Manager Project

Jason R. Finns

Charlotte, NC ***** 859-***-**** ***********@*****.***

Director of Application Development

Over seventeen years of experience working in Information Technology environments where deadlines matter, value is measured, and quality is paramount. Proven leadership skills and ability to perform and communicate well with technicians at a whiteboard and executives in a boardroom. Career has featured developing applications in the containerized shipping industry, delivering a large-scale IT solution at one of the largest banks in the United States and managing software development for the flagship sales engine of a global life insurance company.

• Demonstrated skills in driving results as career has evolved from a software developer to the Director of Application Development

• Take-charge attitude that is a natural fit for solving organizational, technical, personnel and procedural issues

• Proven ability to mobilize and motivate teams to reach their maximum potential

• Deep experience in every facet of the software development life cycle

• Ability to manage team operations while setting strategic direction with business executives and business partners

• Communication skills that transfer from discussing complex technical topics with IT staff to executive presentations

Professional Experience

SCOR Global Life – Charlotte, NC March 2012 - Present Director of Application Development July 2014 - Present

• Successfully delivered over 50 releases per year to production to ensure client’s needs were me on time or ahead of schedule.

• Delivered IT solutions that facilitated a 287% grown in business volume over the past six years.

• Managed multiple teams in the development, quality assurance and production support functions

• Migrated the division’s flagship application from a local data center to Amazon Web Services which positioned the division to reduce software hosting costs by 40%, eliminate bottlenecks in the SDLC and achieve a SOC2 Type 1 certification

• Worked closely with the CISO to ensure all SLDC audit points were met and the SOC2 certification was maintained.

• Regularly participated in designing infrastructure solutions that reduced cost and complexity while increasing reliability.

• Led a database migration effort from Oracle to MySQL that saved approximately $300K per year in licensing cost and eliminated the database as a bottleneck to creating new “on demand” development and test environments

• Regularly consulted with C-level executives regarding project status, issues and risks

• Responsible for ensuring adherence to policies that governed the IT department which included enforcing controls, producing evidence and consulting with external auditors

• Created, communicated and enforced Best Practices related to software development, testing and deployment

• Reduced post-production defects by ensuring consistency in quality and process across all teams in the division

• Worked closely with the product owner to ensure expectations were met

• Redesigned the release process to shorten time to market, increase change throughput and decrease complexity

Application Development Manager March 2012 – June 2014

• Managed development, quality assurance and production support teams for Velogica, an automated insurance underwriting application used as one of the primary revenue and growth engines for the company

• Responsible for a $6,000,000, two-year application conversion project that included operating system and database upgrades, migrating the hosting platform to JBoss and re-writing the underwriting algorithm to facilitate expanded product offerings

• Ensured production uptime, performance and accuracy exceeded client Service Level Agreements

• Led simultaneous new client implementation projects

• Managed all personnel functions for the unit’s IT department including hiring, reviews, compensation, coaching and performance improvement plans

• Identified and resolved problematic system issues that led to measurable performance and stability improvements which resulted in a better customer experience

• Acted as liaison to the Infrastructure team on various projects including data center migrations and managed solution outsourcing

• Re-designed aspects of the Agile methodology being used to increase focus on regression testing, closer interaction with business users, earlier detection of issues, clearer understanding of requirements and increased team member accountability

• Created and executed against release plans that ensured proper testing and adherence to best practices from development through production implementation

• Contributed to and ensured sound architectural design

• Documented and enforced best practices for various functions of the IT team

• Designed improvements to an automated regression suit of over 6,000 test cases

• Wrote and reviewed system documentation

Bank of America – Charlotte, NC July 2010 – February 2012 Technology Manager February 2011 – February 2012

• Managed team of J2EE developers located throughout the US, Mexico and India

• Implemented a 1.5 billion record enterprise system that processed 700,000 messages per day forming client linkages from the banks entire customer data population with a potential $500 million use case cost savings

• Responsible for project deliverables, financial forecasts and personnel utilization

• Managed day-to-day team activities as well as short and long term team goals

• Established a continuous integration system to increase code quality by detecting faults earlier and increasing automated testing

• Supported project through warranty period (including weekly and monthly releases) and established “Business As Usual” support processes

• Established reputation of being a desirable manager that takes a personal interest and concern for the people on the team

Team Manager July 2010 – January 2011

• Led project development and design discussions impacting every major data hub in the bank from development through the initial testing phase (Component Integration Testing)

• Provided guidance to development teams regarding defects and blocking issues

• Developed and managed defect resolution process to efficiently move fixes through each test environment and into the integrated test environment without impacting ongoing test efforts

• Successfully managed challenging test phases that completed on time and met all objectives

• Regularly presented testing status to project executives and consulted with them regarding risks, issues and strategy

Dell Perot Systems - Lexington, KY January 2001 – July 2010 Applications Development Specialist January 2001 – July 2010

• Developed and supported enterprise systems used by personnel around the world to manage a fleet of over one million shipping containers for Triton Container International

• Drafted design specifications and proposed enhancements for various departments (e.g. billing, accounting, operations, etc.) which included obtaining support from client’s senior leadership

• Used IntelliJ to refactor legacy pieces of system code in order to improve testability, ease maintenance and comply with Java and EJB best practices

• Led system implementations and other short-term projects

• Used the JRockit Management Console and other tuning/monitoring tools to troubleshoot resource usage issues

• Re-Engineered the production WebLogic deployment to achieve failover, increased performance and scalability

• Used JMS to distribute complex business processes across multiple clustered nodes running in a Linux environment

• Migrated legacy web applications to the WebLogic platform and improved user experience through the use of AJAX and JavaScript

• Improved production installations by developing Java Swing configuration tool to automate what was previously a long and error prone process

• Addressed system stability issues such as memory issues and deadlocks

• Implemented SSL web connectivity

• Trained helpdesk personnel to support day-to-day operations relating to newly deployed functionally

• Managed the team’s automated test and integration environment using Team City and established best practices for various test frameworks including JUnit, EasyMock and Selenium Education/Certification & Training

University of Kentucky: Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Minor in Business Scrum Alliance: Certified Agile Leader I, Certified Scrum Product Owner Oracle: Certified Java Programmer, Certified Java Web Developer, WebLogic System Administration Red Hat: JBoss Server Administration

Bank of America: Managing at Bank of America, Leading in Turbulent Times Technical Skills

Languages: Java, XML, HTML, SQL, C, C ++, Andorid SDK, VBA, WSDL Advanced Java: J2EE, EJB, JSP, JavaScript, Servlets, JRockit Application Servers: Oracle WebLogic, IBM Websphere, Red Hat JBoss OS: Windows, Linux, UNIX, AIX

Test Frameworks/Tools: JUnit, EasyMock, Team City, Silk Test, Selenium, Cobertura IDE Tools: IntelliJ, SharpDevelop, Microsoft Visual C++, Eclipse, RAD Databases: Sybase, DB2, Oracle

Change Management: CVS, Subversion, Jira, IBM ClearCase, HP Quality Center, Git Other technologies: AJAX, ANT, F5, Crystal Reports, Style Reports, AutoCAD; MathCAD, Maple, IBM MQ, IBM Message Broker, Introscope, Install Shield, Perl, C#/.NET, Python

Contact this candidate