Director of Applications
EFI
Total years of experience :26 years, 5 Months
• Oversee the Enterprise Applications portfolio, ensuring interoperability and responsiveness to business needs.
• Develop and manage the applications to support business enterprise applications including, but not limited to, the oversight of Sage, Magento and Accellos WMS, Incentive Management, eCommerce/Web services and Database applications.
• Recommend directions, standards, methodologies, tools, priorities and approaches for the overall application architecture. Furthermore, influence business and senior IT management to ensure that application architectures are understood, properly implemented and administered effectively
• Establish and maintain positive relationships with strategic development partners and with internal business teams.
• Manage vendor relationships for application components of the architecture.
• Oversee monitoring of all application implementations with IT team to ensure proper security, efficient utilization, allocation and user access.
• Research IT best practices around industry technologies and their relevance to EFI.
• Participate in the development of statements of work, contracts, managed service and service level agreements with vendors and business users.
• Train and disseminate application support standards, guidelines and direction throughout the EFI organization
• Lead the applications development, support and implementation teams through structured project lifecycle methodology to successfully deliver purchased, customized and Cloud based solutions across the company. Additional responsibility is to be able to teach and encourage these values to others
• Demonstrate excellent communication and executive level influencing skills.
• Coach, motivate, lead and supervise software development team members while acting as a central point of communication for the team and stakeholders. This will include facilitating project meetings and managing project expectations: influence team members to take positive action and accountability for the delivery of their assigned work.
• Supervise and manage staff and conduct performance reviews. Mentor, coach and maintain a best-of-class engineering team. Responsibility for career development, objective setting, review and productivity of team members.
• Work closely with the Program Management team and Project Managers to clearly define business requirements, user stories and technical specifications.
• Validate, design and develop efficient technical solutions that will satisfy requirements and business needs.
• Work closely with the Project Managers and other team members to estimate story points, set project delivery expectations and develop a project plan.
• Work closely with the Project Manager to assist in backlog grooming and ranking.
• Closely monitor sprint and project burn down charts and review/adjust resources and deadlines accordingly.
• Track and communicate all project statuses to executive management and project stakeholders.
• Identify and communicate and resolve any roadblocks that are related to development activities.
• Identify, manage and mitigate risk throughout the project lifecycle and keep stakeholders aware of risks/progress.
• Manage the day-to-day development activities of the Software development team within an Agile/Scrum environment
• Perform software release management and engineering
• Recruiting and develop new team members
• Responsible for two product lines at Ellucian including Full ERP solutions.
• Manage multiple projects by establishing schedules and work assignments for up to ten direct reports to meet project milestones and client deliveries.
• Consistently ship quality software on time in a dynamic environment with concurrent product releases.
• Implemented Lean Agile project management, such as driving the lean principles and agile practices within scrum teams, continually improving efficiency as well as reporting key metrics.
• Direct coordination with the Product Owner to ensure all priorities and roadmaps are managed with quality and predictability.
• A ‘hands-on’ team player able to motivate, coach and mentor staff in design and coding techniques to develop group and individual skills.
• Instrumental in recruiting and maintaining a skilled development staff, both onshore and offshore, using Lean Agile principles.
Ellucian Privately Held; Computer Software industry
March 2005 - December 2012
• Managed a team of product managers and offshore development staff responsible for developing the functional maturity of the Matrix product line within the Ellucian Products.
• As a Microsoft Development partner, looked for opportunities to leverage MS technologies. Transitioned self-service application to .Net and evaluated developing the first function to integrate with Biztalk.
• Defined forward-looking product strategy by developing revolving 12-month product calendar.
• Educated clients, prospects and internal constituents on all aspects of the product by conducting client presentations, pre and post release review sessions, and participating in prospect presentations.
• Developed and managed all project release plans and resources.
• Designed, spec’d and implemented the first connector supporting the company’s Unified Digital Campus vision.
• Determined need and utilized rapid development methodologies to bring to market the Advanced Registration product in 6-months. The product is a web based, web deployed application consisting of administrative and self-service components. Highly extensible and configurable with open APIs to ease third-party integration.
• Performed market competitive analysis to inform scope for baseline release.
• Collected business requirements from higher education clients and translated into system functional requirements.
• Developed project resource plans and assembled offshore development team in Bangalore, India.
• Drafted all specifications consisting of functional, data model, user interface and performance requirements.
• Performed user acceptance testing, responsible for authorizing product release to clients.
• Planned and executed organization-wide knowledge transfer on new product releases.
• Analyzed, planned, and executed the organizational move to a new Issue Tracking System. The conversion process included data migration and a new authentication model.
• Prepared technical documentation related to the installation of software and ensured appropriate level of technical and formal review.
• Supervised the daily activities of seven staff to ensure software met target release dates.
• Conducted technical and process training for new members.
• First line of contact for complex or escalated client issues related to product installation, upgrade and database management.
• Maintained technical proficiency across several platforms and/or environments by remaining knowledgeable on application’s current technology and function.
• Researched new technology and computing tools to devise improvements to release procedures and deliverables, developed models to accommodate future needs.
• Managed installation/maintenance/security policies and procedures for mission critical servers
Increased number of staff by 50% in 6 months to align support staff with customer service demands.
• Brought about 50K in revenue as a result of proposing and conducting implementation engagements.
• Established procedures for a repeatable Suite Wide Product Installation.
• Created server configuration environment to support various line of business needs such as testing, customer support and release.
• Improved quality by creating a standard quality assurance process for the off-shore development center.
• Implemented an acceptance testing database which was adopted corporate wide.
• Established an internal on-line documentation search engine.
• Increased support staff technical proficiencies by establishing plans for MS certification.
• Increased customer responsiveness by 50% and reduced the number of escalated issues by 70% which translated to favorable client references.
worked directly with Saad at SunGard Higher Education
“Saad is technically competent and extremely patient with customers and employees. His listening skills and empathy make an excellent manager” April 6, 2009
Rob Curtin, VP Application Consulting, Sallie Mae Solutions
managed Saad indirectly at SunGard Higher Education