Mike Zurbuch Email & Phone Number

Cleveland, Ohio, United States

Cleveland, Ohio, United States

Cleveland, Ohio, United States

• Acting as a working director by balancing billable project management for clients as well as team leadership to drive improvements throughout the organization with the primary objectives of improving customer happiness, growing the business, and maintaining strategic focus towards company vision. • Improving profitability by reviewing processes and approaches to the execution of services to find opportunities and implement tactics to reduce labor effort or expenses in projects. • Evaluate team members for their positive contribution to profit based on those individual’s capabilities, efficiency or drive.• Improving internal processes by determining where things can be automated or improved to help remove obstacles for all. Focus on the accountability of invoicing and continuing to bring in revenue as projected. • Enhancing the Customer Experience by working with the leadership team, sales, and account managers to increase client happiness through the development of new processes, operations, systems, and employee assessment.

Cleveland, Ohio Area

• Successfully delivered 25 CMS-based website projects, including 3 eCommerce sites, to clients over 2 years by overseeing each project from proposal to delivery and maintenance, including sites for the Van Aken District and the Greater Cleveland Aquarium.• Transitioned development team to an iterative project process allowing for more opportunity for client feedback earlier in the process, leading to fewer unplanned changes in scope and more touch points with the client.• Effectively managed multiple vendors relationships across concurrent projects for complex API integrations on eCommerce sites, development and design tasks, allowing Insivia to operate in a more lean fashion and focus on project planning internally.• Increased client retention and support contracts by 26% over 2 years by fostering strong communication throughout project completion and afterwards to ensure client satisfaction.• Collaborated with client stakeholders to analyze business opportunities and problems, and develop project proposal justifications, which include proposed solutions, strategic rationale, success measures, milestones, critical success factors, initial risk assessments, and alternatives considered.• Proactively accessed risks and opportunities on a regular basis and communicated these with both the internal team and all client stakeholders to better manage project specifications, budget, and scope.• Ran the project team through a retro/post-mortem at the end of each project to encourage continuous process improvements and find learning moments.

Cleveland/Akron, Ohio Area

• Successfully delivered 19 CMS-based websites to clients over 2 years by overseeing each project from proposal to delivery and maintenance, including sites for Positively CLE’s social blog, Greater Cleveland Goodwill and the Cleveland Marathon. • Regularly achieved or excelled in beating project deadlines using milestones and regular cross-functional project meetings to review schedule status, issues and ensure conflict resolution and risk mitigation. • Increased billable hours and capacity for interactive projects by leading a web design course; transitioning print-based designers to front-end designers with training in UX and UI principles, User Testing, HTML, CSS, Responsive Design theory and layout.• Responsible for writing proposals and budgets for all web projects and assisting in the sales pitches. • Assisted in writing functionality specification documents for each website project, recording all business requirements and assessing risk up front and throughout the duration of each project.• Proactively monitored all active projects and alerted clients when a project was in danger of going over budget or a milestone was going past a due date in order to react and work out a new solution.• Encouraged compromise and negotiation within the account team when it came to the sharing of resources and timelines to mitigate potential risk weeks or months down the pipeline.

Cleveland, Oh

• Managed the software development life cycle from inception to delivery including the organization of new architecture, development, testing, and release of interactive merchandising products. The most successful project achieved over $1MM in online sales on an average weekly basis for Lowe’s Home Improvement.• Led QA on user-generated content SAAS suite of tools that included Ratings and Reviews, Guided Selling and Product Recommendation.• Assisted in selling custom project contracts by delivering outstanding customer communication, outlining project objectives and timelines in clear and concise statements of work and assisting the executive and sales teams to develop project plans and budgets.• Built a 7-person production team, including the hiring and training of each local member, while maintaining deadlines and meeting project requirements set by the Marketing, Sales and Client Service teams.• Increased production team output levels by 75% in 4 months by transitioning a company-wide waterfall-based project management system to agile-based Kanban management system.• Managed coordination of multiple vendors simultaneously developing video, audio, 3D modeling and animation, and back-end development.