I'm seeking a position in the Bay Area starting in August or September of 2010. I would prefer to work in downtown San Francisco, Berkeley or Oakland, but am open to any location within a reasonable commuting distance of Oakland, where I plan to be living.
What I'm looking for
I am seeking a leadership role related to web site/web application development projects in an innovative and progressive organization. I'm open to contract and permanent positions. I'm less concerned about the title and level that I come in at than I am about the opportunity to learn, grow professionally, and help shape the future direction of the organization. While I have extensive management experience, I am very hands-on, and most enjoy situations where I am involved with the design of applications, in addition to managing staff, budgets and schedules. My ideal job would be as a client-facing project manager in a firm that provides web design and development services to large organizations, or as a manager of internal web development projects in a corporation.
What I bring to the table
- I am a seasoned manager with over ten years of management and project management experience in a range of industries including health care, financial services, apparel, manufacturing and government.
- While I have pursued a management career, I have considerable technical expertise as well. I went back to school several years ago to obtain an M.S. in Computer Science, out of a desire to deepen my understanding of the subject. I decided to return to project management, but have found that my CS education enables me to quickly understand new technologies and technical issues, and to communicate effectively with developers and other technical specialists.
- I build websites as a side hobby/business. This keeps me in touch in the latest web design trends and development technologies, and helps me to be an effective manager of developers because I understand first hand many of the challenges they face in their work.
- I can think strategically, and effectively manage the financial, political and organizational aspects of projects, but I can also roll up my sleeves and be very hands on when appropriate and necessary. As an example, before my current position, I managed the implementation of an ASP recruiting solution for a large manufacturer in Portland. Part of the project involved building an interface to the company's ADP Payroll system. We lost our business analyst partway through the project, and were not able to replace the position. I took on the business analysis tasks in addition to my project management responsibilities. In that capacity, I learned the customization toolkit of the ASP product and created some customizations, did the data analysis for the ADP interface, and architected a solution for encrypting data transmitted to and from the ASP system using a McAfee PGP encryption product that ran on the mainframe. After our primary developer left the company, I got involved in debugging and modifying the interfaces because they were written in SQR, a language I had some familiarity with from my PeopleSoft consulting days. In addition to this, I managed three in-house IT resources, worked with two HR staff to coordinate the configuration and rollout of the application, and coordinated with three offsite vendor consultants. The project was completed on time and within budget.
- I am passionate about all aspects of building good websites and web applications. In addition to being conversant with many of the standard web development technologies, including HTML, CSS, and LAMP, I have a strong interest in front-end design concerns, including usability, accessibility, information architecture and interaction design. While not an expert in these areas, I read books and follow blogs on these topics and thus am able to have intelligent conversations with experts, and to effectively work with them on projects. In my current project, I recognized the need early on to bring in a resource with information architecture and interaction design capabilities. We did not have the skills in house, so I was able to make a business case for hiring an outside firm to do the work. Given that Multnomah County is facing significant budget pressures, I faced some skepticism about this, and I had to really sell the idea to people who had never even heard of information architecture and interaction design. I was able to make the case, and brought in a small firm called Squishymedia that specializes in public sector work, and this has proven to be a successful partnership.
- I have experience with agile development. Prior to my current position, I had not done any agile projects, but very much wanted to. Multnomah County is starting to embrace agile methods, so my manager was very supportive of using an agile methodogy on my project. While there has been a learning curve for all involved, the approach has been very successful. While it is not a silver bullet, I am convinced that agile approaches are generally the best apporach for new development projects as long as organizational factors are in place to support them.
- While most of my career has been in IT, I have always been interested in the business aspects of my work, and always make the effort to learn about the business area that I'm working in. I spent a number of years working in HR systems, and although I came at it from the IT side, I took it upon myself to earn the Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) certification, which required learning the fundamentals of all areas of HR. Because of the business knowledge that I gained, I was able to quickly gain the respect and trust of the human resources executives that I worked with. One of the reasons I was hired for my current position is that I have education and experience in social work, and thus have business knowledge related to providing mental health services. I have especially enjoyed being able to integrate that background and knowledge with my application development work.
- I have international experience, and have managed geographically distributed teams, and this is something that I enjoy. When I was at Levi Strauss, I was responsible for HR applications used worldwide, and managed a project with team members located in San Francisco, Singapore and Brussels. I enjoyed the challenge of bringing together a team of people with diverse cultural backgrounds to accomplish a common goal, and gained skills in working effectively in a cross-cultural environment. I also had the opportunity several years ago to work for a French company, Business Objects. Business Objects is now owned by SAP, but at the time was independent, and had acquired another French software company, Cartesis. For historical reasons related to earlier acquisitions, Business Objects' services division was managed out of Portland, and I was hired to manage the systems integration of the services operations of the two companies. I spent over two months working at Cartesis headquarters in Paris, working with headquarters staff as well as staff in a number of other European countries. This was an extremely challenging situation, since the work was not well defined, and I was doubly an outsider, being from the acquiring company, and being American. I was able to achieve successful results, in part because of my cultural sensitivity, ability to rapidly adapt to new situations, and ability to deal with ambiguity. I've long been a foreign language buff, had studied French on and off over the years, and had traveled to France once before. I made an effort to use French as much as possible, and while I don't speak it fluently, I rapidly got to the point where I was able to conduct most of my e-mail in French, and this was extraordinarily helpful in dealing with the situation. The was one person I had to work with from the beginning who was somewhat hostile toward me, and not unreasonably wondered why a French person wasn't doing the job. At one point, I wrote him a long e-mail in French, and since my written French is obviously not that of a native, he had to have known that I had made the effort to write it myself. The next time I saw him, he shook my hand with a big smile on his face, and said "Ça va?" (French for "how's it going").
- I have strong quantitative skills. In my CS Master's program, I specialized in Spoken Language Systems, which involved speech recognition, speech synthesis and natural language processing. All of these areas are heavily statistically driven, and I have a solid grounding in the application of statistical methods. In addition, I studied machine learning and pattern recognition and have a good basic understanding of the mathematical approaches used in these disciplines.