Establish and adapt the business applications strategy in a fast-paced, rapidly changing start-up environment for Zenreach, a WiFi-powered marketing platform that helps businesses automatically create connections that build customer loyalty, revenue and reputation.

• Manage product development of integrated internal systems to ensure compatibility of improvements across Salesforce CRM, proprietary Account Management System (AMS) and Recurly payment & billing tools.

• Prioritize and execute a business applications roadmap that improves the effectiveness of stakeholders in the Sales, Marketing, Customer Operations, and Finance organizations.

• Facilitate cross-functional leadership decision-making and translate business requirements into technical specifications for the Business Applications engineering team.

• Partner with business and operations teams to understand user pain points and identify opportunities for business process improvements.

Supported TenMarks, an award-winning online instructional solution aligned to grade K-12 state and Common Core standards. TenMarks was acquired by Amazon in 2013.

• Defined Content Management System (CMS) roadmap and drove feature development to support customer acquisitions for Math and English instructional solutions.
• Launched operational and process changes associated with CMS feature delivery, including training and documentation.
• Performed Product Owner and Scrum Master duties for global engineering team developing scalable internal tools.
• Served as CMS SPOC, performed system troubleshooting and executed new feature feasibility analysis.
• Managed relationships with content partners and vendors and served as an administrator for enterprise tools.

AN EXAMPLE OF MY CONTRIBUTIONS

PROJECT:  ENABLE SPANISH TRANSLATION OF ENGLISH CONTENT TO SUPPORT ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS

Managed end-to-end delivery of a large scale project to define process and system enhancements to enable successful manual translation of 20,000 content items from English to Spanish by a translation vendor directly in our proprietary CMS system. Performed the following strategic and tactical functions during various stages of the nine-month project to ensure delivery of high quality Spanish content to students by Fall class starts:

(FYI...MY MOM AGREES)

Supported TenMarks, an award-winning online instructional solution aligned to grade K-12 state and Common Core standards. TenMarks was acquired by Amazon in 2013.

• Drove Content Management System (CMS) feature development by global engineering team to support customer acquisitions for Math instructional solutions.
• Developed processes and tools to scale content development and reuse, including creation and dissemination of training and documentation.
• Defined and executed change management activities to ensure operational success of departmental changes and maximize team commitment to change.
• Served as single point of contact to triage and drive technical CMS issues to resolution.
• Managed relationships with content partners and vendors and served as an administrator for enterprise tools.

AN EXAMPLE OF MY CONTRIBUTIONS

PROJECT:  ENHANCE EXISTING ASSIGNMENTS & ASSESSMENTS WITH NEW INTERACTIVE CONTENT TYPES

Led content development standardization to enable the creation of new interactive question types and drove system improvements required to incorporate third party authoring functionality into TenMarks' proprietary CMS to via APIs. Served the following roles during the successful six-month implementation and pilot phases of the program to deliver over 3,000 interactive items by Fall class starts and on an ongoing basis following product launch:

Supported Aplia, an innovative, interactive higher education homework solution improving student outcomes by increasing engagement and effort. Aplia was acquired by Cengage Learning, a leading educational content, software and services company supporting global academic markets, in 2007.

• Recruited to serve as Product Owner for internal CMS/content development workflow tool (ACDC). Represented Content team's needs to Engineering to improve existing internal tools and debug released features.
• Implemented process improvement projects to increase content development efficiency as Aplia expanded homework offerings across multiple disciplines.
• Drove change management activities across the business, including creation and delivery of training to ensure successful adoption of business process changes.
• Developed process documentation and maintained internal Confluence knowledge base to clarify responsibilities and enforce process controls.
• Managed two direct reports.

