Manager Management

Debra French

________________________________________________________________

**** *. ***** ****** **. 720-***-**** (Home)

Parker, Colorado 80134 720-***-**** (Cell)

Email: ***********@*******.***

Executive Summary

A seasoned leader, problem solver, team builder and facilitator among

multiple stakeholders with diverse needs and goals. Have successfully

blended skills gained through 20+ years in IT for diverse businesses.

This included managing technical staff of 50+ developers for American

Airlines, running a PMO for a critical contractual deliverable at EDS,

and delivery and support of systems these and other organizations.

Recognized for customer focus, collaborative leadership style and

building empowered teams.

Summary of Qualifications

A proven and versatile manager of information technology (IT) projects,

programs and services, and their successful delivery to internal or

external customers.

Areas of expertise includes IT applications development management for wide-

range of systems including financial, warehouse, inventory and customer

tracking. Responsibilities have also included management of service

delivery function (helpdesk, desktop and third-party systems support) and

integration testing groups.

Skilled in all aspects of development life cycle, with a focus on

disciplined program and project management.

Excellent skills in project delivery, organizational development, team

leadership, motivation, problem-solving and customer relationship.

Customer- and team-oriented, creative, technically broad, and committed to

high-quality, high-value business results.

Industry applications: Airline systems (customer tracking, provisioning,

accounting, and maintenance and engineering systems); manufacturing

(warehouse, inventory, and logistics); financial (mortgage origination,

post-closing and loan servicing systems; accounting systems).

Strong hiring/dismissal, mentoring/training, project management and

budgeting skills.

Certified Project Management Professional (PMP)

Professional Experience

February, 2009 - Present: PriorityCommerce

Vice President, Products - Program/Product Management (Contract)

Program and product management for start-up electronic payment software

company. Updated existing products to remove quality issues; defined and

released new software product to market.

Development of release-to-market processes and procedures including

identification of process gaps, working with corporate partners to

establish initial and steady-state delivery and support model.

Oversight of product development and delivery, including software product

development. Developed requirements, and performed hands-on functional

testing. Responsible for all user-facing product documentation.

Applications are .Net. Development team is a combination of off-shored

development team and local resources, utilizing agile development

methodology.

Facilitated requirements for PCI audit of card processing software, which

was passed with no remediation requirements.

March, 2005 - December, 2008: Pulte Mortgage Company

Vice President of Applications and Service Delivery

Applications development and delivery. Responsibilities include management

of team of programmers in delivery of applications supporting mortgage

operations. Applications supported include loan origination system, post-

closing systems (auditing and management of closed loan activities, loan

servicing system, accounting/finance systems) and secondary marketing

systems. Technologies involved in the systems range from legacy systems in

COBOL and VisualBasic, to new development in .Net and Web Services.

Management responsibilities also included oversight of dedicated systems

integration testing group for the department.

Management of the IS help desk and desktop support teams. Oversight of

call tracking, with focus on reducing volumes, improving service levels and

adherence to SLA commitments. Included responsibility for third-party

systems utilized across the organization.

Responsible for introducing standard procedures and development methodology

into the group and to the entire IS organization, to bring greater control

and reliability into project and applications maintenance delivery. Scope

of changes implemented includes development of change control board process

for all request activities and release management process for applications

changes. Interface for SOX audit for SOX-relevant systems.

Program/project managed organization's Disaster Recovery effort, including

establishing strategy, application build-out, configuration management and

recurring testing.

All aspects of personnel management including recruiting,

coaching/counseling and termination of personnel

March, 2000 - March, 2005: EDS

Program Manager, Asset Management

. Strong applications delivery manager/program manager. Recognized for

ability to turn around troubled projects in both infrastructure and

applications delivery.

. Program manager for high-visibility program supporting contractual

rollout of Asset Management services, tools and processes for airline

customer. Overall program consisted of two phases, totaling over 300,000

man-hours of effort. Both phases delivered on schedule and within

budget.

