IAN PARKINSON

SUMMARY

A highly productive information technology director / program manager. Conceptual. Strategic. Focused on getting projects done on time and within budget. Great team leader. Excellent communicator. Honest and Trustworthy. A real team player.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

American Express Virtual 2007 – 2015

Program Manager Workforce Management (2009-2015)

Provided oversight and IT planning for American Express Customer Support Call centers across the globe. Systems supported over 5000 telephone service representatives working 24x7 inside US and international internal and 3rd party call centers. Liaised with primary business stakeholders to provide 2nd line support for production systems and ensure system updates were applied as appropriate.

Oversaw global consolidation of 4 regional instances of Aspect’s eWFM tool to one single platform. While at the same time uplifting the version of the product to current level. Dovetailed regional decommission of US platform with hosting center closure and subsequent hosting relocation. Realized opportunity to decommission a further two supporting platforms without impact to end user functionality. Migrated consolidated platform to VSS provisioned server farm. Managed extended team of 25 including PM’s and Developers plus supporting vendor resources. Achieved cost savings of $750K + within a $800K budget in partnership with IBM and Aspect vendors.

Continue to manage platform and portfolio financials ongoing. Acted as relationship manager with IBM and Aspect for platform. I was also responsible for developing the platform blueprint for future deployment and development. In parallel with preparing funding request quotes. Continuing management of Change Management process.

Was department champion for introduction of Agile methodology across American Express. Managed resource allocation for Scrum teams and running both Waterfall and Agile methodologies in parallel.

Program Manager Global Travel Technologies (2008-2009)

Responsible for planning, directing and coordinating multiple projects, from initiation through to implementation. Lead geographically diverse cross-functional project teams. Primary projects worked include automation of current manual business processes for internal and external customer reporting. Provided web platforms for access to business MI reports. Tools used to provide solutions include Ab Initio, MS-SQL, J2EE. Responsible for managing project costs, resources, change requests, risk and issues as well as providing regular project status updates.

Program Manager BI Shared Infrastructure (2007-2008)

For the BI shared infrastructure I provided team direction to the 30 plus, on and off-shore BI staff of the Business Intelligence group. This supported the Cognos, Microstrategy and Actuate platforms within the BI portfolio. Monitored budgets, ensured cross functional team partnerships worked seamlessly and provided feedback on the current status and future options for the BI infrastructure to senior management as and when required. Responsible for Change Control on BI platforms.

IBM Phoenix, AZ 2005 - 2007

Project Management Consultant

Provided Consulting and Project Management for large-scale infrastructure projects in multiple production environments; taking projects from inception to post release warranty in support of the American Express Technologies group client. Managing on-shore / off-shore technology groups and ensuring projects remain on schedule and on budget. The Primary project provided a Virtual Server farm platform and involved migrating physical servers to the virtual environment using VMWARE and ESX. Reducing hardware cost and decreasing provisioning time for servers.

American Express Phoenix, AZ & Greensboro, NC 1999 - 2005

Director of Information Technology

Key areas of responsibility include budgetary and project management of a $20m+ cost center with 50 plus employees across US and India. Providing strategic and tactical technology leadership, setting goals, and objectives for Risk MIS business areas. Major achievements include establishing a Multi-Terabyte data warehouse and N-Tier .NET & Java web delivery portal, which provides BI tools, MIS reporting and an ad hoc analytic environment for the Risk modeling community. Platform supports over 800 Risk managers and 2500 call center analysts across diverse geographic areas. Ensured Change Management controls were in place and executed upon. Concurrent focus has been applied to driving re-engineering initiatives, invoking six sigma methodologies to realize cost savings of $3m year on year from 2000.

Mercedes-Benz IT Director

Established and managed a core Y2K preparation test team. Responsibilities included preparing and implementing Hardware and Software testing strategies for Mercedes Benz global systems.

Royal Mail IT Director

Managed teams in two locations for Royal Mails Electronic Services Division. Re-structured internal teams to achieve the highest level of efficiency. Soley responsible for the implementation of an improved process documentation system, which introduced procedural reforms enabling ISO9000 acceptance.

Galileo International Project Manager Systems Test

Responsibilities included implementation and testing of multi-million dollar Airline Central Reservation System - GCS / TravelManager, across multi-system platforms.

IBM Test and Development Consultant

Major responsibilities involved systems testing for GDDM, GWSP, 0/S 2 Presentation Manager, Lan Manager and IBM C Compiler versions.

Price Waterhouse Coopers ( Coopers & Lybrand ) @ British Telecom Systems Consultant

Responsibilities included supporting VM, MVS, DOS/VSE and SSX/VSE systems running MSA GL packages. Generated DOS/VSE, CICS and VTAM systems and installed at regional BT IT centers.

IBM New York & ITT New York IT Consultant

Employed as a consultant through a software house to provide on site support to the following companies:

IBM - Designed and coded Assembler programs and macros for CICS and Batch applications running under MVS. The programs formed part of a suite of programs issued as part of the STAIRS product.

ITT - Installed and tailored a DOS/VSE including establishing CICS, VTAM and ICCF systems to provide a platform for an online Telex look up system.

Merrill Lynch New York Systems Consultant

Responsibilities included the maintenance and upgrading of an IBM originated O/S called CCAP. This system was designed as a message switching system similar to TPF and supported a worldwide network of over 12,000 devices. Major projects completed during this time included a CICS fast restart facility coding DAT features into the CCAP supervisor.

Related Client Engagements

Meijer Corporation Grand Rapids, Mi Director Testing Systems

Retail

CSS New York, NY Consultant

Health Care

Barclays Bank UK Senior Applications / Analyst

Financial

Wiggins Teape UK Senior Analyst Programmer

Manufacturing

ICI UK Systems Audit consultant

Industrial

Great Universal Stores Analyst/programmer

Retail

EDUCATION

Bachelors of Arts (Honors) Liverpool University

Architectural Studies Liverpool, England

PRODUCT KNOWLEDGE

Hardware IBM 370 33XX 3090 43XX 3705 IBM PC'S, RS6000 LanServers Macintosh SUN HP SAN NAS RAID

Software MVS VM/SP D0S/VSE TPF 3.1 / 4.1 CICS VTAM NCP SSX/VSE CMS TS0/SPF

REXX ICCF VSAM JCL ADABAS/NATURAL M&D MSA D&B GL / AP MACINTOSH

UNIX OS/2 ORACLE MS SQL SERVER SYBASE WINDOWS, LINUX LAMP SOLARIS QA - AUTOMATE TEST DIRECTOR WINRUNNER SQA SIX SIGMA MS-PROJECT SDLC SEI/CMM WEBSPHERE APACHE WAS MS-IIS .NET SAS TOOLS BRIO BUSINESS OBJECTS E-ACTUATE MICROSTRATEGY COGNOS INFORMATICA AB-INITIO VMWARE ESX CHANGE MANAGEMENT CLARITY AGILE

Languages ASSEMBLER COBOL VISUALBASIC ASP C++ JAVA J2EE EJB JSP XML HTML PHP XML CSS

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