My Technology Experience
PMO Director with proven skills in project and product management, client relationship management, delivery team leadership, and strategic process improvement. eCommerce and software specialist with experience in professional services. Solid background in program, product and project management balanced with a very robust technical development background. Adept at communicating at all levels of an organization. Experience building and organizing multi-disciplinary project teams of 15 to 25 individuals to ensure maximum performance.
CERTIFICATIONS:
• PMP, Project Management Professional
• CPC, Certified Public Consultant
• CSM, Certified Scrum Master
• CSDP, Certified Software Development Professional
• CSSBB, Certified Six Sigma Black Belt
• PMI-ACP, Agile Certified Practitioner Trainer
• ITIL v3 Foundation Certified Trainer
Recommendations of my work
Some of my major projects
As a serial entrepreneur, I certainly understand business strategy, and I possess a great facility for knowing how my products and projects fit into the organization’s strategic goals.
I have a very robust technical product & project management background, including requirements elicitation and gathering, preparing competitive analysis documents, creating product and engineering roadmap documents, and creating presentations that communicate product features & benefits. I am very experienced with use case modeling, UML, Agile project management methodologies including scrum, user stories, user goals, and pattern-based software development. I can manage a QA or testing project, a turnaround project, establish traceability, and prepare a project plan and estimates. I am extremely capable in preparing functional specifications and defining user interfaces.
I have detailed domain knowledge in several industries and focus areas, including mobile ecommerce, GPS, NFC, VUI and IVR, EDI, mobile software applications, telecommunications, supply chain and spend management, and ecommerce and retail.
I have 32 recommendations of my work from managers, peers, and reports on LinkedIn. Here is a list of some of the major projects I have worked on in my career.
About Cartera Commerce
Cartera Commerce is the leading provider of card-linked marketing solutions that increase revenue and customer loyalty for merchants, banks, issuers and loyalty programs. For merchants, Cartera powers the industry’s largest card-linked advertising network that targets shopping offers to more than 150 million loyal consumers and tracks in-store and online sales. For banks, issuers and loyalty programs, Cartera provides the industry’s most comprehensive card-linked offer platform that powers personalized in-store and online shopping programs that build consumer engagement, maximize card spend and create new revenue streams. Cartera’s platform delivers card-linked offers via multiple digital marketing channels including Websites, online banking, email, mobile, social media and browser apps. Four of the five largest financial institutions, three of the four largest airlines and 60,000 merchant advertisers drive incremental revenue with Cartera’s fully-managed, performance-based solutions. The company is headquartered in Lexington, MA and has significant operations in Atlanta, GA.
Clients include four of the top five global banks, three of the top four global airlines, and dozens of loyalty programs that trust Cartera to power card-linked offers from over 60,000 merchants. Some other clients include: IHG Hotels, Wells Fargo, Suntrust, Barclay Card, United Airlines, Delta, American Airlines, Spirit Airlines, Citizens Bank, Upromise, Conde Nast, Best Buy, Shop.org, Charter, and NASCAR.
Specialties include: Card-Linking Marketing Solutions, Card-Linked Offers, Local Advertising, In-Store Rewards, Online Malls, Performance Advertising Networks, Multi-Channel Shopping and Marketing Solutions, Partnership Marketing, eCommerce.
Director, PMO (Project Management Office)
Responsible for defining and executing project implementations with eSpendwise’s ecommerce and e-procurement applications, including customization, configuration, and integration. Managed new customer engagements including testing and launch. This role demonstrates solid technical project management competencies as well as the ability to form successful and cooperative relationships and handoffs among the participating functional and customer organizations.
– Created project proposals and ensured successful delivery of key projects.
– Estimated effort for all project phases, created project plans and schedules, and tracked time, status and changes against plan, assessing risk and reacting accordingly.
– Effectively managed projects for delivery on-time and on-budget; Communicated project status internally and with a broad range of customer representatives.
– Liased and communicated effectively with senior management at all levels and groups within the organization.
– Directed new customer engagements (post sales)
– Developed formal statements of work in partnership with customer and other third parties.
