Jonathan Thomas Email & Phone Number

Huntsville, Al, Us

Salt Lake City, Utah, Us

With the merger of AdvancED and Measured Progress I was asked to lead the Enterprise Solutions Engineering team which included 4 direct reports and a total of 10 people in the areas of Solutions Engineering, Business Implementation, Application Support and IT Project Management. I was only in this role for 2 months but this was really just a formal assignment of work that I was already involved with in my previous roles.• Tracked and prioritized the enterprise roadmap across Measured Progress and AdvancED.• Gathered information from each functional division regarding platform needs, objectives and opportunities.• Determine impacts of requested changes on other divisions sharing the platform and coordinate compromised roadmap objectives in cases of conflict or resource constraints in order to maximize efforts to achieve corporate objectives.• Work with internal development teams, partner companies and vendors on all platform functionality to ensure consistency across the platform in data use and ownership.• Collaborated with the business development and proposals groups to define how the platform could support sales opportunities and RFP responses.

As the Director of Software Engineering and Development I was accountable for the Measured Progress education assessment platform from end to end. The platform consisted of business critical applications developed over the last 20 years to brand new cloud based applications designed to carry us into the future. My involvement began through collaboration with all business segments at a high level to understand the needs of the many stakeholders of the platform. My team of business analysts and I would work with the functional groups to identify and tune the requirements so that objectives could be met and ROI achieved without compromising the consistency of the platform and its ability to serve the other stakeholders. I would then work with the development and QA teams to turn the high level plans and estimates into a solid release plan that supported negotiated budgets, resources and timelines. I worked with stakeholders, Business Analysts, User Experience Designers and Subject Matter experts to do in depth design on applications. As we designed the features for each release I continuously managed the overall impact on the platform to ensure the integrity of all upstream and downstream data and processes. From there I supported my management team in their activities around execution of the release plans using Agile methodologies wrapped by a waterfall budgeting and approval process. We developed detailed stories with wireframes, dependency maps and sprint plans. I handled escalations of issues and addressed design questions as needed. As scope or dates needed to be negotiated I handled that with the Executive group or with vendors if the project required integrations. My teams delivered many very large and complex software releases during the 8 years I spent at Measured Progress. They weren’t always on time and within budget but I managed the releases with accurate tracking and as much transparency as possible. There was never a surprise at the end.

As a manager of software engineering I was responsible for the portion of the platform that covered test content creation and management. As I came into the position, Measured Progress was working on their third generation Item authoring system. They had several years of development into it but had not been able to completely transition away from the prior two applications. They had also recently adopted the IMS QTI standard but their new platform had not been built to that standard and they were struggling to make things work. A QTI based content bank was developed independently but it was a manual and time consuming process to get the content from the authoring system into the bank. I started with aligning the priorities to the corporate objectives and was able to deliver more value with half of the team size. I pushed for direct integration of the content authoring system with the content bank and was able to deliver that after a challenging 9 month effort. This new authoring system successfully replaced all previous systems allowing for their eventual shutdown and became the center of content management for Measured Progress. It is based on the IMS QTI standard and supports full lifecycle management of test content along with templates for creation, assignments for users, configurable workflow and user configured custom metadata fields. It has strong security via the integrated content bank and supports versioning of items and a detailed change log. I also guided the content bank’s integrated QTI test construction tool’s evolution to a full featured professional test construction application to support the building of large scale assessments for state contracts. Each release of these tools provided features that replaced time consuming manual processes and disconnected tools with integrated and automated tools that boosted the content development group’s ability to produce quality content and tests more quickly.

• Responsible for the overall product quality and responsiveness of the development department to internal and external stakeholders• Contributed to management team decisions for company direction• Worked with the product owner in designing and planning of the products direction• Planed the content of major releases and maintenance updates• Managed the development and QA teams to keep them productive and on schedule• Assisted with and reviewed designs of new functionality during all stages of development• Interfaced with partner companies in the design and implementations of integrations• Interfaced with Datawise staff and clients as needed with escalated technical issues• Trained new employees in technical areas of supporting the software• Coded occasional special projects such as new configurable interfaces to other vendor’s databases• Implemented transition to Agile development practices

• Responsible for Employee and Client satisfaction with Client Support and Billable Services • Managed Client Support Services, Data Processing and Content Technician teams• Contributed to management team decisions for company direction• Implemented and developed company wide policies and processes.• Resolved any internal and client issues escalated through team leads.• Facilitated Staff meetings• Trained new employees in policies, processes and technical areas of supporting the software

• Worked outside of the official development department at the direction of the owner on projects needed to meet specific company needs and timelines.• Analyzed, designed and wrote code according to project requirements.• Converted 20+ custom Microsoft Access VBA code modules to 3 configurable Microsoft Access projects to significantly reduce the time and cost of supporting clients.• Coded and Implemented many significant internal capacity improvements in the area of data processing and new client implementations

• C/C++ Driver and Object Oriented Development.• Became the Team Lead for HTBasic project in October 2002.• Assigned to the Qlink, home automation software, development team. Corrected bugs of all levels with some internal re-design to correct architecture failings.• Implemented the ability for users and 3rd party developers to expand and modify the HTBasic software product with Dynamic Link Library (DLL) based callback functions tied to HTBasic Events and commands.• Proposed, designed and implemented the ability to call into DLLs containing compiled code straight from an interpreted HTBasic program.• Developed many of the DLL’s provided with the product as the “DLL Toolkit”. These DLL’s range from simple string manipulation to MFC based interfaces running on multiple threads communicating across thread and/or process boundaries. • Designed and implemented the “Device Setup” interface. This provides an MFC based interface in the HTBasic executable which links into configuration dialog boxes embedded into the HTBasic loadable device drivers. • Continually did re-writes, updates and new development of loadable device drivers for HTBasic. These included: a Data Acquisition driver, multiple General Purpose Interface bus drivers, Multiple General Purpose IO drivers, a Serial port driver and smaller amounts of maintenance on several more drivers.• Development of Kernel Level device drivers for proprietary hardware in order to access the hardware across the Windows NT Hardware abstraction Layer.

• Responsible for employee and management satisfaction with Information Systems performance• Analyzed company procedures and interacted with employees to determine needs involving Information Systems.• Designed and developed automated systems, applications and reports in C++ for accounting, inventory tracking, customer service, sales, purchasing, database management, and warehouse management.• Supervised and supported the Programmer / Network Administrator with duties I had performed previously.

• Designed and developed database applications in Magic PC for accounting, order entry, customer service, sales, purchasing, mail processing, and point of sale.• Supported the Novell NetWare 3.11 – 4.11 local area network.• Maintained all company software and hardware including research, testing, training, support, purchases and assembly.• Maintained company phone system including wiring.