. Personally responsible as Program Manager for key sub-projects of the

overall program. Additionally, established and managed program office

for the overall program, including creation of project management

processes, deliverables and reporting.

. Projects included applications development projects for data warehouse

and tool deployment, as well as delivery of services, rollout of tools

and processes within Network, Midrange/Mainframe and Desktop

infrastructure organizations

. Role included heavy customer interface, program-level issues resolution

and change requests, management of multiple subproject deliverables, and

direction of cross-functional deliverables.

Delivery Manager, Airline Applications Development

. Day-to-day management of up to 48 employee/contract project managers and

developers

. Projects included new development, maintenance and support

. Systems included airline revenue accounting, financial and maintenance

operation systems for multiple airline and travel industry companies

. Platforms included mainframe, client-server-based and web-enabled.

Development team tools included Java and Javascript, VisualBasic,

Weblogic, Oracle, PL1/Cobol, IMS and DB2.

. Heavy customer interface regarding required system enhancements,

issues/problem resolution, budget planning and invoicing

. Planning, monitoring and reporting ongoing development activities

. All aspects of personnel management including hiring/downsizing, resource

planning, team supervision, and recruiting

. Note: This department was among a large segment of Sabre which was

transitioned to EDS in July, 2001

January, 1998 - March, 2000: Levi Strauss & Co.

Westlake, Texas

Senior Manager, Logistics Applications

. Managed up to twenty-four employee and contract analysts and programmers.

Development team tools included C, VisualBasic, and Oracle, as well as

COBOL and DB2.

. Project scope included development, implementation, support and

enhancement of a client-server based warehouse and transportation

management systems

. Planned and monitored ongoing development activities, as well as managing

production implementation of the system

. Established procedures for production support in conjunction with new

corporate distributed systems support tools and policies

. Worked with IS management and business in prioritization and planning of

required enhancements to the system

. Negotiated Service Level Agreements with customers and internal

providers, and initiated ongoing monitoring of performance reporting,

working with Service Level Management team on reporting and procedural

issues

. All aspects of personnel management including recruiting and hiring

qualified personnel

. Special projects include participation in the development of resource

strategy (in-sourced versus outsourced approach) for long-term support of

the new logistics systems, participation in analysis of technical up-

skilling needs for the information systems department, and advisory role

in the roll-out of the policies and procedures for distributed systems

management

June, 1997 - January, 1998: The Associates

Irving, Texas

Development Project Director

. Managed twelve full-time and contract programmers in the support and

enhancement of a client-server based customer service database.

Development team tools included COBOL and DB2.

. Established departmental operating practices, aimed at strengthening the

department's project management and delivery approach, establishing

processes and standards for project deliverables and system support

. Formalized approach for interfacing with customers and business systems

control groups

. Personnel management including recruiting and hiring qualified contract

and permanent personnel

. Support of recurring expense and annual departmental operating budgets

May, 1995 - June, 1997: Boise Cascade Corporation

Boise, ID

Systems Development Manager

. Managed a small group of programmers and analysts in the selection and

pilot-site deployment of a client/server-based warehouse management and

inventory system. Hands-on involvement in the hardware/software

selection and installation process, including deployment of client/server

computing environment and radio-frequency bar code scanning equipment

. Coordinated design efforts for vendor software modifications and host

system interfaces

. Managed development of new business operating practices, and customer

testing, setup and training plans

. Responsible for project management activities for cross-departmental

projects involving remote mill locations and centralized data processing

services groups

July, 1979 - April, 1995: American Airlines, Inc.

Tulsa, OK and Dallas, TX

February, 1993 - April, 1995: Manager, SABRE Development Services/SABRE

Decision Technologies

. Management and direction of up to 54 programmers and database analysts in

support of various American Airlines departments, including Food &

Beverage and In-flight Duty Free Sales, Corporate Accounting, and SABRE

Computer Services departments

. Systems supported/developed included inventory, scheduling and payables

systems and equipment inventory tracking system. Development team skills

included C/C++, Oracle, COBOL, PL1 and IMS/DB2.

