Jim Parris Email & Phone Number

Greater Chicago Area

Rolling Meadows, Illinois

Brought on to create a middle layer of support for the Resale organization between customer service and developers, orchestrate issue resolution with Engineering teams, and prove the viability of a multi-tiered engineering support model. Developed and implemented a formal support flow for triage, analysis, and resolution of issues escalated from level one teams. Aligned SLAs & priority levels for all teams. Provided support for all broker and fan-facing products operating on wide variety of technologies. Investigated and categorized issues that were systemic by holistically examining the technology landscape.

Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

Technical lead for internal tools, DevOps, SEO, and all web analytics, marketing, and third party integrations. Formulated technical requirements and provided developer support in executing on User Stories, including code reviews.Consolidated broadly scattered marketing and analytics efforts, with attention to compliance and performance standards, into a single project. Partnered with Hybris Architect to strategize upgrade to 6.1, migration of client data from AS400, front end redesign, and more. Devised and enforced front end architectural principles, holding to cross-platform Responsive design, MVC design patterns, and device-optimized delivery.

Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

Invited to the European division in order to implement eCommerce best practices and act as interim team lead for all aspects of the digital transformation of 14 EU sites to Hybris. Ensured all critical aspects of Continuous Integration, Agile approach, performance, security, system and application monitoring, and business analytics were in place on day one. Also screened and selected new hires, including team managers. Covered several roles (security, performance, QA, and devops), while we were still hiring teams and managers. Always remained a consultant, mentor, and resource for those teams.

Facilitate Officemax/Office Depot merger in technology selection and data migration. Provide input for establishing governance and policies, assist with migration efforts, conduct POCs, and evaluate emerging technologies for the combined Officemax/Office Depot eCommerce organizations.

Holistically monitored eCommerce environment, worked with merchants on technical end of promotions and issues, worked on special projects to build business value (sku expansion, real-time demanded sales reporting, etc). Supported all applications, configurations, systems, and business rules in ATG. Implemented and built tools/scripts to improve development agility on ATG regarding stress testing, error detection, gathering performance statistics, live property changes, etc.Worked to bridged the gap between infrastructure, development, and merch/marketing to unite the digital organization into a single effort.

Hoffman Estates, Il

Was among the first members of new operational team: the combined intake for all issues of the Online Business Unit whether it was raised as a software, infrastructure, security, or business concern. Monitored and built alerting on all infrastructure and applications, as well as all business metrics, which impact the online division. Owned, analyzed, prioritized, and solved or escalated all revenue-impacting issues for sears.com, kmart.com, and smaller sites.Studied Java in order to analyze Java stack traces and core dumps, allowing far more precise escalations to cut down on developers’ time to resolution, and setting a tone of self-improvement which became the norm for Sears operations engineers.Worked closely with pricing, sales, marketing, and merchandising teams to understand the non-technological aspects of eCommerce, to support their needs, and to prioritize their interests. Conducted deep investigations on complex issues, created tools and documentation, and owned data quality & jobs scheduling. Built scripts, tools, and dashboards to facilitate mine and others' daily work.

Track issues that are either major problems (or ones that get repeatedly kicked up from level 2 support) and write scripts/fixes to patch and/or track the issue until developers can build a more permanent fix into the next release. Track perf and error logs, both manually and by script. Also, push certain things to production: web apps, database changes that require manual intervention, etc. Lastly, App Admin acts as communication hub for support between users, L3 groups, and developers.

It was difficult selecting a title - like the name says, yourITdept.com basically acts as an on-call IT department. What we did or specialized in depended a lot on who the client was and what they needed.Personally, I was an on-site person for two or three regulars in addition to the usual telecommuting and client visits. I did Everything went through Linux at some point, and we all spent a lot of time in VI. I developed and/or debugged sites and apps in Joomla (PHP,etc), Visual Studio (C#,ASP/.NET), Java (jsp), etc.I never knew what new technology, platform, or concept I was going to have to learn during the course of a day. It was interesting work - never boring.

Handled data entry and helped with new systems for administration of the practice, as well as miscellaneous IT support.Also was contracted to develop and execute a program to establish a school under the Illinois Private Business and Vocational Schools Act to found a training facility as part of the practice.

Beginning as a work-study position to help pay for school, I couldn't help but immerse myself in SILC, a college preparatory English (ESL) School. I, like many of the employees there, frequently stepped out of my prescribed role and took on responsibilities that floated near me. It was an excellent place to learn the value of teamwork in terms of keeping your eyes on what must be done, instead of just what is in your personal to-do list. Along with some teachers, we were given freedom to experiment with technology-assisted learning and develop new programs and curricula. I left the position in August when I moved back to Chicago.

A temporary job, but one that I enjoyed very much. I had my first taste here of both corporate life and large-scale information technology implementation.