Daniel Refaat

Key Projects:
•Smart Resident ID Card System - Ministry of Interior - Qatar.
•Intranet E-Services - Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) - Dubai.
•Intranet Portal (based on Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007) - RTA - Dubai.
•IT Strategy Formulation - Ministry of Education (MoE) - Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
•Risk Matrix - Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) - Dubai.

Responsibilities:
•Maintaining strong client relationship and developing business opportunities by up-selling more services to different departments within a client’s organization.
•Producing Statement of Work (SOW) documents based on Technical Proposals.
•Drafting Work Breakdown Structures (WBS), Deployment Plans, and Project Plans.
•Coordinating between Project Sponsors, Business Owners, and other project teams to stay on schedule.
•Creating Quality Control plans, participating in System and Integration Testing, as well as planning and overseeing User Acceptance Testing (UAT).
•Writing various types of documents: Proposals, Business Requirements Specifications, Delivery Plans, etc.
•Presenting finalized solutions to client stakeholders through demos and workshops.
•Preparing Project Status Reports.

Highlights:
•Participated in the Logica Project Management Office: estimating effort, budgeting cost, reconciling ledgers, tracking and reporting status of various projects, etc.
•Prepared a User Functional Requirements document followed by a Technical Proposal which were accepted by the client (DFSA) to automate their Risk Assessment Process (Risk Matrix).
•Contributed to writing the Technical Proposal for an IT Strategy Formulation which was eventually awarded to Logica by the Ministry of Education in Saudi Arabia.
•Gathered the Business Requirements of RTA stakeholders for their Intranet Portal as well as managed and executed the testing phase to make sure deliverables are aligned with requirements.
•Managed the project of the RTA Intranet E-Services and closed it within the budget and schedule specified in the Terms-of-Reference agreed with the Operations Director.
•Participated in modeling the Business Processes and writing the Functional Design Documents for the Qatari Smart Resident ID Card System (using IBM Rational Software Architect and MS Visio).
•Prepared the Deployment Plan for the Qatari Smart Resident ID Card System.
•Managed Change Requests raised by the client in terms of Risk Analysis, Effort and Cost estimates, impact on the project schedule, and integration with the overall scope kept in the requirements vault (IBM Rational RequisitePro).

Key Projects:
• Omniyat Auto-Attendant.
• Ajman Municipality: E-Services and Auto-Attendant speech enabled IVR.
• ARAMEX: The project implements a predictive dialer working in tandem with a Computer-Telephony Integration application.
• Dubai Municipality: Managed the delivery phase of the Environmental Fine System IVR.
• Dubai Financial Market (DFM): Managed the delivery phase of the Mobile Voice Portal Project.
• Responsible for preparing sign off documents to close projects.

Responsibilities:
• Leading project work planning and operation plans and formulating approaches to support the implementation of company projects and to efficiently construct and monitor project schedules.
• Liaising with clients and organizing meetings with stakeholders to gather data needed for defining the functional and technical business requirements to understand their business processes and requirements.
• Translating project requirements into technical terms, presenting stakeholders with prototypes and working with the technical team to resolve technical issues and to deliver Design Specifications Documents.
• Analyzing project designs to effect maximum utilization of data, methods and processes in order to meet deadlines, cost objectives and quality specifications.
• Preparing and signing Business Requirements Documents to lay out the functional scope, effort estimation, assumptions, and constraints of the project.
• Prioritizing and processing change requests submitted by clients as well as coordinating and planning the User Acceptance Test and the ensuing changes.

Highlights:
•Trained a local ISV (Sakhr) to migrate their Document Management System to an X64 environment using Intel C++ compiler.
•Collaborated with a local ISV (ISIS) and achieved 1.24X speed-up in their Morphological Analyzer by using Intel C++ Compiler and Integrated Performance Primitives (IPP) Suite of Libraries. The benchmark compared a quad-core uni-processor desktop to a dual-core one.
•Conducted a 2-day workshop at SunGard Switzerland to enable their financial reporting applications to get better performance out of the underlying Intel platforms.
•Trained over 20 post-graduate students and professors in 2 Turkish universities to take advantage of Intel’s newest processors and software development tools.
•Presented the advantages and methods of programming for multi-core technology using the Intel software development tools at the Intel Developers Forum (IDF) to more than 30 professionals.
•Trained more than 15 Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s) in various countries on using Intel Software Development Tools (viz. VTune, C++ Compiler, Intel Thread Checker and Thread Profiler, Intel Performance Libraries) and on threading methodologies (Win32 API’s and OpenMP). Received multiple recognition awards for the delivered trainings in appreciation of their quality and customer orientation.
•Earned a recognition award for efforts in contributing to the establishment of software resellers for the Intel software development tools in the Republic of South Africa.
•Developed an application to retrieve the number of physical processors and logical threads of execution available in a system. The application also probed other properties of the underlying processor: type, speed, cache size.
•Participated in the analysis of a code produced by an ISV and enhanced the performance of their application, gaining up to 30% speed-up.
•Evaluated the best combination of compiler switches for the MySQL source after benchmarking several builds.

