About Me

What seems an eternity ago I graduated with a degree in History. I planned on taking a year off and then go back to attend Law School. In the meantime I needed to pay my bills. Unfortunately with a degree in History, there weren't many offers. The vast majority of offers were for selling insurance or telemarketing.

I've graduated, now what?
A couple of months before I graduated I went to lunch with a friend. He worked as a software developer for a fortune 500 company. He told me about a Helpdesk opportunity supporting the company's proprietary software. I wasn't crazy about the idea, but it was more interesting than selling.

Help Desk Agent
I applied and practically begged for the opportunity despite my lack of experience. The manager decided to take a gamble with me. Ultimately, hiring folks is a gamble. You don't know whether this person has the right attitude to work within your team or company. You hope it works out and take a leap of faith.

Fortunately I adapted very quickly to the Helpdesk environment and soon began to take on more and more responsibilities. I was constantly looking for opportunities to make things more efficient. I became the number 1 submitter of bugs to the development team. I proposed a bug tracking tool, and a knowledge base repository. Management didn't act on all my ideas, but enough of them to give me the confidence that I was on the right track. Soon, I began to look for new opportunities to apply what I had learned and some of own ideas.

QA
Eventually I left the Helpdesk and moved onto the QA group, still in IT. There, my job was to ensure the monthly releases of  the application were good. This was the days before the web and we had to burn 10 thousand CDs every month and distribute them to our user base around the country. A bad build meant we had to burn a new set of CDs and it could get expensive quickly.

At that time I also began to tinker with various remote control software such as pcAnywhere and Remote Desktop Services as well as RoboHelp and PDF authoring tools. Another tool I learned to use and loved was Ghost Pro--a hard disk imaging software that could replicate a failed Hard drive in minutes. We didn't have to spend hours installing Windows and configure it to the company's specs. I had a great time becoming a techie.

Technical Specialist
One day, someone from a business group approached me and told me about an opportunity within their group. They needed someone to support the field workforce, about a 100 users armed with laptops that represented the company around the US. I jumped at the opportunity and soon became an advocate for the business within the IT groups--since I had worked with them, I knew them and could relate to them.

Pretty soon, supporting the 100 users was not enough to keep me busy and folks learned I was approachable. They approached me with requests to fix a broken macro, add functionality to an Access Database or to add new data onto existing systems. Soon I learned about gathering requirements, managing system objectives and user expectations. Training users on new functionality or systems became important as well as documentation for continuity.

Business Analyst
I had arrived at the shores of the BA's world. As I helped business folks realize their dreams for system enhancements or to launch new products, I thought I needed some formal training. I attended local colleges and university extension courses such as: Fundamentals of Object Oriented Databases; C++; Visual Basic for Applications; XML/XHTML Schemas; System Analysis and Design. In short, I began to get serious about what I was doing. It wasn't just a job to pay the bills, it was my career.

After a couple of years within this role an opportunity came up to step up and take on a bigger role. A co-worker who had seen me work began to plan his retirement and recommended me to replace him.

Senior Business Analyst
In this position I was given charge of a multi-million dollar system along with a dedicated team of 8 IT developers supporting it. The internal user base was around 50 people, while the external users were in the thousands. The system interfaced with several partners (from tax, print fulfillment, road side assistance, legal, front end, data warehouse and JD Powers).

It was here that I took flight. I was involved in the full life cycle of the software development effort. I had a great time learning, adjusting and trying new ideas. I proved to myself that I could gain depth in a given industry. The new question became, can I gain breadth? In other words, can I do it in a different industry?

Implementation Business Analyst
An opportunity opened up with a Software as a Service company and I took it. They hired me to help them migrate their existing clients on the West coast onto a newly developed Java/Web based application.

The role was to engage the client, review their existing processes, match them to the new system's functionality and features, develop the implementation plan, get it approved by the client, implement it in a staging environment, test it to ensure all needs are met, train admin and end users and push it to production. Sounds simple, right?  In hindsight it does.

By the end of my tour with this group, all the left coast clients had been successfully migrated.

Consulting
The last couple of years I've spent it at a couple of different companies. Always with the same goal: Review existing processes, streamline, automate as much as possible, document the new system needs, assist in the development, test what's been developed, ensure it matches the specs, train users and implement.

I've enjoyed this role and will continue to derive satisfaction in partnering up with businesses with their system needs.


Here are a few links to share with you:
1,  youtube channel.