I was promoted to a full-time Activision employee from being a contractor, still doing the same work as I was doing previously!

Whisked to a brand new team within Player Support, I am now working with passionate producers that are constantly improving the way we service our players. We are using one sprint throughout Player Support to manage our website, improve agent tools, and innovate with new experiences.

I was responsible for managing all projects under Operations, large or small! I actively asked my team to bring me improvements, including managers and support agents. I created surveys that went out to external partners in order to grab feedback from them as well so that we could improve how agents handle cases and service our players.I was brought on full time to Activision (under Volt Workforce Solutions) after being a TEA (Temporary Employee of Activision) and was moved to the Operations team within Player Support. My first project was to migrate our survey system from MaritzCX, our partner, to a new company - CVENT. We had only a couple weeks to do the migration but we were able to complete the project before the company shut down for Christmas. Not only did I work with CVENT's project team to make it happen, but I also recreated Player Support's survey ecosystem. As a result, we have a more flexible survey system that allows us to quickly tweak what data we want to use from the backend and more teams have control over their own surveys.After taking classes and reading a ton of books about project management, I wanted to experiment with Agile and to see it's effects on projects that we do in Operations. We started out using Trello and created basic user stories, but I wanted to learn more - I signed up for a Certified ScrumMaster session and became a CSM! I put a new sprint process in place to take care of any iterations on Player Support's Salesforce system.Eventually we evolved from Trello to JIRA, and I frequently asked agents to give any feedback about the systems they use in order to constantly improve. I dabbled in designing solutions to problems that our agents faced while using Salesforce, and put them in our sprint backlog to tackle with development.

After interning for Activision for several months, I was asked to become my team's project manager. I graciously accepted the challenge! My responsibilities included owning projects, tearing down barriers of communication, breaking down work into manageable pieces and driving continuous improvement for the Service Planning team.I actively looked for areas of improvement within Player Support, including ways we could optimize our player surveys. I discovered that many questions were redundant and vague, so I proposed that we redesign every survey we send out in order to clarify questions and cut down on what we ask for. After implementing changes, my department discovered that our player satisfaction numbers jumped up due to having a shorter survey and clarifying any vague questions.I was also an active part of assisting my team in the management of game tools. Every year, Player Support creates new agent tools to support our games. My role assisted the program manager and the business analyst to gather resources, break out work, schedule dates, and communicate to stakeholders any work that needed to be done. We were able to get important tools out in time for game launches, and iterate improvements after launch.To challenge myself, I purchased the Project Management Book of Knowledge, a very "exciting" book to read in order to take the CAPM (Certified Associate of Project Management) certification exam. After answering over a hundred questions, I secured the certification and still hold it today. The entire process expanded my knowledge of waterfall project management.

I came into Activision wide-eyed, looking to learn from one of the masters of the gaming industry. I joined Activision because I loved video games, and I wanted to create new gaming experiences as my career. My responsibilities as an intern included meeting several different teams within Activision, learning about the industry, and leading my intern group's projects.While I was an intern, I was responsible for a global survey that was sent out to millions of people that played Black Ops III! Working with several internal and external teams, such as Marketing, Legal, Consumer Insights, Player Support, Art Services, User Research as well as Treyarch.The survey was a huge success and sparked more interest in gathering player feedback for future Call of Duty titles. My role was to manage the project, create the survey itself, and to create feedback reports to share with Activision and Treyarch. Treyarch ended up using player feedback to dictate game balance and make tweaks before the worldwide launch of Black Ops III.While I was an intern, I also led a secret shopper project for Player Support. We sampled other companies support experiences (Riot, Blizzard, Sony, Microsoft, EA) and used our findings to improve Activision's support website as well as the way our agents interacted with our players.

Spending four years through college with the Trojan Marching Band was the best decision I have ever made. When I was asked to come back as a Teaching Assistant, it was a no brainer - I want to make sure that every student has the same great experience that I had when I was a member of the band.As a TA, my duties involve protecting my students and representing them to leadership. I am also a coach, a teacher, a friend, and an advocate for every student in the band. When a student comes up to me and tells me that I've made a difference in their life, that's all I need to keep going - and it makes the job worth it.

I wanted to get my hands dirty in the industry, so I went full indie and made mobile games. I don't know a lick of programming, so I used a drag and drop "game maker" style tool called GameSalad and created several titles. I used my knowledge of Photoshop for graphic art, my audio editing skills in Audacity to manipulate sound and music, and my own brain to design games.My first and most successful game is Tap Harvest, which is still on the Amazon store. The game uses "Cookie Clicker" as a foundation and has the unique quality of incorporating two resources to tap on. The game improved through feedback from my students as a TA. My second game is called "Stump Jump" which was later renamed to "Ninja Inja". For this game, I riffed on the idea of Flappy Bird's "simple controls yet difficult" concept. You're a ninja in training, repeatedly jumping over a swinging pendulum while your master mocks you. This was the most popular game for my students, some still play the game even today!Other games include "Powerline", "Drumkit Clicker", and "Potion Master". Overall, I learned a lot about what goes into creating a game and I carried that knowledge over to my new role at Activision.