Katharine Mercer, Mba Email & Phone Number

• Manage, grow, and coach team of Project Coordinators, Implementation Managers, and Project Managers in the Professional Services group. • Oversee project excellence and implement tools to enable project visibility and reporting. Optimize internal and cross-departmental processes in the services domain.• Serve as project escalation point for customers – both internal and external.• Develop documentation of project management processes and deliverable templates. • Develop capacity and resource planning/triggers and expectations for IM/PM/PC roles. Train staff on project management tools, processes, style, and best practices.

• Manage customer-facing professional service projects, including requirements gathering, SOW creation, execution, and stakeholder management.• Provide customer-facing implementation consultation using one-to-one and one-to many strategies.• Serve as an internal, cross-functional SME, providing informed understanding of our customers’ business cases and operational workflows for documentation and product development purposes.• Advise on relevance of product pipeline features for specific customer segments.• Contribute to ongoing efforts to enhance our customer success efforts by participating in and taking lead on departmental process development and infrastructure improvement initiatives.

• IT Strategy – Key participant in determining long-term enterprise-wide vision and information needs, and developing overall strategy for system development and integration, hardware acquisition and integration, security, and compliance. • Execution – Oversaw all activities within IT to ensure system availability, uptime, and optimal performance. Operationalized cross-functional processes utilizing the enterprise applications suite to improve effectiveness, eliminate redundancies, mitigate and remove risks, and reduce cost. Partnered with extended leadership to ensure cross-functional staff jointly fulfilled their responsibilities in accordance with company policies, procedures, regulatory requirements, and best practices.• Staff Management – Supervised multiple teams, including infrastructure, service desk, product development, and study development. Managed succession planning processes for the department. • Financial Management – Managed departmental annual budget of over one million, including staffing, facilities, infrastructure, and software applications for the company. Analyzed the cost, value, and risks of technology and prepared cost/benefit analyses and cost justifications related to departmental and enterprise investments as required.• Security and Compliance – Served as the Information Security Officer overseeing and assuring compliance with the FISMA policies and procedures required to deliver clinical studies for the government. Served as the Privacy and Data Protection Officer overseeing privacy and the data protection strategy, implementation, and training to ensure compliance with EU GDPR, EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework, and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework.

• Staff Management – Performed active role in staff development, provided direction to team members, and identified and assessed staff capabilities. Managed staff through sourcing, onboarding, performance planning, development and evaluation process. Ensured staff development and career progression. Operated and oversaw the promotion and succession planning processes for the department.• Technical Management – Ensured the successful technical delivery of each release of software products through managing technical task-level planning and execution. Developed and maintained an in-depth knowledge of the principles, theories, practices, and techniques for managing the activities related to planning, managing, and implementing systems analysis and application development projects and programs. Kept abreast of competing services, products, and industry technical trends and used those to generate new ideas and product enhancements. Participated in technical tradeoff conversations and offered alternative solutions in support of the product direction and service delivery.• Department Management - Developed, maintained and enforced application of documented SDLC and change management methodologies, and other applicable policies and procedures by team members. Defined and enforced software quality and security principles and requirements, including required FISMA controls. Participated in budgeting and capital equipment processes and quality improvement activities for the development organization. Identified and resolved major risks within the development organization.

• Maintained extensive knowledge of systems, including their current state and future state. Acted as SME of all software. Monitored systems for retirement versus maintenance. Possessed an in-depth and up-to-date knowledge of company goals, product strategy, and objectives of the products.• Supported the product team to set clear goals that communicate the product vision so the team is equipped to realize it.• Worked with each project team to determine timeline of projects and prioritize them as appropriate to align with department strategy. Engaged with other BAs in support of setting priorities, making decisions, and communicating tradeoffs.• Ensured the long-term roadmap for the product was aligned with the company strategy and clearly communicated it to stakeholders and executives.• Acted as product owner in areas of domain and product expertise, and led and mentored the product team (direct and indirect reports) to expand knowledge of industry best practices and develop careers.

• Implemented study design in 3rd-party vendor software based on study-specific specifications and company standards on-budget and on-time while also transitioning the company to CDISC (Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium) standards.

• Worked with both internal and external clients to elicit requirements and developed epics, features, and user stories containing acceptance criteria and mockups in the implementation of multiple clinical trial software applications utilizing the agile software development methodology. • Conducted market analysis and performed software needs and usability analysis for software applications to ensure efficiency, quality, and marketability.• Participated in daily scrums and regular retrospectives to support a local development team of 8, an offshore development team of 6, and a QA team of 4.• Managed backlog and future roadmap to successfully plan releases, iterations, and sprints by analyzing and prioritizing internal and external client feedback based on resources, urgency, and value added to ensure projects were delivered on budget and on time.• Acted as primary liaison between Product Development and all other functional groups, including executives and external clients (sponsors, doctors, nurses, labs), to ensure open communication and trust, consistent use of standards across all studies, and a clear understanding of system functionality and release schedules.

• Designed and managed the development of a secure, proprietary Electronic Data Capture (EDC) system from inception into Production and maintenance mode, leading to quicker data analysis, improved user experience, and revenue for the company.• Devised a streamlined and easy-to-use tool for the creation of web forms utilized in the EDC system that enabled a faster study start-up timeline (from 6-8 weeks down to 4 weeks) and improved data quality.• Developed requirements for study dashboard and trial management portal in SharePoint.• For device-related studies where a patient sample is the critical data source for analysis: designed and trained users on utilization of a customizable Sample Tracking system to enable visibility into the location of each sample and to ensure the quality of each sample for the study.

Raleigh, North Carolina, United States

A global IT services company responsible for building NCTracks, the Medicaid Management Information System for the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services.• Supported several teams in the creation of large deliverables (Business Requirement Documents, Requirement Traceability Matrices, Operations Manuals) in a waterfall SDLC environment.• Designed business processes and constructed Pega use cases and UI mockups for multiple business units. Coordinated with Pega development team to ensure business needs were successfully met through installation testing and management of the test plan. Oversaw the development team to ensure requirements were implemented at a high level of quality and defects were resolved on time.• Led working sessions with over 35 subject matter experts to define role-based application security model for the entire system of over 600 user interfaces.

Raleigh, North Carolina, United States

• Performed data entry and management tasks for the Mortgage Records team in the NCSECU Operations Center.

B.A., Anthropology - Bioarchaeology

Master Of Business Administration - Mba, Information Technology Management

Aug 2020