James A Huss

Columbus, OH 614-***-****

https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-a-huss-69184612 ac7b0h@r.postjobfree.com

SUMMARY

Engaging, collaborative and responsible individual with IT experience in application leadership, software development and Process Management/Operations.

Track record of management of application build and run teams, IT efficiencies, improving engagement, acquiring talent, priority setting, forecasting, team communication, project management, and productivity.

Strengths in building and coaching highly effective teams, uplifting capability, continuous improvement, acquiring talent, and decreasing costs.

StrengthsFinder top strengths: Harmony, Responsibility, Analytical, Consistency, Arranger

TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGY

Mainframe, COBOL, JCL, CICS, VSAM, Oracle, Oracle Forms, Unix, HP Quality Center, ServiceNow, HP Service Center, Clarity, PowerPoint, Lotus Notes, Peoplesoft, PeopleClick, SnagIt, Triage, Microsoft Office.

ADDITIONAL STRENGHTS AND COMPETENCIES

IT Strategy, ITIL, Business Process Improvement, ServiceNow, SDLC, Analysis, Training, and Development, Waterfall/Agile Methodologies, Vendor Management, Process Improvement, Process Documentation, IT Portfolio Management, Project Management, Executive Communications, Stakeholder Relations, Prioritization, Talent Acquisition, 3rd Party Relationships, Team Building, Engagement, Budget Management, Change Management, Release Management, Problem Management, Knowledge Management, Resource Management, Collaboration, Conflict Resolution, Customer Relationship Management, Leadership, Performance Reviews, Planning, Nationwide Insurance Annuity applications, Nationwide Insurance Public & Private Pension applications.

EXPERIENCE

Nationwide Insurance Columbus, Ohio

IT Process Management 2015 – 2018

Uplifted SLM, Application Service Level Management, process capabilities by documenting and supporting activities as related to the Nationwide Application Portfolio system. This includes monitoring and notifications for business reviews, Class of Service, and availability levels.

Key driver to initiate and provide guidance to the Nationwide Batch processing team to utilize ServiceNow as the primary knowledge repository. The use of ServiceNow as the repository provides easy access to up-to-date knowledge, reducing the time to resolve production abends.

Partnered with several Problem Managers to engage in the Problem Management process, gaining exposure to numerous production outages and Root Cause Analysis, resulting in providing issue documentation and Root Cause Analysis documentation.

ServiceNow

oMember of the Knowledge process POT, Process Operations team. This team is responsible for creating knowledge standards, approving and validating ServiceNow knowledge enhancements, creating knowledge metrics.

oUplifted ServiceNow Knowledge process by building Knowledge Management Capabilities across Nationwide IT, this entails documentation standards, partnering with organizations across Nationwide IT to develop Knowledge Management best practices.

oPrimary contact for enterprise knowledge articles within ServiceNow, responsibilities include validating new enterprise knowledge articles, approving new knowledge articles, monitoring for expired and soon to expire knowledge articles.

oUplifted ServiceNow Configuration Management capabilities by documenting tasks, configuration mapping activities and involvement in risk reduction and vulnerability activities.

oUplifted ServiceNow request processes capabilities by documenting tasks and supporting activities to monitor all ServiceNow group name request activities; including approving new groups, group name changes and process changes within groups.

Facilitated weekly Executive review meetings by preparing weekly agendas and leading discussions. The intent of this meeting is to provide a recap of the weekend implementation activities, status and outages as well as a preview of upcoming activities.

Participated in the 2018 Nationwide Run Services Hackathon where our team came in third place with an idea and solution to utilize ServiceNow to assist third parties with communication of changes with Nationwide. The intent is to create awareness of 3rd party change and avoid outages and/or reduce downtime. This solution has been approved by the Infrastructure and Operations cabinet to be implemented in 2018. Primary role was the document and present the teams journey, progress and accomplishments.

