Michael N.
IT Management
I am a results-driven IT Professional with significant experience in Resource and Program Management. I have a history as a strong team leader and manager with proven ability in consensus-building and cross-functional networking, with expertise in scoping, planning, scheduling, risk management, quality, and end-to-end project ownership. My technical background makes me a competent problem solver. I approach every opportunity with a high level of commitment to quality and communication to bring solutions to market that meet the demands of the business and customers alike.
Latest Projects
Delivery Manager
Eastgate Software2020 – 2021
- Responsible for the Operations and Delivery of 6 project teams, including overseeing requirements reviews, design discussions, estimates and finally execution and delivery.
- Drove the company’s first cloud hosted platform for a fortune 500 company.
- Introduced the concept of Behavior Driven Development (BDD), reducing manual testing (costs) required for longer running projects.
- Focused on removing ‘waste’ by reducing meeting frequency, resources required and by restructuring sprint cycles.
- Responsible for staffing assignments across company (~10 projects), reporting project status as well as Organizational health to Board members
Manager IT
Nordstrom2016 – 2019
- Developed a cloud-based Content Management System in 6 months, from conception to deployment, in collaboration with UX, Siteops, Product Management, and business managers. The new solution delivered superior functionality and performance to the third-party tool that it replaced, while saving the company ~$700K/year. Tight timelines necessitated successful negotiations of competing priorities across business and technology.
- Drove cross-functional adoption of DevOps by transferring ownership of Operations and Support team’s responsibilities to Development teams.
- Through ongoing war rooms, identified roadblocks and potential solutions and prioritized deliverables for MVP release, keeping all stakeholders informed.
- For continuous improvement, leveraged usability tests for product design, gathering results, and focusing efforts on re-architecting problem areas with changes to workflow and the user interface.
- Designed a flexible, forward-looking solution that would support multiple content areas beyond the original scope.
Project Lead
Nordstrom2013 – 2016
- Directed a team of developers in multiple locations responsible for addressing critical customer- facing incidents; delivered company-wide communication of real-time status, impact, and resolution.
- Introduced and implemented Agile concepts and Kanban board to development team and Business partners, providing a means to easily prioritize and manage backlog.
- Maintained calendar for all deployments to Nordstrom.com, to provide cross-organizational visibility for development, infrastructure and security teams
Program Manager
Lexis-Nexis File & Serve2007 – 2013
- Leading Agile/Scrum development projects focused on new software, maintenance cycles, and day-to-day operational support. Acted as Scrum Master.
- Assumed ownership of a large project that was behind schedule and over budget. Successfully negotiated with the business unit to adjust scope and add resources in order to bring the project under control.
- Managed the plan for the product roadmap, and oversaw high- and low-level estimating, budgeting, calendar, and feature negotiation with product owners
Program Manager
Lexis-Nexis Applied Discovery2006 – 2007
- Coordinated the requirement gathering, software development, test, and deployment efforts for the flagship e-discovery product and internal-facing tools.
- Initiated a transition from waterfall to Agile/Scrum methodology.
- Led the project to select and implement FAST Instream Indexing solution as a replacement for Microsoft Indexing Service. This included requirement gathering, mapping of MIS functions to FAST for transitioning tool sets to new platform, overseeing fidelity, validation, and performance testing efforts, and seeing the project through to production.
- Managed multiple concurrent efforts across the core e-discovery product domain.
- Oversaw the deployment of grid computing technology that vastly improved throughput of documents and data through the system.
- Working with various teams, designed tools to automate previously time and labor intensive processes. This included managing the software development efforts to bring them to market.
Senior Software Test Engineer
Applied Discovery2003 – 2006
- Acted in a leadership role for projects through the QA lifecycle, and managed the testing efforts of the QA team on assigned projects.
- Scheduled and coordinated work efforts against milestone dates, working with development and infrastructure (IT) teams.
- Wrote test plans, functional specs, and created use case scenarios (user stories) to support development and testing efforts. • Worked as Build Master, managing the configuration and deployment of test projects
Education
Minor in Computer Science University of Idaho, Moscow, ID
BS in Psychology
