Project Manager Business Partner

Christopher Forehand

Tampa, FL *****

Former Citi FTC

Citibank – Tampa, FL July 2021 to December 2023

Manager Name -Sandy Zamora and Brian O'Bender

SOEID CF60198

Quick View of Skills and Career

Sr. Lead Project and Program Manager – Business and IT, including hardware and software partners, regulatory agencies, and customers.

Developed, managed, and reported on Franchise Critical banking processes and procedures, updating critical banking systems.

Sr. PM of the company’s “C” level presentations, including world-wide conferences, solutions matter expert in Business to IT solutions implemented for BAU.

Includes contract negotiations, SoW costs with headcount, and all resources management.

Owning end-to-end delivery of software projects, budgets, book of work, and status reports worldwide daily, directing people, developing and implementing business to IT processes for critical solutions to BAU teamwork.

Direct client-facing internal and external, including vendor management (bank customers to hardware and software OEMs, ODMs, and ISV negotiating solutions to meet company and customer goals as one solution).

Daily use of CITI bank's backend IT tools for full deployment, including full compliance release docs / BAU, and owning my projects with App IDs.

Release Manager and Development work: SDK Microsoft and other development tools to advance legacy systems into 2024 by way of utilizing Microservices, Scheduling services, and developing full automation / zero touch points as much as possible while retiring legacy systems in migration work.

Extensive Project and Program Management Client Facing, Events and Tradeshows – 24+ Years:

Over 24 years of direct customer site visits to solve pressing technical issues, coordinating the RoB, from end-to-end owning the whole events calendar, prep work, post work, and closer with stakeholder teams.

CSU leader of partner calls, and offsite complete leadership, including presenting to large audiences as solutions matter expert for a product rollout, with full customer journey mapping for enterprise customer experience.

Analytic mindset - resources, able to dig into data and create reports and PowerPoints, consultant/BA background - good with data, presentations, and tidying up data to present.

Expert Level Excel and PowerPoint skills – 10+ years “C” Level Corporate Executive Program / Project presentation with deep-dive analytical data to help executives and managers make data/market data-driven decisions at company/industry levels.

Macro usage and development, Excel worksheets in and out of business intelligence systems and/or predictive analysis software systems.

Including environments in Supply Chain Management / Control Systems Software with CRM, and Telemetry / BI, Microsoft Clarity – predictive analysis tools.

Agile utilization – Current on Agile technology – including going to Agile conferences to keep up with the latest changes.

EMERA [TECO], Microsoft, and CITI career roles, been using Agile for 10+ years at enterprise level bring products and services to market faster, and more sustainable.

Extensive Financial knowledge utilized in both IT and Business management end-to-end processes [ Headcount control systems, Finance BAU, and contract finance with industry leaders [ Thomson Reuters, Fidelity, Mitsubishi Financial, etc.].

Current on Microsoft's latest products, services, and SaaS offerings to customers at enterprise-to-consumer levels.

PowerPoint – deck creation and delivery of technical meetings.

Visual Studio, TFS, Azure Client, Product Studio, SQL plug-ins for telemetry data–tracking and development tools.

SharePoint – document control, creating and managing projects.

Professional Experience

EMERA Energy / TEC - US and Canada – Tampa, FL Feb 2024 – Present

Sr. Project Manager – Corp. IT Team

Project and Job Duties

Full Sr. Analyst and Sr. Project Management project duties for implementing IT software and hardware upgrades utilized in the US and Canada, including end-to-end full Agile Project Release Management, and Sr. VP reports with actionable results-driven processes and procedures.

Sr. Analyst skills: Data mining all risk data for the area, analyzing risk assessments, producing meaningful reports for team reviews using BI tools (BI and AI utilized to develop meaning and actionable report process).

IT and HR critical software/hardware projects, updates, and migrations running all systems related to business objectives inside and outside the EMERA parent company, with all affiliates.

Producing key reports, updating recovery systems, and transferring work that impacts companywide business.

SharePoint updates, automation, workflows, and tracking of all data updating assessments to update recovery in key software/hardware impacted risk scenarios (many federally regulated).

Budget oversight and project cost analysis: Ensure that all projects are executed within the predefined budget, making proactive adjustments as necessary—project new project cost analysis with risks, updating with actual costs, and maintaining budget constraints.

Helping develop and maintain key PMO metrics, and project status, including deep dive data meanings to help keep project scope and budgets on track with risks outlined daily with Sr. VP / Sr. Manager presentations, I run and present all my project status. Sr. PM skills to perform business and process analysis in Agile transformations to help define and support solutions for existing and new functional capabilities.

