SUMMARY OF QUALIFICATIONS 

Dedicated, intuitive, and analytical, and responsive AGILE PROJECT MANAGER with a proven track record.  Innovative and persistent problem solver who thrives on challenges, excels under pressure, and gets the job done. Bright, diligent, and transparent team player who possesses excellent interpersonal and presentation skills. Empowering and hands-on leader and catalyst, organized planner and win/win negotiator dealing effectively across all levels of the organization. Accustomed to a fast pace and concurrent programs, fulfills priorities and balances competing agendas while maintaining a strong business focus, delivering high quality systems and outstanding user satisfaction when managing complicated projects.

AREAS OF EXPERTISE

Agile Leadership including transforming teams, ensuring adherence to agile practices, mentor and development of personnel, staff empowerment, and helping teams increase their predictability and collaboration practices.

Program/Project Management from initiation through deployment including strategic planning, project plan development (WBS, milestones), progress tracking, risk management (identification, assessment, mitigation plans), ad hoc issue resolution, scope and schedule management, communication planning, leading cross-functional teams, negotiating stakeholder approval, executive and administrative reporting, and documentation.

Process Improvement including analyses of current and proposed methodologies, recommending new methodologies, conducting root cause analysis, tracking progress and communication of results.

Product Development including identifying and prioritizing the software release contents, risk and contingency management, scheduling, beta and pilot planning and managing organizational readiness. 

Relationship Management including consensus building, customer relationship building, scheduling, and prioritizing product releases.

Personnel Management including personnel readiness (recruitment and retention), staff training and development, employee coaching, and performance management (goals, reviews, compensation planning).

BUSINESS EXPERIENCE

2017 to Present:  Disney Streaming Services, New York, NY

Disney Streaming Services is responsible for developing and operating The Walt Disney Company’s direct-to-consumer video businesses globally, including the ESPN+ premium sports streaming service; the upcoming Disney subscription video service; and BAMTECH Media, a global leader in direct-to-consumer video streaming products and solutions. 

Senior Technical Agile Project Manager – AWS Cloud Account Management  – March 2020 – Present

A Senior Technical Project Manager serving the distributed (AWS) Cloud Account Management team of operational support engineers. Driving transformation, process improvement while leading the delivery, optimization, and improvements of services that are critical to the Disney Streaming Services platform.

To serve our customers faster, improved the processes, restructured the Jira workflow, and cut the amount of work in progress (WIP). RESULT: Cut lead time by 40% and cut WIP by over 50%.

To improve transparency, the team’s external reputation and support data-driven decisions introduced reports and dashboards including WIP, lead time, cycle time, customer team, and work type. RESULT: Data based proof of improvement and repeated very positive feedback from management and stakeholders.

To better manage operations vs automation development time, improve communication, drive staff development, improve efficiency, address large timezone differences between the team members, and better utilize the team’s director time, split the team into squads. RESULT: delivery of more projects, higher staff satisfaction, and the director spent significantly less time on the day to day team management.

Senior Technical Agile  Project Manager – June 2017 – February 2020

A servant leader facilitating and managing agile projects with distributed teams spanning multiple time zones. Projects use leading-edge technology and frameworks (AWS ECS, S3, DynamoDB, Kinesis, Scala, etc.). Delivered high-risk components in time for ESPN+ release without compromising the team’s work/life balance.

Project management of new rapidly growing SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) department. This department is charged with improving reliability, resiliency, scalability, maintainability, and observability of applications within the media streaming platform allowing the application teams to focus on business value. The role is a very close collaboration with the technical visionary department director defining agile roadmap, processes, and general strategy.

2003 – 2017: SRS Health, LLC, Montvale, NJ

SRS Health, LLC, Montvale, NJ, a software vendor to the healthcare industry providing innovative EHR and HCIT solutions. These solutions are designed to enhance the ability of specialists and other high-performance physicians to practice the art of medicine by focusing on their patients, not their technology. 

Vice President, Program Management / Agile Adoption – 2014 to 2017
Vice President, Software Development – 2010 to 2014
Product Development Manager – 2008 to 2010
Senior Software Engineer – 2003 to 2008

1998 to 2003 KALONYMOUS, INC., Passaic, NJ

KALONYMOUS, INC., Passaic, NJ, an independent consulting firm focused on survey research computer-aided telephone interviewing (CATI) serving customers in North America and Europe.

1987 to 1998 QUANTIME, LTD, New York, NY & London, UK

Quantime developed software that takes market researchers from questionnaire design and survey administration through data collection and tabular reports. Quantime’s software is used by many of the industry’s leading firms. Quantime was acquired by SPSS in 1996.

Vice President Systems and Customer Projects – 1996 – 1998
World Wide Systems and Programming Manager – 1995 – 1996
Technical Manager – 1991 – 1995
Senior Programmer/Analyst 1989 – 1991
Programmer (London, United Kingdom) 1987 – 1989

EDUCATION 

Masters Degree Computer Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 1987.

LANGUAGES Fluent English and Dutch; limited French, German and Hebrew. 

AFFILIATIONS & CERTIFICATIONS