AN EXAMPLE OF MY CONTRIBUTIONS

PROJECT:  IMPROVE END-TO-END APLIA COURSE CREATION PROCESS

Aplia representative courses are the backbone of the Aplia product - they enable the staging of assignments and course materials during content reviews and are eventually published to production to allow professors to create custom courses for their students. The Aplia Editorial team creates dozens of new courses every semester and each course requires detailed coordination of several independent development workflows that span several months. I performed the following functions to improve the overall effectiveness and efficiency of the course creation workflow, empowering Editorial Assistants to own the process, reducing costly errors and rework:

• PROCESS MANAGER: Interviewed Engineering and Content stakeholders to create current-state process maps, performed process analysis to identify risks, and facilitated cross-functional discussions to brainstorm solutions and socialize future-state process workflows.
• PRODUCT OWNER: Identified repeatable tasks and created user stories for ACDC automation to eliminate defects caused by ambiguous manual workflows.
• CHANGE MANAGER: Executed implementation activities for new process tools and ACDC features to maximize Content team commitment to changes.
• KNOWLEDGE MANAGER: Maintained documentation on Confluence site and delivered role-based training on the complexities of the process to new hires.

Supported Aplia, an innovative, interactive higher education homework solution improving student outcomes by increasing engagement and effort. Aplia was acquired by Cengage Learning, a leading educational content, software and services company supporting global academic markets, in 2007.

• Implemented process improvement projects to scale operations associated with the design, development, production and support of Aplia products as the team experienced unprecedented growth.
• Partnered with Content Engineering to document user requirements and business rules for new proprietary content development workflow/CMS tool (ACDC).
• Performed end-to-end workflow analysis to identify improvement opportunities and drive process excellence across the organization.
• Initiated and managed project activities (data analysis, status reporting, documentation creation and training) to ensure improvements were executed as designed.

AN EXAMPLE OF MY CONTRIBUTIONS

PROJECT:  OPERATIONALIZE APLIA SITE OUTAGE EMERGENCY RESPONSE PROCESS

Aplia employed a multi-tiered emergency response system to alert engineers to platform performance issues that could impact users. In rare cases when incidents disrupted service to customers, it was important to prepare an "all hands on deck" response to quickly troubleshoot and address the problem. I performed the following roles while managing  two projects to operationalize the site emergency response process, ensuring that each team was fully prepared to execute under pressure, day or night:

• PROCESS MANAGER - Worked with VP and senior management to document end-to-end emergency response process, from initial steps to identify scale of the outage to post-outage notifications to affected customers and cross-functional postmortem.
• KNOWLEDGE MANAGER - Documented established emergency escalation procedures and published in online and offline formats.
• PROGRAM MANAGER - Managed integration of Aplia emergency response process with Cengage's corporate engineering escalation workflow. Organized mock emergency simulations on a regular basis to keep the emergency response skills of the Product Development, Customer Support and Engineering teams sharp.
• CHANGE MANAGER - Planned and executed cut-over activities to move from third party escalation service to Cengage's global engineering escalation service. 

Supported Manufacturing Operations at Genentech, a global Life Sciences industry leader developing medicines for serious and life-threatening medical conditions.

OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE PROGRAM MANAGER - April 2007 to July 2008   

• Managed Operations team project portfolio and local manufacturing department portfolios for facility construction and equipment upgrades to provide executive team with project health metrics and eliminate redundant projects.
• Developed, documented and enforced Project Planning and Delivery process to ensure projects supported strategic goals and were executed within specified timelines and budgets.
• Used Operational Excellence tools (RCA, FMEA and Lean Manufacturing concepts) to increase manufacturing productivity.

PROJECT COORDINATOR - August 2005 to March 2007

• Managed projects and applied Operational Excellence tools to identify and execute process improvement initiatives in support of SAP implementation and attaining World Class Manufacturing status.

• Facilitated multiple root cause analysis and problem analysis sessions that led to resolution of a trend of four similar adverse safety events.

• Successfully decommissioned equipment, raw materials, documentation and training following the end of a contract to manufacture a competitor's product.

SENIOR MANUFACTURING ASSOCIATE - July 2001 to July 2005

• Managed projects and continuous process improvement initiatives to ensure operational compliance with FDA regulations.
• Standardized procedures across multiple departments and revised and created GMP documentation and training to ensure process compliance.
• Personally resolved over 30 Corrective and Preventative Actions (CAPAs) during three month period contributing to CAPA backlog reduction effort to reduce the number of open manufacturing CAPAs from over 200 to less than 85 as requested by the FDA.

SENIOR BIOPROCESS TECHNICIAN - September 1998 to June 2001

• Performed large-scale extraction, isolation and purification of proteins for clinical and marketed products.
• Piloted an On the Job Training (OJT) Program as a technical trainer for five new hires.