Responsibilities:
• Planned and implementing overall strategy involving 3 major accounts within the product range. Creating avenues for establishing company identity and developing potential key accounts.
• Researched market requirements and applicable logistics to create business roll out plans as well as associated support service structures for enhancing product penetration into virgin markets and augmenting client base.
• Identified customer requirements, and strategically marketed suitable solutions. Oversaw product development process, and ensuring after proper after sales support to all customers.
• Liaised with diverse technical specialists and managed multiple relationships with Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to effectively position products by delivering Technical and Business Disclosures and planning projects of common interest.
• Acted as a First Line Application Engineer to all Intel customers and technical teams. Provided them with technical support solutions pertaining to key areas and integration.
• Administered technical disclosures and prepared Statements of Work (SOW’s). Tracked project progress as well as resources supplied to the customers.

Joined Company as Software Engineer. Charted an impressive growth curve and was repeatedly promoted to finally hold the position of Team Leader in 2005.

Designation Chronology:
• Jan '05 - Jun '05: Team Leader.
• Jan '03 - Dec '04: Senior Software Engineer.
• Jul '00 - Dec '02: Software Engineer.

Highlights:
As Team Leader:
• Gathered and analyzed requirements of version 2.0 of the Content Management System (CMS) for the Vodafone live! Portal and designed the CMS according to agreed specifications.
• Participated in writing 2 proposals for a CMS solution and an Intranet employee portal.

As Senior Software Engineer:
Key Projects:
• Vodafone Streaming Media Management:
- Designed and implemented an add-on module to the existing CMS for Streaming Media Management.
- Designed and developed an Oracle database schema for the module.
• Vodafone Arabic CMS:
- Designed and implemented support for Arabic content management through the backend Content Management System (CMS) of Vodafone live!.
- Participated in deploying the project to integrate it with the already-running system with no down-time.
• Vodafone IMPS:
- Implemented XSL transformers to provide the Vodafone live! portal with instant messaging and presence services.
- Configured Live! 3PI component to use Sony Ericsson’s implementation of IMPS.
• National Postal Authority (NPA) Web Portal:
- Participated in the development of part of the front-end pricing module for services that are available through the NPA using Active Service Pages (ASP) to write business logic rules.
- Designed and built a poll module with front and back-end interfaces as well as its underlying MSSQL schema.
- Supported both Arabic and English browsing over Internet Explorer 5.0 and later versions as well as Netscape Navigator 6.0 and later versions.

Highlights as Senior Software Engineer (Cont'd):
• Vodafone Live!:
- Implemented the backend Content Management System (CMS) for the Vodafone live! menu pages, using JSP templates over a Vignette server.
- Created a workflow using Vignette Business Integrator to collect external content from third party providers and integrate it into live!.
-Designed and created an Oracle database schema for live! menu and static pages.

As Software Engineer:
• Nov '00: Participated in the North Africa and Arab Regional Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Contest, Morocco.

Overall Responsibilities:
• Led a team of professional programmers to assess systems, gather specifications and design customized solutions as per the requirements of clients and end-users to ensure smooth transactions and efficient operations.
• Analyzed client needs to develop turnkey software solutions that affect overall output and productivity, in terms of resource management and productivity bottlenecks.
• Conceptualized and customized projects as per client requirements, created test plans for new and modified systems, while devising solutions by continuously restructuring / reallocating resources.
• Ensured the suitability of specific software applications for meeting business requirements, through, system design (data modeling, data flow modeling, procedures), test design and implementation.
• Translated project specifications into technical design and development processes. Performed regular system checks and preventive maintenance to ensure optimum system performance.
• Evaluated functionality of the system, implemented programs, software applications, logical designs and codes. Organized and delivered demonstration sessions to update clients on project progress and provided post launch support to ensure efficient and successful system performance.

Highlights:
• Collated requirements for a desktop application that enabled satellite engineers to control an electronic device that simulated timing signals sent to a satellite to configure time intervals allocated for the various satellite users.
• Implemented the above-mentioned applications using C++ and developed its graphical user interface using MFC’s.