Management Quality Assurance

•••KASSEBAUM CONSULTING

FIREFIGHTER

MODE Project Management

Cross-Cultural

Background

& Bio

Erik Kassebaum

Ethnography

of

AdaptationShiiba Village Japan

Shiiba

Village

Career Bio

A a management and research consultant, I do

specialized research and organizational reengineering for product

development processes and/or teams. Research topics have included:

Japan, Iran, product usability, critical infrastructure protection,

business continuity plan reviews, and intelligence analysis. With respect

to organizational development, my specialty is working with product

development/support groups that suffer from one or more of the following

issues: schedule slippage, feature creep, cost overruns, quality problems,

poor relations with other internal groups, poor relations with external

customers, high staff turnover, etc. I've worked with groups that range

in size from 3 to 70 people and on projects that took from 3 to 24 months

to implement.

If you have an account on,

then you can read for yourself what business associates have said about

me. Upon request, I can provide additional references. For government

work, I have had a LiveScan (FBI & California Department of Justice)

background check and am "clearable."

Work History 1997-2004

Before starting down this new path as a Consultant, I managed the development

of customer documentation for the Litespan Division in Petaluma California.

As a bit of history, I started with DSC's Litespan Division in 1997

and stayed with the company after it was acquired by Alcatel. Not long

after my fifth year with Alcatel, my department was outsourced to Kudos

Information Incorporated. The branch of Kudos that I worked for

was spun off and is now known as .

I lead the Kudos documentation development teams that are responsible

for supporting the following Alcatel products: the Litespan-2000 and

Litespan-2012 digital loop carriers; the Alcatel Access Management System

(AMS); and Litecraft. AMS is an element management system used to monitor

and provision Alcatel ASAM and Alcatel Litespan equipment. Litecraft

is a craft interface used to turn up and provision Litespan systems.

Alcatel's family of digital loop carriers are called Litespans. Litespans

provide a wide variety of services to more than 30 million subscribers.

There are more than 40,000 Litespan nodes deployed in North America.

The Litespan is an integral part of North America's telecommunications

infrastructure.

In addition to my role as the team lead for these documentation teams,

I also served as a member of the Litespan, AMS and Litecraft release

teams. As such I worked closely with key members of Alcatel's marketing,

development, verification, and customer support groups. From time to

time I also submitted software designs to the marketing and engineering

departments. According to one of the product line managers (PLM) that

I worked with, one of my designs was worth about $20,000,000. [And no...I'm

not exaggerating about the value.]

In addition to writing and assisting with product design, I managed

a documentation development lab and intranet site. The lab included

a dozen Litespan systems, several PCs, three central office simulators,

and a pair of SUN workstations. Let's just say most of the equipment

in my lab found its way there sans an official paper

trail: The benefits of maintaining friends in interesting places and

being an efficient scavenger.

Prior to joining Alcatel I worked as a Web Developer for Lanier

Publishing International (LPI). LPI publishes travel guides. The

primary focus of LPI is Bed & Breakfast guides. The LPI web site

is database-driven. While I was at LPI, it had sites on AOL, MSN, and

CompuServe. LPI also licensed data to other online content providers

such as Travelocity, The Bloomberg, etc.

One of the many projects I was responsible for was the "B&B

Online Gazette," a biweekly HTML E-mail newsletter. When I took

over the development of the newsletter it had 5000 subscribers. After

eight months, there were 25,000 subscribers on the list. While at LPI,

I also planned and oversaw the development and release of one of the

first database-driven sites to appear on AOL.

Work History 1993-1996

After I returned from Japan in the Fall of 1996 I did some freelance

technical writing for .

Mangajin used Japanese comics (manga) as a means to present the Japanese

language to a foreign audience. It also covered popular culture and

technology. I wrote three articles for Mangajin's "Computer Column."

Topics related to the operation and use of bilingual English/Japanese

computer systems. Mangajin was distributed worldwide. Sadly, Mangajin

is no longer being published.

From 1993 to 1996 I worked in Japan as an English Teacher for the Shiiba

Village Board of Education. I was a Japan Exchange and Teaching Program

(JET Program) Participant.

I had the unique distinction of being Shiiba's first foreign resident.

In January of 1994, the Yakuba staff asked me write a column in Shiiba

Village's monthly newsletter. "Adventures in Shiiba" was about

daily life and the mixing of cultures. I wrote "Adventures in Shiiba" in

English. Kouichi Higuma and Takashi Kusuda translated my articles into

Japanese. To make things easier, I used a writing style suited for translation

into Japanese.

Work History 1992-1993

Prior to becoming a JET I worked for Commerce

Clearing House (CCH). While at CCH, I analyzed state tax law and

coded it for CCH ACCESS, a hyper-linked relational database. In addition

I did Quality Assurance (QA) testing; implemented changes in the coding

of tax law for the CCH ACCESS database; and edited a revision of the

code book used by my department to code tax law for inclusion in the

CCH ACCESS database. The definitions in the code book were the heart

of the CCH Access State Tax Law Database.

Background Information

My hobbies include studying foreign languages such as Japanese, biking, swimming, gardening and surfing

the internet. I regularly volunteer at my daughter's elementary school.

My first Master of Arts is in Anthropology and is from California

State University, Chico (1990). My Anthropology MA thesis is titled

"Ethnography of Adaptation: Ethnographic Study of Japanese Sojourners

in Butte County California." It was based upon a year of participant

observation with a group of Japanese students. For links to other qualitative

studies, visit Nova Southwestern's "The

Qualitative Report An online journal dedicated to qualitative research

since 1990."(180KB)

I held a variety of different part-time jobs while working to complete my degrees in Anthropology. Positions included the following: Dormitory Resident Adviser at Santa Rosa Junior College (SRJC); Tutor (SRJC); Adaptive Swimming Pysical Therapy Assistant (SRJC); Recreation Center Assistant Manager (Vista Del Lago); Warehouse Loader for UPS; Interim Museum Director of the Chico Museum; and part-time Lecturer at CSU Chico. Along the way, I earned a fair number of academic scholarships, was quite frugal, and as result--had very little in the way of debt when I finished school.

My second Master's Degree is in Business and Organizational Security

Management and is from Webster

University (2006). Most of the faculty that I studied under are

members of the law enforcement, military and intelligence communities.

My MA thesis is titled "Terrorism and Local Telecommunications

Infrastructure: A general and specific examination of local telecommunications

infrastructure security." Due to the sensitive nature of the material

covered, I am only providing copies of this document to those who make

written requests from government or corporate Email accounts (Erik

Kassebaum ****.*********@*********.***).

Most of the folks who've worked with me at firms such as Alcatel

Lucent or CCH assumed that I had a degree in computer science. Shock, amazement and

envy were some of the more popular reactions that coworkers had when

they found out that my background was in anthropology. Most found it

comforting to be told that I was hard-wired as an anthropologist.

My interest in security management stems from my interest in topics

such as information security, critical infrastructure protection, emergency

management, business continuity planning, intelligence analysis, terrorism,

employee screening, risk management and offshoring. My MA in Anthropology

and work in the field of organizational management dovetails nicely

with my degree in Business or Organizational Security Management.

By now, it's probably apparent that I am a firm believer "lifelong

learning." As most in my family have at least one advanced

degree, it's hard to say whether my aggressive pursuit of interesting

knowledge, skills and abilities is due to nature, nurture or mental

defect (joke).

Erik

Kassebaum ****.*********@*********.***

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