As Customer Development Coordinator my role in the company is to lead the development and maintenance of the company's applications using applications development and system integration, web integration, web services, and system architect, and software development methodology; lead the technical aspect of projects and company-wide initiatives within the development team. In the last year I have added taking the role of the Project Manager of small projects with a Senior Project Manager as my mentor while taking online classes towards a PMI certification. Taking on the role of Project Manager instead of working under a clients Project Manager allowed me to work in an Agile method rather than the traditional Waterfall methodology.
Some of my duties in my role have included, communicating with customers on project requirements; define and document project scope; maintain and enhance all production sites within the product line and develop new software products. As well as, leading application developers and ensuring that project prioritization and production schedule releases effectively use IT resources. Furthermore, including defining schedules and verifying progress is according to schedules including communicating issues. Progress and status of projects to management.
Due to my previous experience, I was often consulted or asked to give presentations on my recommendations for other areas of the company. For example, I was easily able to assess the needs of the help desk area, as one of my other duties involved providing Tier II Support to LiveBlock’s largest client. This last year a Software Developer and myself pitched a new process and architect structure for the Technical Services team, with minor alterations we were able to see our idea come to fruition. Many of the projects I’ve worked on involve multiple departments across two or more companies working together through telephone meetings on blending software together.
My most significant project at Access was developing a complete Ebill solution. I took charge of planning meetings with management from other departments to define expectations and requirements, and to place reasonable limits on scope. As the project lead, I co-ordinated with developers responsible for other systems such as our AS-400 billing system to facilitate real-time data transfer. Upon completion of development extensive testing was required and an external security audit was performed. The project launched smoothly and on-time.
I lead inter-departmental discussions to identify ways that internal communications processes could be improved through the use of an improved intranet site. I took ownership of this project working with the communications department to ensure the site was visited regularly through contests and other activities. I was responsible for providing training to staff throughout the company who would be updating the site content.
In another project, I was the technical lead for a custom outage ticketing system which was used to improve communication between management and front line support staff. This project entailed creating the system based off the needs of both management and support staff with reporting and tracking capabilities. A major challenge with this project was balancing the needs and desires of the end users against the requirements of higher management.
Maintenance of automated "agents" that parse a variety of external web sites and retrieve information on a regular basis. Developing an agent involves determining how to simulate a normal user interacting with the web site, and writing a regular-expression-based control file for a Perl engine to use in retrieving the data and storing it a MySQL database. The Perl engine itself also needs regular modification to adapt to new techniques used by the web sites being monitored. This activity directly increased sales for the company, even necessitating the hiring of more sales personnel to handle the load.
Development of a site to track and maintain agents, for use by other agent maintainers and sales associates. This included forms, email notifications, lists, date tracking, and tracking of agent statistics, and was developed using Perl and MySQL.
Internal website project - designing, creating, maintaining and testing an internal website to handle the majority of the company's needs. One of the first needs was a complete structure for the support team. For this area, the support team needed customer information to be at hand plus the ability to record data from the calls. This project was done using PHP and MySQL with some graphing tools along with some JavaScript and date controls. Also, there was extensive cascading style sheet development as well as a user privilege and security implementation. This system was developed using the Extreme Programming life cycle. A complete contact management system needed to be in place for complex searching of contacts and support records. An inventory system that links to the client information was integrated.
For each of the preceding projects, interviews with affected personnel and a project proposal first had to be completed. After each project, thorough project documentation was needed, includiung flow diagrams created in Kivio. In some cases, the creation of tutorials was also required.
The company's external website was designed and developed by an outside company, but the subsequent maintenance of the site was an internal project. This involved adding additional information, some graphics work, and maintenance of the PHP and MySQL code.
