each problem and agreed to work together on implementing solutions.  Automated the reprocessing of sales orders.  Created a system to fully manage the backlog of problem sales orders.  Reduced the percentage of errors dramatically.  Automated the correction of many types of errors. This was a huge win for the company! It resulted in much happier customers.

Contact Julian

Get in touch and chat about your company or project.

Julian Cash     415.738.9385     julian@HireThisGeek.com or see the contact page.

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