– Actively participated in all aspects of the engagement including but not limited to: training, design, integration, configuration and testing.
– Developed and implemented resource and staffing plans for each engagement.
– Provided oversight with regards to the overall implementation plan; Analyzed and gathered business rules and application requirements.
– Provided team leadership and motivation, managed risks, and made project decisions and tradeoffs.
As you should be able to tell, I have a special interest and expertise in ecommerce, telecommunications, agile software development, and software project management. I have worked in a number of industries, including banking, ecommerce, retail, telecommunications, health care and real estate.
Some of my articles on these pages with a more technical bent, or the Project Manager perspective:
Agile Development In Practice
Twelve Tips For Agile Project Planning and Estimating
What is a Product Roadmap? How do you create an Engineering Roadmap?
What is a Pattern based design for software development projects?
What is a software requirements traceability matrix?
What is UML? What is Unified Modeling Language?
What is EDIINT? What is AS2 and how does it differ from AS3 or AS4?
What is Scrum?
The Twenty Laws of Testing Computer Software
Eight ways to tell if your Project Team is on the Way Up, or on the Way Down
What is a “Use Case”?
Why Designing for a VUI is harder than designing for a GUI
45 Summer Street, Dual-zoned Commercial & Residential office building in Natick, MA Center – For Sale (I’m the owner) – email me for more details – complete listing.
Paul Seibert’s LinkedIn Profile Send me an invite to connect!
Follow Paul Seibert on Twitter
I have tried to cultivate a “Renaissance Man” approach to my education and career with the past 10 years being primarily focused on software development and agile project management. Here is what some of my LinkedIn professional contacts have written about me:
“Paul is extremely knowledgeable, professional and thorough. His attention to detail and his ability to research a problem are unprecedented. His technical knowledge is very deep and his ability to manage a project from inception to completion using process and documentation was highly effective. Paul earned the respect of his teammates in Development and QA as a responsive and valued member.” – Andy Snow, Executive Vice President Client Services, eSpendwise
“When I was recruiting my ecommerce “Dream Team” to create a licensed apparel and motor sports online retail megastore, I set about the task armed with a recruiting technique I have often used in the past to identify extreme high performers. My complex project required that I source the types of individuals who were extraordinarily talented and technically proficient. I realized that an average hire would be one of the worst hires I could make, because I wasn’t going to get this opening again, and I didn’t want to hire someone who would be just good enough to keep the job.
So I asked the most connected professional in my network, a gentleman that has enjoyed senior IT positions at Fortune 100 companies in the Boston area, to recommend the best ecommerce & software development guru he had ever worked with – the one person who gets on the most difficult, challenging projects, the one individual everyone wants to work with because they bring everyone else up? He without a moment’s hesitation began describing the Technical Project Manager leading the multi-million dollar project he was working on at that time, promising to set the meeting up between Paul and myself. I wasn’t about to settle for a B player, or someone who wasn’t quite right for the role.
Paul is smart, and gets things done. Actually, a more apt description of Paul is that he’s seemingly always *done*, and he invariably gets things Smart.” – Mark Cusson, eSpendwise
“I worked with Paul for nearly one year while he was the Project Manager on a critical web-based software product for a major client. During my time working with Paul, I found that he is capable of authoring very detailed functional specification documents that Engineering was able to use as a good guide during software development. Paul worked to get clarification questions from our developers answered and also worked closely with our QA department. Paul’s varied technology experiences and knowledge, like those he details on his professional Hub Tech Insider blog, proved useful at many points throughout the project.” – Yuriy Kupershmidt, Chief System Architect, eSpendwise
“It was my pleasure to have worked with Paul on a number of different projects. Paul is a passionate project manager who will take a project and drive it through. He is also very knowledgeable about a wide variety of different technologies and can apply this knowledge to the problem at hand.” – Brook Stevens, Chief Technology Officer, eSpendwise
“Paul was the Project Manager provided by eSpendwise for a critical eBusiness initiative. During the year we worked together, Paul proved himself to be diligent and effective in his duties.” – Lee Mersek PMP, Sr IT Manager – Project Lifecycle, Diversey Inc
“Paul is very articulate and professional. Paul knows the power of business networking!” – Joseph LaPorta, Controller, Cottage International Development Group