. Personnel management including coaching and counseling team members,

conducting performance reviews, locating and hiring qualified personnel,

and establishing and operating against budgets

. Projects managed included all phases of development, enhancement,

maintenance and support of mainframe and new client-server systems as

well as phase-out of obsolete mainframe and PC-based systems

. Systems were being developed for use by both internal (American Airlines)

customers as well as external customers. Initiated research to determine

marketability of systems outside the company.

. Additional responsibilities included participation in Quality Improvement

Teams to improve organizational processes, including system documentation

and the management of cross-departmental projects

January, 1991 - January, 1993: Systems Planner/Project Lead/Acting

Manager, AAdvantage Systems Development

. Systems planning, project manager and acting manager roles for IT team

supporting American Airlines' AAdvantage Marketing Programs department

. Activities included liaison with users for requirements analysis, project

status/prioritization, research regarding transfer pricing issues, ROI

analysis for upcoming/proposed marketing projects; allocating

resources to projects based on prioritization; support for budgeting

process

. Assumed project management responsibilities over 30,000 man-hour project,

requiring supervision of 14 mainframe programmers from three managers'

areas and coordination of programming efforts of another 40+ programmers

in numerous other programming areas, development of project timelines,

coordination of manpower budgets, and liaison with users

. Acted as department manager May-September, 1992, including

project/resource planning, administration of performance reviews,

transition of new employees into department, performance issues including

termination of employee for poor performance

February, 1990 - December, 1990: Project Lead, Data Management/Data

Extract and Conditioning

. Supervised five mainframe programmers extracting data from various

sources for loading the Teradata database processor in support of

numerous projects. Provided day-to-day supervision, project management,

and liaison with users and other development groups. Since the

department had no manager, provided personnel management functions

including performance reviews and performance counseling. When the group

was dissolved due to a change in technical direction and budget cuts,

coordinated the termination of projects and reallocation of manpower to

other departments

December, 1989 - January, 1990: Programmer/Analyst, Knowledge Systems

. Trained in expert systems shell, participated in analysis of company's

Purchasing department's expert systems requirements, and assisted in

testing and implementation of other knowledge-based systems. Left this

position to fill the Data Extract project lead position at the request of

the Managing Director of the organization

December, 1987 - December, 1989: Senior Programmer/Analyst, SABRE Computer

Services Business Planning

. Primary analyst involved in the preparation of the AA/SABRE Computer

Services IT Business Plan, which involved working with IT division senior

management to develop and document long-term goals, strategies and

objectives for their individual departments

. Worked with teams to develop specific departmental action plans to

support the long-term plan

. Participated in preparation of IT department Standards and Directions,

working with SCS Vice Presidents and their staff members to document

current technical standards and future directions

. Conducted special research projects as required by senior management

July, 1979 - December, 1987: Various Positions

. Programmer/Analyst, Business Planning/Information Center: Analysis and

business planning support in launch of American's office automation

systems, including corporate-wide requirements studies assessing work

processes and automation requirements with business users, Systems

Engineering, and IBM in detailed studies of American Airlines'

Accounting, Marketing & Field Services and Finance & Planning

departments. Developed and presented results and recommendations based

on the studies. Developed evaluation criteria and evaluated numerous

vendor offerings in response to the requirements studies recommendations.

. Instructor, Technical Training: Developed and delivered introductory

training courses in telecommunications, vendor liaison for outside

training services, and support for alternative training sources,

including computer-based training and video-based training

. Communications Systems Engineer: Hardware and software evaluation,

installation, training and support activities, including office systems

personal computing hardware and software, and SABRE equipment

installation

. Word Processing Department: Various positions, including system operator

and department supervisor

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