Sara K. Pope,

PMP, ITILv*, Six Sigma, CCMP, CSM, CSPO, EVM

IT Program/Project Manager

Greater Atlanta Area

ad04yn@r.postjobfree.com

QUALIFICATIONS SUMMARY

As IT Program/Project Manager supporting domestic and global, large scale business transformative IT program and project management, Ms. Pope has enabled cross-functional and cross-cultural teams to successfully deliver on time and on budget the business goals/objectives and stakeholder expectations. These successes have improved the organizations’ performance results and contributed to achievement of their strategic objectives. Her programs and projects typically range in value from $3 to $15M, having 5-40 teammates and having a duration of from 1 to 3 years; these include both custom development and packaged solution implementations such as SAP and Oracle ERP.

In a leadership role holding required security clearances, she has assisted in the management of IT strategic and tactical programs for both global Fortune 500 and large DoD and Public Sector agencies. These have included Mercedes Benz, Avanos Medical, Change Healthcare, Truist Bank,T-Mobile and Standard Insurance from 2017 to present, and US Army and US Treasury Depts from 2003 to 2013. By supporting business case analyses and project budget formulation, and by aligning program and project teams with the business priority definitions, she has delivered programs on schedule.

By consistently advocating and applying a proven and reliable set of program and project management methods and best practice disciplines, she has worked with project team members to prioritize business requirements and deliver on successful business transformations. Using such standards and practices including lifecycle PMP methods, EVM, ISO 9000 and CMMI, she has delivered quality IT products meeting the Fortune 500, Federal, DoD and public Sector organization and stakeholder’s expectations to reduce costs, modernize operations, and improve operational systems’ performance.

KEY COMPETENCIES

IT Program/Project Management PMO Leadership Prioritization/Scheduling Release Management

Change Management Resource Management Risk/Issue/Problem Management

Quality/Test Management Communications Stakeholder Management SLA Oversight

Knowledge Management Data Analysis/Reporting KPI Management Contract Management

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Dec 2022 – Present – Sr IT Project Manager M&A (Standard Insurance-Securian Finance)

Currently serving as Sr IT Project Manager M&A supporting the acquisition of Securian Finance Retirement Plan products, she supports the Plan Sponsor Services organization’s system modifications efforts to address the M&A and Securian product requirements. These modifications will enable the migration/conversion of Securian Finance customers and consumers (500k) to Standard Insurance’s Retirement Plan systems processing and will also provide new product enhancements and features for Standard’s existing customers. She is responsible for overseeing system changes to Sales Force, FIS Global OMNI, PACE and 12 other custom apps, working through IBM as integrator overseeing 10 IT teammates and supporting a team of 25 business leaders and plan managers. Four enhancement projects are being managed concurrently including Step-Up Savings, Loan ACH Processing, Late Contribution Monitoring and 5 Year Rolling Calculation projects. Project scope includes the full lifecycle, applying Agile and Waterfall methods and using Jira, MS Project, MS365 and bespoke PMO tools. She controls the following concurrently for four, full lifecycle implementation projects: critical path scheduling and monitoring, requirements/scope management, risk/issues management and resource allocation/oversight. She coordinates with Business management to confirm requirements and deliver system capabilities through UAT and deployment, on time and within budget.

Nov 2021 – Dec 2022 – Sr IT Project Manager M&A (T-Mobile)

Previously served as Sr IT Project Manager for T-Mobile Innovative Data Services group supporting T-Mobile/Sprint merger and acquisition, she oversaw four technical application teams in the full lifecycle migration of Sprint customer records to T-Mobile’s 5G network and account billing systems. She was responsible for successful delivery of Releases 3, 4 and 5 customer migrations for T-Mobile Marketing division, which all releases were executed concurrently. She coordinated with Product Owners and DevOps teams for T-Mobile system modifications and for test data supporting QA testing for four downstream Marketing systems on Teradata, Azure and SAS platforms. She controlled the critical path, contingencies and scope changes using agile methodologies and tools including Jira Align, Jira, MS Project and T-Mobile proprietary in-house utilities. She ensured that projects were delivered on time and exceeding customers’ expectations, overseeing a team of 20+ resources across the four Marketing data warehouse systems.

April 2021 – Nov 2021 – Program/Project Manager M&A (Truist Bank)

Previously, she served as IT End User Compute (EUC) Program Manager for the M&A, Merger of Equals (MOE) Program at Truist Bank, focused on merging the IT infrastructure, applications and associated business processes for the BB&T and SunTrust Bank organizations. Overseeing approximately 50 projects within three banking portfolios: Retail Community Banking, Consumer Lending and Digital Innovations, she managed a team of Project Managers and coordinated the efforts of more than 40 applications/infrastructure technologists tasked with merging the bank organizations' IT technology. She was the IT counterpart to the bank's Lines of Business SVPs and tasked with ensuring a smooth transfer of technology for Truist Bank.