“Paul is an e-commerce visionary and his passion and work ethic are infectious. He has a rare ability to work smart AND hard through the most complex technical and strategic challenges. I first met Paul in Nashville around 1995 when I underwrote his startup, providing angel funds to both TSN and a second e-commerce company he co-founded called GearPro. He started his company in 1994, while on the campus of the University of Alabama and, while it is difficult to imagine now, at the time nobody expected the arrival of a world of Amazon, Ebay and the I-tunes store. In the years that followed, Paul appeared regularly on local television – discussing various aspects of e-commerce and its future impact on consumers and businesses alike. Frequently, business professors from the University would appear during those segments typically offering a contrarian perspective on the Web’s intent and how unlikely it would be for it to become a standard way of doing business anytime soon. How wrong they were. Paul developed the software for both start-ups from the ground up – bootstrapping his way through and keeping costs low by leveraging a team of software developers he developed relationships with in years past. Interestingly, when it was most popular at the time to be in “B-to-B”, Paul was opening e-tail stores and stocking inventory using the most sophisticated pick-and-ship barcoding software I’ve seen to this day. He custom-designed not only mail order management and global fulfillment software from scratch, but also a complete POS system so well put together we were able to license the software to a national chain. Paul is one of the best e-commerce minds around and has been doing it longer than 99% of his colleagues and I recommend him without reservation.” – Mickey Smith, Owner, SmithReed Investments
“Paul is an extremely detail-oriented and thoughtful person. I recently worked with Paul on his job search and was blown away by his professionalism and organizational skills. He also has exceptional communication skills and was able to present his ideas clearly and concisely. He was also able to convey these skills with the people he has worked with in the past and clients. Paul communicated to me very cleary his expectations and requirements in a search and upheld them to the end. He very engaging gentleman and someone who I believe upholds the highest integrity. He is an outstanding person to work with.” January 8, 2010
Derek Popek, Senior Recruiter, Lynx Inc.
With today’s economic challenges, companies are more concerned with filling their key seats with the right people. The ‘right people’ share some common traits: they don’t need to be tightly managed, they fulfill their commitments, and they are passionate about the company and its work. Paul fits this description. When you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you have made a hiring mistake. You don’t have to spend any time motivating or managing Paul. It’s in his DNA to be thoroughly understand your business, be self-motivated, self-disciplined, and compulsively driven to excel. In a culture of discipline, Paul takes his commitments seriously – he does what he says he will do, without complaint. Equally, this means Paul takes great care in saying what he will do. He is careful never to over commit or promise what he cannot deliver. In software development and process engineering, nothing great happens without passion. Paul displays a remarkable passion that captivates. Give him the tools, the goals, and get out of his way. – William J. Ritchotte
The most telling aspect of working for Paul is the questions he asks. One wonders at how much knowledge Paul will end up with on his deathbed at this rate of knowledge acquisition. He manages by “walking around”, stopping at your desk to “check in” – a brief face-to-face communication that is helped along by his natural affability, which, let’s face it, many people find absolutely compelling. It was a true pleasure to work with him on software development projects. He always has books and magazines he carries around. He must read a hundred books a year. – Suresh Thummala, ETL, Informatica & Oracle Developer
“Paul would never be caught calling himself a “Scrum-master”, or calling an iteration cycle a “Sprint” – he frowns upon such terminology while fully embracing and embodying the *true* tenets of Agile development. He eschews pomp and rigid formality in favor of very practical and hands-on direct personal connections. This inspires confidence in developers and programmers that Paul will protect them from undue pressures external to the development team beyond their control. Programmers deliver for managers like Paul because he protects them and gives them copious, public credit for their hard work. As an interface to the business, Paul is without peer. His domain-specific knowledge is so highly technical that to call him a subject matter expert is really almost missing the point. He knows how to deliver in myriad circumstances and industries because he grasps the difference between his task list and his true responsibilities. He is always ready to finish this sentence: “I am the one person ultimately responsible for…” – Subash Dhakal, President, KTM Consulting Group
