Karen Downing Email & Phone Number

Texas, United States

Specialize in Medicare education and solutions for a diverse clientele, focusing on underserved seniors in English and Spanish.Act as a Benefits Advocate for individuals with physical and mental challenges and limited resources.Provide personalized, education-driven service to ensure high-value customer satisfaction.Navigate complex insurance plans to deliver tailored recommendations.

Round Rock, Tx

Primary Focus: Foreign Language instruction (Spanish, French) and Dual Language programs.Implemented lesson plans and conducted assessments as required.Acted as a Spanish Language Interpreter for Special Education in ARD meetings by facilitating collaborative discussions between parents and educators to develop individualized educational programs (IEPs) for students.

Round Rock, Tx

Directed 7 global teams with 20+ employees to provide 24x7 operational support, ensuring the stability and performance of www.dell.com (aka e-Dell), one of the largest e-commerce sites in the world.• Recognized with Vice President’s Gold Award for Inspiring Leadership by being awarded in e-Dell• Consistently high and above average Tell Dell (employee satisfaction scores) year over year.• Oversaw the review, coordination and implementation of 800+ changes annually into Production.• Revamped the change request and release process to respond to organizational and business changing needs to allow for requests to be processed in shorter sprint-like delivery periods.• Served as a central escalation point for critical operational functions affecting the e-commerce site, such as major cross-segment program releases, high and critical production incidents, expedited change requests, and root cause analysis for revenue-impacting outages.

Washington D.C. Metro Area

Directed a global team of 20 employees providing 24x7 operational support of test environments for Development, QA, Production Operations and Partner Testing. Support relates to computing resources, application engineering support, physical and virtual infrastructure, networking, source code control and a build management system.• Directed the maintenance and troubleshooting of multiple test environments (Dev, QA, End-to-End, and Staging) across 1800 hosts used in the software development life cycle (SDLC).• Supported over 750 global enterprise users, ensuring customer requests are addressed within stated SLAs.• Surpassed the level of quality and service of prior years' SLA even after a 60% reduction in staff.• Set a customer service goal of resolving operational support requests within three days. Of the 950 requests submitted for a six-month period, 90% of issues were handled within the given time frame. Achieved a 94.6% overall rating of “Extremely Satisfied” from customer surveys.• Achieved a stretch goal of 75% host reduction (300+ hosts) in seven weeks with a small team.

Washington D.C. Metro Area

Managed a staff of eight, providing enterprise first-level triage and analysis for application deployment, including environment consistency control, software life cycle coordination, system administration, data recovery, tools administration, Automation Lab administration, infrastructure support, and compliance.• Reduced overall operating and capital expenses by over $500k by consolidating physical to virtual hosts.• Created $350k in savings by transitioning enterprise QA teams from licensed tools to open source alternatives.• Negotiated significant cost savings annually by right-sizing licenses as AOL downsized from 20,000 to 4,000 employees in a three-year period.• Managed Enterprise Tools: Performance Center • LoadRunner • Quality Center • Test Director • WinRunner • QTP • SilkTest • SilkPerformer • SOATest • Business Objects • TestLink • Selenium • jMeter • VMware Virtual Center • Nagios • Remedy

Washington D.C. Metro Area

Served as a subject matter expert (SME) and organizational lead possessing an in-depth knowledge of AOL Client software components, setting standards and guidelines for the organization.• Designed and served as system administrator of proprietary tools for defect tracking (BLT) and test case management (TCM) utilized by over 5000 users.• Authored organizational backbone documents, such as back-end testing guidelines, product element matrices, and bug logging and tracking guidelines.• Governed a 12-person Test Case Review Committee that reviewed over 125 test plans by evaluating requirements traceability, detailed test scope, and identification of release-specific test objectives.• Served as organizational trainer and mentor by delivering custom training on effective bug logging procedures, scrum team and agile test practices, and efficient test case planning for 250+ staff in the US, Europe and India.

Washington D.C. Metro Area

Led the functional, regression, and system testing efforts for AOL Client Mail and the AOL Japanese Client. Coordinated integration testing with the host back-end and other client dependencies.• Led daily bug scrubs with Product, Development, QA, and Beta teams, assessing and prioritizing defects for the AOL Client releases 6.0 – 9.0, frequently covering 200+ bugs within two hours.• Optimized the AOL Client Mail test plan by creating variation efficiencies and reducing the overall execution time from 40 to 24 resource hours.

Washington D.C. Metro Area

• Led a test team of 23 staff in systems integration and package implementation efforts for the enterprise order entry application, EntradaPro.• Supervised and delivered the Y2K compliance certification for the enterprise order entry application.• Ensured Y2K operational readiness through client-server and database verification.

Washington D.C. Metro Area

• Oversaw an $11 million budget for the YWCA national program, ENCOREplus, over a four-year period, providing educational outreach, and support services for medically underserved women's cancer screenings.• Developed and maintained an informative database to manage association profiles for more than 100 local YWCAs.• Led interactive regional training sessions, training over 300 staff members on essential computer literacy, private network utilization, and internet skills.

B.A., International Relations

School of International Service Minor on Anthropology Field Concentration: International Development Area Concentration: Latin America.

H.S., 9-12

Learned French, Spanish, German at this school.