December 2019 – March 2021 – Program/Project Manager (Change Healthcare)

Previously for Change Healthcare (CHC), a provider of revenue, payment cycle management and clinical data exchange solutions for the healthcare industry, she was IT Program/Project Manager responsible for supporting the IT implementation of Icertis’ Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) system. The Icertis System will migrate data and documentation currently held in eight legacy CLM repositories and will replace multiple supporting CLM applications; these include three Apttus CLM instances and several other custom systems that manage 500K CHC contracts. Her team completed the IT requirements/analysis phases and early systems design, and she guided delivery of initial infrastructure capability for four infrastructure projects: Identity IQ access management, PingOne single sign-on, AdobeSign and Salesforce application integration to Icertis. Previously from December 2019 through July 2020, she was responsible for overseeing Human Resources (HR) IT solution teams in enhancing and extending the SaaS-based HR Workday applications for 15,000 North American employees. These included Human Capital Management, Recruiting, Security, Payroll integrated to Kronos, and vendor Integrations. She managed multiple HR Workday projects and was responsible for implementation task planning and project execution, including monitoring vendor performance and contract deliveries, communicating to stakeholders, and for setup/execution of PMO support activities for CHC HRIS-IT.

July 2018 – September 2019 – Program Manager, SAP S4 HANA Supply Chain/Distribution Logistics/Transportation M&A (Halyard-Avanos Medical)

Previously for Avanos Medical, she was a Program Manager for SAP S4 HANA Supply Chain/Distribution implementation; the Titan Program technical scope included business domain coverage for OTC, PTP, PTD, RTR and HR. She served as the Plan to Distribute (PTD) Program Manager and represented the Business in managing 13 projects and project managers, including SAP Quality Management, Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) and Master Data Management projects, among others. Integration of SAP Transportation Management function was included in the scope. These IT/Business functions were moving from on premise, de-centralized, loosely integrated application services to fully integrated, Azure cloud-based SAP S4 HANA software suite. Applying ASAP and SAP Advanced methodologies in coordination with EY Consulting as systems integrator, she was responsible for full lifecycle implementation for PTD Business with a specific focus on System Integration and User Acceptance Test management. She was also responsible for production readiness and early release management for the business’ project components.

March 2018 – July 2018 – Project Manager, Design (IHG)

For IHG, American Brand Standards PMO, she supported two large, global design/build projects for Holiday Inn Express brand, including business case analyses for vendor design firm selections. Using iterative method project standards to organize, plan, and coordinate the project tasks, she facilitated a multi-disciplinary team of IHG designers, architects, and procurement resources using Agile methods in the planning and identification of a model build for a globalized, high quality, international branding solution. She was successful in driving the lifecycle timeline planning, monitoring/resolving program level issues, conducting cadence using Agile Sprint methods and leading the retrospective lessons learned sessions – accomplishing all on time and on budget.

February 2017 – March 2018 – Program Manager (MBUSA)

For MBUSA she was responsible for establishing the Learning Academy PMO disciplines and supporting Learning Management System IT re-platforming to the cloud EdApp SaaS application suite, including migration and conversion planning to achieve learning mobility enhancements. She completed solution assessments, scheduling, requirements definitions reviews, backlog management monitoring, release management, enhancement analyses and system design activities. She accomplished the implementation of standardized application test planning and execution to achieve quality levels, setup defect and risk management processes, and met the program’s system delivery deadlines.

COMPUTER SCIENCES CORPORATION – 1999 to 2016

2016 – Program Manager for Liberty Mutual/Xchanging Global Insurance, TravelCenters of America and Verizon Wireless Financial Operations.

Program Manager supporting Initiation Phase Projects for Fortune 500 business; goal is to implement global, enterprise-wide, mission critical solutions to expand business, improve IT operations and reduce costs for multi-national business organizations. As a Program Manager, she applied IT management disciplines and practices to support business case definition, drive business scope and process elaboration, and she relied on proven project management processes with a focus on strategy/portfolio management, prioritization, communications, stakeholder alignment, budget reporting, and resource and release management. The Liberty Mutual/Xchanging Global Insurance and Verizon SAP program teams spanned multi-countries and multi-cultures, and she established a communications cadence to facilitate collaboration. Project objectives, including requirements definition and business analysis/design, were met on time and on budget, and system functionality was expanded to meet business strategy.

