Catherine Willis: MS, PMP 919-***-**** or 919-***-**** ac2exa@r.postjobfree.com

Summary of Qualifications

Focused, energetic, and successful Senior Technical Writer with extensive experience documenting complex technologies for a wide variety of audiences.

Thrive working with multifunctional and global teams and with tight deadlines.

Project and Program Management experience managing multiple concurrent software and hardware documentation projects with local and global teams in both Agile and Waterfall environments.

Demonstrated ability to innovate and continually improve Technical Documentation and the processes and tools authors use. My primary focus is content retrievability. Let's make life easier for our customers and employees!

Develop strategic plans for Technical Documentation organizations including audience analysis, resource plans, group goals, processes, best practices, style guides, style sheets, and document templates.

Proven leader: my teams consistently exceed our goals and targets, and work well with other teams throughout the company.

Lead and mentor teams locally and from geographically and culturally diverse regions including junior to senior Technical Writers, Editors, Illustrators, and Desktop Publishers.

Expertise in documentation design and development for a wide variety of Technical and Customer Documents in start-up, mid-sized, and enterprise companies for the following industries: Internet Technology, Internet Security, Aerospace, GPS/GLONASS, Biotechnology, Oil Exploration, and Manufacturing.

Experience with DITA, structured-authoring, Content Management Systems (CMS), and XML.

Summary of Employment

Lead, Technical Documentation Cisco Systems, Security & Trust Organization

Led Technical Documentation team for the entire Security & Trust Organization (formerly Global Government Services Group)

Senior Technical Writer Cisco Systems, Gigabit Systems Business Unit

Led Technical Documentation team for the Catalyst 4000 Series and Catalyst 4500 Series Switches

Lead Technical Writer Thales Navigation (formerly Magellan/Ashtech)

Led Technical Documentation team for high precision GPS and GLONASS products.

Technical Writer VeriBest Corporation (Division of Intergraph)

Developed and updated Quick Start tutorials, User Guides, and Licensing manuals for ASIC simulation applications.

Project Manager Los Trancos Systems

Coordinated teams of Technical Writers that created a variety of Technical Documentation types for clients.

Certifications and Certificates

Project Manager Professional (PMP), Project Management Institute

Managing the Development of Technical Information, University of California, Santa Cruz Extension

Project Management, University of California, Santa Cruz Extension

Application Skills

Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook), Adobe FrameMaker, Adobe Acrobat Professional, Rally, Microsoft Project, CMS, CCMS, JiveOn!, Doxygen, DITA, HTML, XML, Adobe Dreamweaver and Muse, Wikis, vi, shell scripting, Microsoft Visio, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and Lightroom.

Education

•Masters of Science, Geology, Michigan Technological University

•Bachelor of Science with Distinction in Major, Geology, University of California, Santa Barbara

Volunteer Service

•Member, Town of Morrisville Planning and Zoning Board, 2004-2016

Detailed Employment History

Lead, Technical Documentation, 2004 to 2016 Cisco Systems, Security & Trust Organization

Led Technical Documentation team for the entire Security & Trust Organization (formerly Global Government Services Group)

Ensured the success of internal and external Cisco customers by designing, developing, and delivering Technical documentation that best suits the user’s learning style and working environment, while maximizing their understanding when using the code or product.

Developed and implemented an overall Technical Documentation strategy for the Business Group in Cisco, ITAR, and US secure environments. Revised and incorporated changes as needed.

Planned for resource requirements and managed the hiring process for Technical Writers. Wrote job descriptions, RFQ, and SOWs. Reviewed resumes, conducted phone screens and in-person interviews, coordinated on-site interview schedules. Mentored incoming team members.

Increased Technical Writer productivity and improved retrievability and usability of Content by migrating PDF-based documents to XML-based environment as part of documentation improvement processes for the organization.

Increased Business Unit’s productivity by overhauling and realigning the entire Business Unit’s internal online presence to JiveOn!. This project deleted over 100 Gigabytes of duplicate data and fostered a more cohesive and collaborative environment for employees.

Efficiently integrated Technical Writers into the Agile environment and Engineering scrum teams.

Maintained strong working relationships with Engineering, Project Management Office, Marketing, Global Certifications Team, Government Security Office, Advanced Services, Legal, and other Cisco Technical Documentation teams.

Managed Technical Documentation projects for multiple Cisco Catalyst Switch projects simultaneously, each with different operating systems.

Led the Technical Documentation effort and team for the highly successful initial release of Cisco IOS on the Catalyst 4000 Series Switches. Early in the development cycle, I arranged weekly meetings with the Director of Engineering, Technical Writers and principle Software Engineers that helped both the Engineering and Technical Documentation teams learn Cisco IOS and mimic the implementation and style used when Catalyst 6500 teams completed the same effort.

Built strong working relationships within and outside the BU as the Technical Documentation point of contact.

Contributed to the Cisco Documentation Community by actively serving on Cisco Style Guide committee. Complete overhaul the Index for the Cisco Technical Documentation Style Guide.

Designed and developed Technical Documentation suites for Catalyst 6000 and Catalyst 4000 Series Switches including Software Configuration Guides, Command References, System Message Guides, Hardware Guides, and Release Notes.

Lead Technical Writer, 1996 to 1999 Thales Navigation (formerly Magellan/Ashtech)

Led Technical Documentation team for high precision GPS and GLONASS products.

Developed high quality paper documentation with 100% rate of on-time delivery of content that supported technical and customer requirements.

Actively planned and maintained long-term group goals, assigned tasks and resources.

Mentored junior writers, illustrator, and desktop publisher.

Implemented strategy with Print vendor that cut first article proof costs by $750 to $1000 per book and cut the delivery time from two to three per book to less than a week. Print vendor used this strategy with several other clients.

Developed new FrameMaker templates and applied them to current Technical Documentation Library. These new templates considerably simplified documents and improved the organization and retrievability of the Content.

Evaluated and selected vendors for documentation and GUI translation projects.

Sought customer input when designing product Quick Start Cards.

Built and maintained strong, working relationships with all levels of Management, Engineering, Marketing, Customer Support, and Sales.

Technical Writer, 1996 to 1996 VeriBest Corporation (Division of Intergraph)

Developed and updated Quick Start tutorials, User Guides, and Licensing manuals for ASIC simulation applications.

Researched and recommended strategies to convert paper documentation to HTML and an interactive format.

Initiated the documentation conversion strategy, before division funding declined, and eliminated my position.

Project Manager, 1994 to 1996 Los Trancos Systems

Coordinated teams of Technical Writers that created a variety of Technical Documentation types for clients.

Ensured Documentation quality. Kept projects on budget and on time.

Worked with BioScience clients to develop Technical Documentation, online help systems and product training. Designed and produced work-flow diagrams describing manufacturing processes.

Worked with Computer industry clients to generate a general corporate online strategy, customer documentation, and training.

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