This is a professional background summary. It is not meant to attract job offers, it is a place to share my professional experience without any tracking by the site.

My Professional Background

Devon - I.T. Professional

Professional Skills

About My Career

Throughout my career I have had the opportunity to take on a diverse set of roles at many different types of organizations. This experience has given me a well-rounded understanding of how to most effectively drive I.T. deliverables under the umbrella of a wide array of business objectives, dependencies, risks and organizational cultures.


In 1979, my dad --a PhD in Engineering who went into computers— brought home an Apple II Plus. He believed that computers were the future and wanted his kids to learn some programming. I thought “what did he know?” but learned a little BASIC. Fast forward 17 years, my first office job was managing a nationwide legal document retrieval service. My customers were Chase and NationsBank (Bank of America). Everything was being done manually. Sending hand written orders and receipts was unprofessional and time consuming. I couldn’t help but notice Microsoft Access on my desktop. So I developed a homegrown order fulfillment system using Visual Basic and Access. This time I was pretty taken with what programming could do. After a lot of reading and trial and error, I was a software developer delivering custom built desktop and web-based business applications. I was responsible for the entire delivery lifecycle: business requirements, project planning, software development, database design, testing and deployment. I specialized in n-tier applications.


In 2003, I transitioned out of software development and went from Project Manager to I.T. Manager. I managed a Project Manager, Business Analyst, System Administrator and 2 software development vendors. I later graduated to a Business Analyst/Project Manager position at a global information services company. While there I had the opportunity to work on a transformational SAP Implementation. I was awarded the companies first ever SAP Implementation Excellence Award. I held 3 roles: Program Management Team, Procure to Pay Project Manager and System Integration Project Manager. Upon completion of my part-time MBA, I took on a management role for a money services business. I was responsible for a call center receiving 3,000+ calls a day and managed 30 resources. I then took on a Program Manager role at a Global I.T. Research company, and later founded an I.T. consulting company that never took off. Sometime later I happily returned to the information services company. I am currently a Project Manager for 7 integrated systems that process 250 million dollars of order revenue each year.

Project History

Industry Description Highlights Role Technologies
Global Information Services

Order Fulfillment

Middleware

Web Based Order Monitoring System

EDI

eCommerce System

Product Management

Vendor Onboarding Portal

Subscription Retention (CPQ)

 Coordinate operational releases and projects for 7 integrated systems that drive order processing of $250M of customer orders each year. Project Manager Windows Server - IIS - Tomcat - SQL Server - Oracle - Java - IIB - Advantage - B2Bi - .NET - Firebrand
Salesforce Consulting Replace Global Electronics Company Partner Portal with a Salesforce Solution Document and validate requirements. Facilitate project completion. Business Analyst Salesforce
Software Consulting

Sales and Marketing for I.T. Projects

I.T. Solutions for Small Businesses

Information Technology Management Articles

Develop a project portfolio management tool

Develop an HTML template generator application

Develop a blog application

Develop a small business marketing tool

 Consultant PHP - SQL Server - Visual Basic for Applications - JavaScript
Global I.T. Research

CRM Portfolio Management

Enterprise Initiatives

Data Quality, Data Cleansing and Master Data Management

Subscription Retention

 Work with senior information technology leaders in order to improve stakeholder visibility into the Customer Relationship Management Program. Gather metrics that measure the health of the program for all Customer Relationship Management functions. Work with stakeholders across the organization in order to prioritize, budget, scope and execute enterprise initiatives: Master Data Management, Data Quality and Subscription Retention. Program Manager Siebel - Oracle
Money Services

Call Center Operations Management

VOIP Migration and Administration

Customer Service Management

I.T. Team Management

 Responsible for a call center receiving 3,000+ calls a day and managed 30 resources. Call center uptime and operational cost were mission-critical business priorities. Led the migration of the telecommunications infrastructure to a lower cost VOIP package. Streamlined the gathering of call center metrics. Reduced cost of call center operations by 30% while designing and implementing initiatives that improved customer service quality. Manager N/A
Global Information Services

North America SAP Implementation

EDI Order Processing System ($10M Sales)

Print + Digital Product Bundling

Order Fulfillment System

Cost of Goods Sold Calculation Modifications

 Member of the program management team for a $50 Million Dollar/300 person SAP implementation of a 1 Billion+ business unit. Facilitate communication across teams and manage day to day project activities, facilitate meetings, facilitate status reporting and deliverable tracking. Awarded the companies first ever SAP Implementation Excellence Award. Held 3 roles: Program Management, Procure to Pay Project Manager and System Integration Project Manager. Project Manager
Business Analyst		 EDI - Oracle Forms - Oracle DB - VAX - Windows Server
Education Recruitement