2013 - 2016 – PMO Program/Project Manager for CSC’s SAP Legal/Contract Management System (CMS)

Program Manager supporting full lifecycle, global implementation of cloud-based CMS, a three-year multi-project program spanning multiple time zones and multi-cultures. She applied project disciplines and SAP best practice application implementation methods and supported the cross-functional program team across multiple time zones and cultures with a focus on budget and resource management, KPI and quality monitoring, subcontractor management, PM coaching, and interactive communications to stakeholders for alignment. She established the Steering Committee, User Working Group and stakeholder communications programs with a focus on quality Release Management. Global contract conversion was a major focus and she setup regular team meetings/status reporting to facilitate cadence. Sustainment operations were setup and hosting vendor SLAs were tracked and monitored; a cloud migration was executed to a new hosting provider as a key performance improvement vehicle. Program objectives were met and CSC contract support functions for 50,000 contracts were migrated to SAP CMS operations on time and on budget, resulting in improved contract access and reduced operations costs.

2010 – 2013 – Program and Proposal Manager

Program Manager for US Army’s Acquisition, Logistics & Technology Enterprise Systems & Services (ALTESS) PMO cloud infrastructure Program and Portfolio Office Assessment during 2013. The charter included 30+ Army mission critical SAP ERP infrastructure systems’ onboarding process optimization and streamlining. She analyzed the Army’s SAP ERP system portfolio and applied Gartner-PMI's Project/Portfolio Management (PPM) Maturity Model framework and ITIL v3 methods to design a PPM-L3 program framework for the Army PMO organization. The project goal was achieved to improve Army Logistics’ cloud management processes, improving implementation and operation of the Army’s cloud services to improve customer onboarding and stakeholder relationships. She directed the analysis of Army operational metrics to determine the operation’s pain points, and then the team revised the customer management workflows to achieve the strategic objectives, cost reductions and improved customer relationships.

During the period 2010 to 2013, she was Proposal Lead for CSC’s Federal Consulting Practice’s Program Management business development activities in response to Federal RFx’s for IT services in the $50M to $5B range. She built the management volumes for more than 35 Federal proposals including US DHHS Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Center for Medicare Services (CMS), and Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) which were won by CSC. A critical proposal focus was CSC’s Cloud Services offerings, public and private, which were bid in majority of proposals.

2006 – 2009 – Program Manager for US Army Logistics & Transportation Programs

Program Manager for multiple, mission critical Army PEO/EIS ERP program implementations, overseeing project teams to bring systems into deployment and operational phases. For Army SAP 4.6 to 6.0 Financials Upgrade and PLM+ Projects, she established a modified SAP-Agile methodology to streamline the conversion program and interface development/execution. She facilitated client and vendor participation and provided clear visibility regarding each team’s distinct roles and responsibilities to highlight their critical paths. She closely monitored the project resources against the delivery metrics to avoid unforeseen delays or overruns, delivering 5 releases in 3 months using structured release management processes. The project deliveries for both projects were on time and on budget. For Army AESIP SAP Program, she also supported task order business development, extending existing service contracts, implementing client partnership agreements, establishing quality and risk management processes, implementing organization change and stakeholder/user communications, and instituted project monitoring and structured release management. For the Army Transportation Information System (TIS) being deployed in Kuwait, a bespoke application suite, she put heavy emphasis on cadence across multiple time zones to maintain cross team visibility, as well as she emphasized technical subcontractor involvement in integrated testing of the complex transportation functions, including caravan tracking, railcar monitoring, and radar system implementation for Army tanks. All Army project objectives were achieved and efficiency goals realized.

2004 – 2006 – Program/Business Transformation Manager for US Treasury-IRS

Program/Business Transformation Manager for IRS mission critical business system implementations, including Data Engine Project for US tax system rewrite, and SAP 4.6 Financials ERP Project for IRS Finance Operations. For Data Engine Project, as PMO member, she provided oversight for cross-functional team members analyzing the data engine requirements and defining data transaction specifications, closely monitoring the budget, timeline schedule, resource tasking and release preparedness. She was responsible for Release Management and monitored the program progress using Earned Value Management (EVM) methods, including reporting at the executive level. For IRS SAP Financials implementation program, she partnered with KPMG IRS accountants to oversee the tailoring of SAP finance processes in partnership with the IRS client. She also organized the interface integration team and implemented standardized interface specifications. She planned the stakeholder communications and oversaw execution, supporting process transition and guiding the design of finance data management processes as critical enhancements. PMO processes were further enhanced with Business/IT System Admin workflows based on ITILv3 that supported technical application management.

