Norma Brown Email & Phone Number

Atlanta Metropolitan Area

• Accountable for all aspects of the various programs/projects executed within the Cyber, Technology, Media, and MPL Portfolio.• Liaison with a matrixed team of Business stakeholders, Project Managers, Business Analysts, Enterprise Architects, Technical Analysts, and 3rd party on/offshore providers.• Work Collaborative with senior-level management within the business to build out feature capability.• Responsible for creating and managing project plans, business expectations, steering committees and budgets.• Responsible for process definition and improvement.

Greater Atlanta Area

Program Manager (Quality Assurance)● Involved in mission critical implementation of new Insurance platform. Responsible for tracking multiple value streams and playing a critical link between the extremely complex and challenging multiple dependencies.● Strong leadership, facilitation, influencing, negotiation, mentoring and personnel management, including the use of supplier and off-shore resources. ● Facilitate discussion, decision making, and conflict resolution within the value stream team.● Manage issues, mitigate risks, and enforce the change management process for all assigned projects. Resolve/escalate impediments when appropriate. ● Monitors dependent projects and processes to manage and reduce project management risks. Establishes a Plan B for high impact/high probability risk and are in problem (red) status.● Plans, coordinates, and prioritizes the schedule, agenda, and activities ensures that no responsibilities and deliverables fall through the cracks.

Greater Atlanta Area

● Managed the ambitious deployment of analytical tax software to assist clients in a collaborative on-line environment.● Facilitated Daily Standup, Iteration Planning, Sprint Review, Demos and Retrospective with distributed teams.● Interacted with program sponsors, stakeholders, and various project members to ensure that specified business needs are met. ● Coordinated with System Team, DevOps, Infrastructure Team, and Release Management.● Supported Product Owner with intra-team dynamics for priorities and scope.● Used agile tools for work item, team performance, and reporting. ● Raised risks, issues and escalate to senior management when appropriate.● Monitored 4 project budgets of $3mil. to ensure on budget delivery.

Atlanta Ga

● Managed the software development and implementation of customer boarding application to reduce the manual process by 30%. Challenging deployment deadline that required rapid understanding of the business environment, technical platforms, and application system. ● Central point of contact for all stakeholders (technical and non-technical departments) in a matrix organization.● Drive project issues through to resolution.● Developed and managed project plans, including program schedules, communication plans, change control and risk management plans. ● Communicated project needs, goals and milestones.● Ensured that project charters, meeting minutes, action items, and issues were documented.● Performed resource planning for personnel, capital resources, software, and hardware.● Identified and assess interdependencies holistically across the solution.● Responsible for budget of $750k.

Greater Atlanta Area

Responsible for projects over 10 Million budget.Negotiated all project commitments in development of the project plan,schedule and other critical deliverables between the business and matrix organizations. Overall management of scope, schedule, cost, quality, communications, and risks for the project.Provided end to end project management throughout the software development lifecycle of the project by co-directing the efforts of the project team.Managed project and program issues, and risks including mitigation and contingency plans. Responsible for escalations and problem resolutions. Point of escalation for Application PMs and Test Manager. Primary Interface between IT and Client .

Delivery Excellence 01/09-2010Execute the activities of implementing standards and best practices for estimating, project management and other methodologies to delivery solutions that maximize business value. Identified challenges and develop processes for planning, estimating and requirements management to reduce trouble projects by 20%. Improved alignment of IT plans with business strategy by 15% concentrating on controls, key deliverables along with clear metrics. Drive common implementation methodologies across the services teams and take best practices from services teams and incorporate into standard methodologies. Provide leadership and set the direction for activities which ensure project managers are prepared to implement new processes and methodologies as they become generally available.

Manages software application development utilizing the full software development life cycle (SDLC). Leverage business process expertise to document standardized process for a world wide infrastructure to host Rational Development tools. Project eliminated the need for local servers for 200+ projects.Reduce development launch time by 33% which allowed deployment of 4 releases within a 12 month period utilizing Rational Unified Process and AGILE methodology.Leverage negotiation and communication skills to gather requirements to automate 5 common mandatory project management processes in ClearQuest and Requirements tool which reduced redundant information by 50+%, allowed trace ability, and electronically filing of documents. Successfully built relationships through out the US, China, India, and Asia Pacific to increased usage of standardized Global Infrastructure by 30%. Trained users' onsite in Japan and China on usage of Rational RequisitePro using the standardized processes which fostered 500+ champions for the program.

Responsible for managing 15 multiple interdependent sub projects with a budget that exceeded $5 million that led towards an 62% improvement in the adoption of Rational technology, processes, and organizational best practices worldwide. Accountable to executive sponsors for schedule, budget, and quality of all program elements including risks and issues management.Reviewed project plans for conformance to program strategy and program plan and schedule. Acted as the communications conduit to project managers, executive sponsors and program steering committee by providing periodic briefings/status updates. Champion partnerships across the matrix subprojects and managed inter project dependencies.

Managed the adoption and deployment of Rational RequisitePro for IBM US internal account (IGA) that had a cost savings of 32% by utilizing a common tool and process. Marketed program to Senior Executive management to receive sponsorship. Managed multiple organizations business opportunity/requirements identification, guidance, support and closure. Facilitated team building activities that included focus groups, meetings, email communications, and mentoring that increased awareness and involvement.Exceeded growth usage expectation with 60 projects and 800+ users.

Created an integrated scheduling application to improve the speed and quality of scheduling for customer's disaster recovery test exercises. Reduce time to schedule a test event by 1 week for an improvement in customer satisfaction. Responsible for $2 million budget with 15 resources. Participated in project planning, budgeting, and requirement analysis. Managed cost including annual DOU/interlock plan negotiations for hardware and services.Responsible for staffing, scheduling and allocation of available resources.Ensured that quality plans were in place and monitored project results against specifications.

Researched business processes and functions that were designated as core components for web enabled educational offerings.Gathered and documented business requirements using RequisitePro.Documented functional and technical specifications as well as developed test plans and scripts.

Responsible for Request for Services (RFS) for the Point of Sales and Finance business areas for the Drug Store Chain, which included mainframe, store, and client server applications. Managed cross functional team of ten technical resources.Served as liaison between technical staff and clients.