It’s very tricky creating an Enterprise Policy & Standards Library that works for all segments of a global technical financial services company. I had to find just the right balance between governance and flexibility. While sorting out governance challenges like that, I was also tapped for a lead role in PayPal’s first ever Critical Incident Management Team. My on-call assignment: step in as a facilitator in our highest profile production incidents, coordinating subject-matter-experts in technical restoration, executive communication, customer service communication, and problem management… all while making sure social media doesn’t blow up about it. It's intense, but I like creating order in a chaotic situation.Most recently, I transitioned onto the Problem Management team. I love digging deep into an incident to find out what triggered it and, more importantly, how we could have shielded our customers from the resulting impact. My focus was broad: what architectural changes could we make to deflect customer impact even in the face of software bugs or hardware failures?

This new group is launching a sweeping Continuous Process Improvement initiative across Amex’s entire Technology Operations organization. Leveraging the best aspects of TQM, Six Sigma, and ITIL’s CSI methodologies, I customized a quality framework that fits within in the Amex culture. Now I’m focused on building the infrastructure necessary to manage Quality Assurance at the program level: mechanisms to track and report on improvement projects all across the enterprise, an ongoing training program in our methodology, and a CITIL-based maturity self-assessment tool.

Director of the Mainframe Technology Excellence Center, a highly technical group that provides internal consulting to Amex mainframe application teams on performance optimization and emerging mainframe technologies.

Project management in aggressive software development environment. Major projects spanned both distributed (internet application) and mainframe (data access interface). Responsible for managing scope, timeline, budget, and quality of ultimate software delivery.

Software development duties (requirements gathering, designing, coding, testing, installing) for several major client companies. Increasing responsibility, eventually working as an application architect on a major mainframe A/R application. Supervisor for programming / testing staff. Experience included an overseas work assignment for 6 months.