1999 – 2004 – Program Manager for County of San Diego (CoSD) and Herbalife International

Program Manager for CoSD mission critical Oracle-based business system implementations, a CSC-outsourcing contract, involving CoSD’s transition to project-centric basis for financial accounting. All modules of the Oracle 11e Financials ERP were implemented in phased approach, scheduled over three-years and integrated to PeopleSoft HR, Payroll, Benefits and Kronos Time applications. She applied a consistent, proven ERP implementation approach that was supported by detailed scheduling processes and structured release management processes. A critical PMO enhancement was the establishment of the CoSD CFO ERP Governance Board and Steering Committee to facilitate collaborative decision making amongst the CoSD financial community members. For the Herbalife global ERP implementation of Oracle 11e Distribution Logistics modules, she supported the project team by deploying rapid application delivery techniques to reduce delivery risk. Implementation program governance and executive reporting were also implemented. Multiple time zones were accommodated with defined communications cadence and a contact committee was setup to facilitate the global deployment roll out, another PMO enhancement. The Herbalife applications went live on time and on budget, meeting Year 2000 goals to replace the BPCS logistic system with Oracle.

PRACTICE DIRECTOR – ORACLE CONSULTING – 7/1997 to 12/1998

1997 – 1999 – Program Manager/Practice Director for Kellogg’s and Oracle International Consulting

Program Manager and Practice Director for Oracle Consulting global financial practice, she supported Kellogg Company’s CIO PMO global Supply Chain-Finance implementation and was responsible for business process and data standardization for the PMO. She applied Oracle Application Implementation Method (AIM) as the IT implementation best practices across her program areas. She was promoted to Practice Director and became responsible for 35 Oracle ERP application consultants engaged in international project implementations of Oracle software using AIM methods. She managed the Financials PMO, monitored software sales pipeline, oversaw consultant utilization targets, and grew services revenue by managing P&L for the practice; she achieved Top 5% Award for exceeding practice performance goals.

PROGRAM MANAGER – TRIAD DATA CONSULTING – 3/1996 to 6/1997

1996 – 1997 – Director, Engineering Systems for Delta Airlines

Director, Program Manager and member of the CIO's PMO team responsible for implementing IT methods, she had responsibility for Technical Operations and Cargo Group. She led teams implementing the CIO's IT SDLC standards for project requirements definition and analysis, as well as software build, test and deployment. She was promoted to Director of Delta Technical Operations, Engineering Management Systems, and managed six engineering development projects. She was responsible for budget, project execution and delivery, resource management and executive reporting.

KEY SKILLS

Metrics Monitoring Measuring and Reporting Team Collaboration Negotiation

Facilitation/Oral Communication Change Management Retrospectives/Lessons Learned

Delivery/Results Oriented Requirements Management Task Order Oversight

MS O365 Sharepoint Jira MS Project SharePoint

AWARDS:

Commander's Coin for Program Management & Implementation, Commander, US Army Materiel Command - Awarded for PLM+ SAP MDM System Implementation

CSC Federal President's Award for Excellence in Business Transformation Improvements - CSC North American Public Sector - Awarded for successful implementation of IRS SAP Financials Business Transformation & Implementation

CSC Partner - Unsung Hero Award - Awarded for IRS SAP Financials Business Transformation & Implementation

CSC Delivery Assurance - Director of Americas West Coast Region - Awarded for Herbalife Int'l Oracle Distribution & Logistic Y2K Solution Implementation

Oracle One Consulting Top 5% Practice Achievement Award - Awarded for Excellence in Oracle Financials Consulting Practice Management and P&L Achievement

Delta Airlines TransQuest CIO Process Improvement Achievement - Awarded for TransQuest Methodology Implementation delivery to Delta Technical Operations

CERTIFICATIONS:

Certified Change Management Professional (CCMP) – Acuity Institute #C13564 – 2022

Certified Product Owner (CSPO) - ScrumAlliance, LeadingAgile - 2020

IACCM Contract Management Practitioner - International Assoc of Commercial and Contract Management (IACCM) - 2015

Certified Scrum Master (CSM) - ScrumAlliance, Version One - 2012

Six Sigma Green Belt - Computer Sciences Corporation, Six Sigma Program - 2012

ITIL v3 Foundation – Computer Sciences Corporation, Loyalist Certification Services - 2009

Earned Value Management (EVM) – Computer Sciences Corporation, Welkin Assoc EVM - 2006

Project Management Professional (PMP) - Project Management Institute Certification #73135 - 2003

EDUCATION:

Master's Degree Program in MIS/Business Analytics

American University, Kogod School of Business -

Washington, DC

Bachelor's Degree in Communications

Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University –

Blacksburg, VA

Contact this candidate