Paul is an intense and detail-oriented manager, with an encyclopedic knowledge of technology of all kinds, especially telecommunications, ecommerce, and software development. He is continuously espousing development and management aphorisms that he gleans from his extensive multi-industry experience and research, yet he never talks down to his reports or pressures them. He has an innate understanding of what it takes to build esprit-de-corps in his project teams. Paul does what a good manager must do to inspire confidence in his subordinates regarding his management abilities: He protects them, mentors them, and reinforces their strengths by positive comments and morale-boosting actions such as instilling team spirit with daily lunch gatherings. Paul has a self-deprecating sense of humor that relieves tension under tight schedules and he always hits his deadlines, mainly through his ability to get the very best performance out of his direct reports. You always know where you stand with Paul, and his cool and collected exterior is obviously covering up a dynamo of energy, passion, and raw technical acumen. You can’t slack off under Paul’s management, and you wouldn’t want to even if he would allow it, which he doesn’t. Paul has walked in your shoes and performed your job function – there is no way you are going to fool him when it comes to computers. He possesses not only a great work ethic – he never misses a day of work – but also fine leadership skills. Leading project teams is his calling. He takes his work seriously and handles every task with competence and confidence. No crisis or impossible project delivery cycle will make him crack – he always has an alternative, a workaround, another solution gained from his mountain of technical experience. The team is always winning with Paul in command, never doubting their ability to accomplish the project. I could go on and on about Paul’s sayings like “Fingerspitzenfulgen” and “The Mythical Man Month”, but I want to conclude with the fact that Paul displays the window-and-mirror maturity and courage of a top-flight manager: When things go well, he points out the window, shining a light on his team members who contributed, giving credit to factors other than himself. If things go wrong, or unexpected challenges present themselves, he never blames others but looks in the mirror and says, ‘I’m responsible’ – Andrea J. Bross, Senior QA Analyst, Silverlink Communications
When Paul was working at Fleet Bank, the EMG senior management team called him “The Professor”. People don’t start calling you “The Professor” for no reason. Like “Doc”, it’s a sobriquet that must be earned. – John D. Hiebert, Senior Analyst, Fleet Bank Equipment Management Group
I hired Paul for a telecom reporting project to lead the business analysis phase of the project. Paul hit the ground running and provided a valuable service to FairPoint enabling us to move the project forward. His knowledge of the telecom industry coupled with his technical experience allowed us to complete the project on time and within budget. I would highly recommend Paul for a similar position without hesitation. Paul worked very well with our customer base and communicated requirements to our developers in a timely and professional manner. – Bill Carrier, Senior ERP Manager, Fairpoint Communications
Paul is definitely the most intense and technical project manager I have ever met. He is disciplined and organized which allows him to multi-task unlike most PMs I have hired who are singularly focused on time and resource management as opposed to adopting a broader analysis of what is right for the company. I found Paul’s knowledge in software services to not only be steeped in old fashioned experience, but also text book, time-tested processes from the top minds in the industry. I can surmise this came from the stacks of resource materials Paul moved in with him during our service build-out and implementation. Unusual at first, but became clear through real results. Paul’s insight is cutting edge, and for a fellow that grew up in Massachusetts, he really integrated well with his team in the South. He co-founded two ecommerce companies while still in college at the University of Alabama, and bootstrapped the software design on his own. Paul listens twice as much as he talks, is personable, and when he goes into a project, to paraphrase Thucydides, he comes out either “with his shield or on it”. In summary, when Paul gets fired up, your software development and implementation problems are over. – Casey Smith, Accredited Investor, Nashville (Belle Meade), Tennessee
Some of the Primary Projects I have worked on in my career (I have alot of work to do on this section, but here are just a few projects — email me for a current copy of my resume):
• Telecommunications Infrastructure Cutover (FairPoint Communications): Led effort to design and build reporting and executive dashboard application: “Scorecard” – gathered requirements from C-level executives throughout the Fairpoint organization as well as Central Office and Business Unit Managers. Application was delivered on time and under budget. In the telecommunications industry, a cutover is defined as the physical changing of lines or trunks from one phone system to another, In March of 2007, Fairpoint Communications purchased the landline operations of Verizon in New England. With the $2.3 Billion deal, Fairpoint became the country’s eighth-largest telephone company. The deal included 1.6 million phone customers and 230,000 high-speed internet customers. Transferring Verizon’s systems to new lines, switches and other equipment in an organized and timely fashion, while being able to effectively monitor progress and reporting such to the public utility commissions of the New England states, was vital to Fairpoint’s success.