Nationwide Insurance Columbus, Ohio

Manager, IT Applications Run Team 2007 - 2014

Managed Mainframe and Distributed application support teams – Annuity Application Support Teams

2014 team Associate Engagement score was 4.6/5, and has consistently been over 4.16. Historically the team Associate Engagement scores were the highest in the Annuity application development space.

Selected as a Change Agent for a Lean Application Maintenance pilot group. Was very involved in working with McKinsey & Company Consulting group to go through current practices for all Annuity, Life and Agency run teams. This included identifying practices, analyzing and modifying run team practices and applying Lean principles with the intent of standardizing personal and team practices.

Responsible for all walk-up/break-fix activities for the Immediate and Deferred Annuity Systems applications. This entailed managing the day to day activities to maintain over 20 mainframe and distributed applications.

Responsibilities included coaching and developing technical staff, creating best practices to support our systems, working with business partners to prioritize walk-up/break-fix activities, server upgrades, efficiency efforts, system performance, Incident Management, audit issues, Generic Id ownership, disaster recovery activities, I&O infrastructure requests, third party vendor upgrades, Application Portfolio information maintenance, Clarity plan ownership, application cost of ownership, and budget forecasting.

Managed team which supported mainframe applications using COBOL, VSAM and CICS as well as distributed technologies such as JAVA, Oracle, Oracle Forms, VB, Unix and Informatica.

Managed prioritization efforts between business partners, audit partners, security partners, break-fix activities, walk-up requests, I&O demands, and ongoing efficiency efforts.

ITDE, IT Delivery Exec, on several software related efforts including server upgrades, database upgrades and software version upgrades.

ITDE on multiple software, and application efficiency efforts resulting in over $300,000 in ongoing annual savings.

ITDE on multiple application performance efforts resulting in faster run times, reducing stress to meet SLA’s and budget.

Maintained relationships with business partners, systems partners, software vendors, 3rd party application vendors, people vendors, infrastructure partners, security partners, and audit partners.

Participated in Diversity and inclusion events by representing Nationwide at various college intern events resulting in numerous intern hires, several which were offered long term employment.

Maintained a staff which consisted of Nationwide associates, offshore associates, contractors and interns, generally a $1.7m people budget.

Maintained a $4m hardware/software budget.

Successfully merged three distinct run support teams into a unified team.

Nationwide Insurance Columbus, Ohio

Manager, IT Applications Build Team 2000 - 2006

Managed Mainframe and Distributed application build teams – Annuity Application Design and Build Teams

Responsible for the systems Design and the Project Development teams. Including allocating, forecasting and managing resources for the analysis, design and build and implementation phases of systems projects.

Coaching and developing high-level technical staff, which were responsible for quality design approaches for PALLM, Deferred Annuity Administration System, as well as several Annuity front-end systems.

Responsible for tracking target dates, resolving project and personnel issues, creating objectives, salary administration, managing customer relationships, managing contractor relations, interviewing and enforcing Annuity systems development and design standards.

Responsibilities also included managing project expectations with our business partners and providing feedback to our Release Management team.

EDUCATION

Bachelor of Science, Business Administration Franklin University Columbus, Ohio

Associate Degree in Computer Programming Terra Technical College Fremont, Ohio

CERTIFICATIONS / TRAINING

ITIL Foundations Certificate in IT Service Management, New Horizons, AXELOS

ITIL Intermediate Certificate in Service Transition, New Horizons, AXELOS

KT ITSM Problem & Incident Management Workshop, Kepner Tregoe

CSM (Certified ScrumMaster), Scrum Alliance

CKM (Certified Knowledge Manager), KMI Institute

KCS v6 Practices (Knowledge Centered Services), KCS Academy

KCS v6 Fundamentals (Knowledge Centered Services), KCS Academy

itSMF USA

AAPA Associate, Annuity Products and Administration

FFSI Fellow Financial Services Institute

FLMI Fellow, Life Mgmt. Institute

COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT

Former United Way Lieutenant

Volunteer at Mid-Ohio Foodbank

Active Red Cross Donor

Coach for YMCA youth sports

Coach for church league youth sports

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