Employment Application Processing Systems

Vacancy Management System

 Facilitated CFO allocation of a budget for the build out of a new Employment Application Processing System. Worked with CFO to issue an RFP and vetted respondents. Wrote business requirements and more than 40 detailed uses cases which were linked to UI wireframes. Selected a Canadian software vendor for RFP completion. Vendor delivered a scalable and adaptable software solution in 6 months for less than $100,000. The solution was used by 20 school districts including DC Public Schools and Memphis City Schools. The system handled recruiting, selection, hiring, onboarding and placement of new employees. Manager
Project Manager
Business Analyst		 ASP.NET - VB.NET - SQL Server - JavaScript
Education Recruitement Employment Application Processing System Brought onboard in July with a September go live of a web-based application to recruit, select, hire and onboard new teachers for the NYC Department of Education. Broke the deliverables into 3 phases. Successfully went live with all 3 phases according to the original plan. The system processed 20,000 job applications per year. The success of the application lead to a promotion to headquarters which also needed a new employment application processing system --but for 20 school districts. Developer Active Server Pages - SQL Server - JavaScript - Windows Server
Finance Software Consulting Client Account and Project Management Portal Enterprise grade utilization of JavaScript for large financial institutions. First professional exposure to Linux and J2EE. Developer Active Server Pages - SQL Server - JavaScript - Windows Server
Global NGO Commodity (Food) Tracking Solution Detailed requirements gathering, documentation and design work including selecting best-fit tools. Developer Visual Basic 6 - SQL Server
Regional NGO International Rural Banking Software Mentor two Ghanaian developers in Visual Basic for rural banking software development. First experience working with international colleagues. First exposure to managing resources. Developer Visual Basic 6 - Access
Web Consulting Web Browser Independent User Interface Functionality At the time IE and Netscape had very different JavaScript implementations. In many cases it was necessary to write one JavaScript library for IE and a second for Netscape. I worked on the websites of a handful of small businesses to implement JavaScript libraries according to the client's requirements which also ran smoothly in IE and Netscape. Developer JavaScript
Global Non-Profit

Cancer Research Portal

DVD Based Website

Cold Fusion Website Maintenance and Reporting

 In less than 4 months delivered a new Cancer Research Portal which is the organization's flagship research resource for people with cancer. Simplified the user experience by consolidating the previously complex navigation menus. Substantially improved the scalability of the site. The portal reliably processed more than 700,000 requests per month with room to grow. Developer Active Server Pages - Cold Fusion - SQL Server - JavaScript
Microsoft Consulting Messaging System (Proof Of Concept) Built an early stage POC implementation of Microsoft Messaging Queue for this Microsoft Certified Solution Provider. The solution was highly scalable and a modularized n-tier solution. Developer Visual Basic 6 - SQL Server - Microsoft Messaging Queue - N-Tier
ATM Provider Chargeback Processing System This regional ATM Provider was paying First Data Corporation $3 every time a debit card customer disputed a charge on their debit card. These disputes are known as chargebacks. With a team of 2, in 6 months we built a highly scalable, fault tolerant system that replaced First Data's chargeback processing product offering. The software integrated with the companies mainframe based accounting system.

(This was an early implementation of Microsoft Transaction Server (COM+) and N-Tier Architectures which later evolved into MVC, Microservices and REST API frameworks.)		 Developer Visual Basic 6 - SQL Server - Microsoft Transaction Server - N-Tier
Global Accounting Firm Tax Reporting for Offshore Associates More than 100 form application used to collect all necessary data from Global Accounting Firm's offshore associates so that they could accurately file their taxes in the United States. Reusable library for binding and updating standard VB control types for 100+ forms saving weeks of programming time.

(The reusable library was mostly implemented by a Senior Software Engineer. I put the libraries to work.)		 Developer Visual Basic 6 - Access
Software Consulting Network Failure Detection Cycle checks of network communications using IP packets and transmission acknowledgements. Implemented alerts when failed transmissions occurred. Developer Visual Basic 6 - Windows API
Software Financial Services Electronic Payments Reporting System Real time reporting on consumer electronic payments for outstanding debt (e.g. unpaid cell phone bill) Developer Visual Basic for Applications - Microsoft Access
Legal Services Legal Document Order Fulfillment Built a ground up system to accelerate nationwide legal document retrieval and provide global banks with detailed, traceable and professional billing. Developer Visual Basic 6 - Visual Basic for Applications - Microsoft Access

Education

NYU Logo

NYU Stern School of Business

Langone Part Time Program

MBA in Management and Finance

Minor in Entertainment, Media and Technology

2011

Northwestern Logo

Northwestern University

BA in Political Science and Psychology

1995

Choate Logo

Choate Rosemary Hall

1991

Honors & Awards

Training and Courses

Recommended Business and Information Technology Books

Title
Why Read This?
Subject