This includes maintaining SLA metrics that are governed and checked globally.

SOW, contracts, SLAs, IT scouring, with all procurement.

This was US and CA agreed / compliance updates and all metrics impacting each business area.

Sr. PM communications, including partnering with leadership, businesses, and central teams to maintain a calendar of activities to ensure timely completion of all requirements impacting project and companywide objectives, and the assessments to keep recovery capabilities of the IT systems running for US and Canada energy systems.

Including helping manage backend databases with migrations, and maintenance to be moved from legacy systems.

Citibank – Tampa, FL Jul 2021 – Dec 2023

Sr. Project Manager /Sr. Analyst of Risk and Resilience Team

Project and Job Duties

Full Sr. Analyst and Sr. Project Management Agile project duties for implementation of an enhanced Continuity of Business (COB) program to update critical banking systems impacted by changing regulatory requirements.

(Agile PM work in areas of Change Management, Release Management, and Sr. VP report with actionable results-driven processes and procedures).

Producing key reports, updating recovery systems, and transferring work that impacts companywide business.

SharePoint updates, automation, workflows, and tracking all data updating assessments to update COB recovery in key bank impact risk scenarios (many federally regulated).

Budget oversight and project cost analysis: Ensure that all projects are executed within the predefined budget, making proactive adjustments as necessary—projected new project cost analysis with risks, updating with actual costs maintaining budget constraints.

Gap analysis was done with assessment workshop data leveraging systems telemetry data – weekly reports were generated.

Extensive use of Macro’s developed and maintained, data import/export to systems managed and properly formatted for all systems syntax, including BI and Telemetry systems while presenting data and what it means for project(s) being tracked – Risk, Resolution Metrics while keeping detailed mappings and reports updated for regulatory reporting.

Quantitative and Qualitative analysis for Business Impact Assessments (BIAs) updating CITI’s main recovery system CoBTRAC for franchise critical banking processes and procedures including application management, SLAs, MTDs, and recovery times worldwide to individual cities, regions, and sectors.

The SLA’s strictly adhered to causing costly governmental finds if not checked regularly.

Transfer of Work (ToW) and change management work included daily monitoring, tracking, and sometimes correcting the regulator to banking ratings companywide recovery systems and tools relied on for COB banking.

Helping develop and maintain disruption scenarios including logic for workflows tracked in Excel, SharePoint, and Risk tools to ensure key metrics are met.

Recoverable within Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), Sustainable for 30 days, live proof of successfully tested scenarios between city, country, and region with full documentation backing up all findings audited by CITI audit teams and external audit sources (including override reason from country to federally regulated systems).

The project included the implementation of the COB governance framework that includes enhanced recovery scenarios as well as the validation of these scenarios for Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD)/Impact Tolerance as it applies to assessment, planning, and testing.

Sr. PM skills to perform business and process analysis to help define and support solutions for existing and new functional capabilities for setting impact tolerances, maximum tolerable downtime, and the subsequent testing and validation of those values (customer journey-mapping for enterprise customer experience including change management and release management of new implementations of updated cut over / recovery systems).

Sr. Analyst to provide evaluative judgment based on analysis of information in complicated, unique, and dynamic situations; draws on a diverse range of internal and external sources to identify and evaluate opportunities for process improvement and simplification.

Sr. PM communications including partnering with leadership, businesses, and central teams to maintain a calendar of activities to ensure a timely completion of all requirements impacting COB and the assessments to keep recovery capabilities of the bank functions current and compliant which included the vendor management of project work.

Sr. Analyst skills: Data mining all risk data for the area, analyzing risk assessments, producing meaningful reports for team reviews using BI tools (Microsoft Clarity, etc.).

Including helping manage backend databases with migrations, and maintenance to be moved from legacy systems to FUSION UI (Salesforce code base).

Citibank – Tampa, FL Apr 2016 – Jul 2021

Sr. Technical Project Manager, BA, Scrum Master, and Managed Developer team

Project and Job Duties

Full Agile Program Management of projects duties while managing 11 developer teams and one BA while coordinating requests for financial updates with financial Operations teams.

Code areas included: scheduling and micro-services code, SQL, .Net, Java code, digital system design updates release deployed to Windows core code as well as backend IBM mainframe for worldwide releases [Waterfall, Iterative, Modified Agile / Agile – all utilized].

Directly also managed deployment tools utilized to track, and deploy code, and track change management solutions including Service Now, DevOps / Azure utilization, and Jira with GitHub integration.

Included also SLA management, IT managed sourcing balancing, ensuring procurement was strictly balanced and checked.