• Voice User Interface Redesign (Silverlink Communications): Conceived of and led redesign effort leading to 215% improvement in voice authentication rate and 47% increase in prescription reorders for Pharmacy Benefit Manager. Updated voice UI capable of supporting demands of up to 250,000 calls per hour, expected to handle 200 million voice transactions in 2009.
• Text-to-Speech Replacement (TTSR) Name Library (Silverlink Communications): Designed and oversaw team developing TTSR name library consisting of over 95,000 words. When used on a Medicare Part D pharmacy adherence call program for the first time, resulted in a response rate four times greater than the same call program without the names library.
• Automated Digital Sound Production System (Silverlink Communications): Designed and implemented automated digital sound production system capable of normalization, parametric equalization, noise gate and reduction, re-sampling, and rendering. Resulting system achieved 66% reduction in the cost of launching their VXML and CCXML standards-based automated telephone calls.
• Training Reservation System (Coldwell Banker): Released Training Reservation System 1.5 used by metro employees and associates. Web application implemented using Java J2EE 5 for training course catalog display, on-line course registration, location management, trainer management, trainer and student course history/schedules, and Verisign integration for on-line payment processing.
• NewEnglandMoves.com Upgrade (Coldwell Banker): Released NewEnglandMoves.com 4, a re-design project of largest real estate web site in New England. Led third party design team and internal resources towards successful implementation of major design enhancements. Design was awarded 2005 and 2006 WebAwards “Standard of Excellence.”
• NewEnglandMoves.com Maintenance (Coldwell Banker): Webmaster for NewEnglandMoves.com. Suggested improvements led to 52% YOY increase in consumers registered each month (14,000) and 57% YOY increase in unique consumers logged in each month (55,000). Site logged over 11 million visits in 2006, with 500,000 registered users.
• Legacy Escrow Tracking Analysis (Coldwell Banker): Led discovery project to generate current business processes and document potential solution details of replacing legacy escrow tracking and identity system (ABES II) for New England Metro Finance and HR teams. Solution rolled out on nationwide basis.
• TSN Corporation Ecommerce: TSN developed over the years into both a software development organization which specialized in creating and maintaining ecommerce websites using proprietary software which operated on what is now called LAMP technology, and an ecommerce website that eventually had nearly $1MM in annual online sales transactions. There was a 4,000 square foot retail store and headquarters building in Tuscaloosa, as well as a “super-kiosk” in one local mall, and a retail store about the size of a typical Hot Topic or Newbury Comics in another local mall. Eventually the operation grew to 15 fulltime and a number of contract employees running the fulfillment operation at HQ, maintaining the three retail outlets, and also working on developing software and product catalogs for ecommerce sites.
• eSpendwise, Director of Technical PMO: Designed and provided the fundamental infrastructure of a new eSpendwise PMO organization: following a best practices methodology and utilizing some Agile Manifesto principles in order to effectively manage IT projects throughout the SDLC process. Utilized risk management best practices, communications management techniques, and stakeholder exception management to ensure that the goals and the objectives of projects are accomplished within the prescribed time frame and funding parameters.
• Walgreens – CMMS, VMS, SPM, and SRM Work Orders: Designed and specified enhanced Work Orders and FMO and MRO Service Tickets functionality for vendor management, budget compliance, consumption management, catalog management and scheduled facilities maintenance. Largest SOW (Statement of Work) ever signed by eSpendWise organization. Extensive travel and on-site requirements gathering from C-level executives in client organization. CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System), VMS (Vendor Management System), EAM (Enterprise Asset Management) functionality provided by the SPM (Services Procurement Module). Indirect Spend Services Procurement and Supply Chain Management (SCM).
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