Project Management work including requirements gathering, cross-project developer project management including negotiating, owning release management schedules for multiple books of work automation requests from operation managers handling financial transactions per country (Cash, Securities, Customer Equities, Credit, Depository connections, with compliance goals) while working with partnering deployment teams.

Full end-to-end software management negotiating with other teams, operations, and outside customers’ solutions to fit within budget and on timelines that realistically allowed the book of work to maintain synergy with needed deployments on time.

Budget oversight and project cost analysis: Ensure that all projects are executed within the predefined budget, making proactive adjustments as necessary—projected new project cost analysis with risks, updating with actual costs maintaining budget constraints.

Vendor management with all stakeholders for go-to-market release issues daily to close business goals.

Injected Sr. Management skills with sourcing, and negotiating large multi-team / multi-client solutions that meet solutions my teams needed while staying ahead of the curve on timely deployments and PMO/BAU duties.

Drive technical design reviews, modeling to system designing using new SDK / Microservices initiatives within the dev team, cross-company SDK implementation of Sr.

VP technology goals with the latest Microsoft and other latest tools, and services while implementing close to zero touch points for users.

Drive standups and weekly Sr. VP calls to give status and drive closer cross-company initiatives.

Drive report processes, communication company, and partner communications in daily deployment work.

Drive test development drops end-to-end tracking projects in JIRA, TFS, HPQC, and Microsoft Project while verifying code to UI deployment requirements while managing Service Now production requests.

Directly implemented Team Foundation Server report tracking for teams and Sr. VP statutes while maintaining system changes.

Currently migrating TFS to JIRA and any legacy HPQC systems to one in-house solution hooking into PM / SDLC tools CITI utilizes daily with compliance and deployment work.

Managed team’s Book of Work for CSD and SSI app IDs – CSD up to 100 projects a year deployed worldwide, SSI working with SWIFT report to develop new processes and procedures for CITI top banking customers automating client settlement instructions.

Live web data for SSI app to the web – developing, and managing legacy applications to new digital transformation (combinational and sequential data sets, synchronizing with BI systems, and live primary customer data between enterprise systems with customer journey-mapping for enterprise customer experience).

JPM / Chase, IT - Tampa, FL Feb 2016 – Apr 2016

Sr. Project Manager – End-to-End Agile Deployment / Release Manager

Project and Job Duties

Full release management control with Developers, Program Managers, and Test Team including TAM work with partners handling deployment, build processes, and procedures for deploying secure VPN and Payment websites for marketing campaigns during deployments.

Handled full RFC and approvals, documentation control, and schedule control while improving the release process daily.

Drove standups, implemented Agile into team (was running in waterfall process), drove meetings, directed people and processes closer to deployment campaign goals including team sourcing and team-wide negotiations to deliver on time within budget.

Business and technical document requirements in traditional program/project manager full lifecycle deployment (Risk vs. Cost impact, the best course of action, deployment techniques analyzed and proven in UAT environment with VP status.

Drove report processes, communication company, and partner communications in daily deployment work.

Help test development drops end-to-end filling bugs in JIRA and verifying code to UI partner integration requirements.

SharePoint business requirements sign-off and full process/procedure development for deployments.

Moved back to Tampa, FL – above - (below Seattle / Redmond, WA area)

Microsoft Aug 2012 – Dec 2015

Sr. Technical Program Manager, Lync Room Systems (LRS), Unified Collaboration Solution Team

Microsoft LRS Team managed overall deployment processes and procedures while integrating the ODM and IHV partner experience with other collaboration solution teams

Full release management control handling LRS deployment with Developers, Program Managers, and Test Team including TAM work with partners handling deployment, build processes, and procedures.

Full control of 4-week sprint cycles with daily partner schedule coordination of forward and reverse integration build processes and procedures.

Handled full RFC and approvals, documentation control, and schedule control while improving the release process daily.

This included also the end-to-end vender, procurement, and vender to Microsoft SLA with hardware requirements tracked and maintained.

Managed ODM account development by working with many ODM account stakeholders closing vendor management goals.

Direct customer site visits to solve press to technical issues coordinating the RoB, from end-to-end owning whole events calendar, prep work, post work, and closer with stakeholder teams.

Managed customer data between enterprise systems with customer journey mapping for enterprise customer experience.

Previous experience available on request

Education

B.S., Electrical Engineering, top of my class engineering schools 3.5 GPA of 4.0

University of Alabama, Graduated 1991

Honors & Awards

Numerous Microsoft Gold Star performance awards & Recipient of executive recognition for exemplary partner engagement. University of Alabama Capstone Electrical Engineering Society Award

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