Ray Jacobs Email & Phone Number

Tampa, Fl, Us

Tampa, Florida, United States

• Founder and principal of Fourteen 25, Inc., serving startups and established organizations nationwide, with teams and customers spanning the globe.• Conducting requirements gathering and user story documentation to comprehensively construct a detailed, prioritized backlog. The prioritized backlog facilitated the development of a comprehensive product roadmap for the next three months, encompassing documented dependencies and the assignment of team members to initiatives.• Collaborating with numerous clients and overseeing multiple project budgets to mitigate substantial overruns or underruns and conducting weekly budget assessments with executive leadership in project review sessions to ensure alignment.• Achieved a 15% increase in daily user logins and a 5% revenue boost through the effective deployment of essential functionality enabling clients to streamline ad production. This enhancement tripled client productivity, saving hundreds of operational hours for the team and improving response times from external organizations.• Leading meetings with client stakeholders and cross-functional teams to establish strategy, goals, and agreement on timelines and deliverables. Prioritizing enhancements to core features involves utilizing the RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort) methodology. • Achieved a 40% reduction in customer support tickets (bugs) by implementing advanced unit testing and automated deployment tests. This required tight coordination with Quality Assurance and Development teams to meticulously test core functionality during software deployments in both non-production and production environments.• Conducting weekly meetings with company executives to assess project performance, including budget and deliverables, ensuring the senior leadership team is informed of any risks to project timelines or budgets. Prior to these meetings, project plans are updated in Jira, DevOps, Linear and Aha.

Tampa/St. Petersburg, Florida Area

• Collaborated with Product Owners to establish and manage the product backlog, identified resource requirements for backlog item delivery, and facilitated daily stand-up meetings as well as bi-weekly sprint retrospective and planning sessions.• Fostered trust among both the scrum team and client team members by consistently delivering value, communicating project challenges and risks promptly, collaborating to achieve project objectives, and celebrating successes when appropriate.• Managed User Acceptance Testing to verify compliance with all project requirements and promptly resolve any issues raised by client staff during testing, ensuring that the project's go-live date remains unaffected.• Acquired an in-depth understanding of the business rules, utilizing this insight to streamline processes, propose solutions, boost team effectiveness, and advance the achievement of client goals.

Tampa/St. Petersburg, Florida Area

• Lead the day-to-day activities for multiple delivery teams, ensured alignment to Agile software development methodologies / best practices, and worked with team members to establish and maintain project management standards and procedures. • Collaborated with members of the Delivery Management team to streamline processes and procedures by updating existing documentation for project on-boarding, technical specifications, and client information with the goal of standardizing documentation across all engagements.• Maintained monthly budget metrics and ensured the project teams stayed within allocated funding while continuing to deliver project results and exceed client expectations.

Tampa/St. Petersburg, Florida Area

• Managed client business processes to identify and benchmark potential solutions against current and future business needs.• Developed strong collaborative communications/relationships with the key Business, Information Technology, and Executive Leaders through timely and relevant information on areas of responsibility, including regular reports on progress against plans and budgets on key performance indicators (KPIs).• Lead all Agile related activities (Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective, Sprint Refinement, and Sprint Planning) for multiple delivery teams.• Drafted end-to-end project plans to track milestones and delivery timelines to further track and escalate project risks, issues, dependencies, and potential budget challenges that could positively and negatively impact project deliverables and overall success.

Tampa/St. Petersburg, Florida Area

• Implemented Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), IT Service Management best practices to increase user and customer satisfaction with IT services (improved service availability and reduced downtime), leading to a 40% increase in student enrollments and revenue. Decreased financial operational costs due to reduction of duplicate work streams and improved resource allocation across all projects and operation tasks.• Leading the Information Technology management team in effectively coordinating application related project management services through all phases of the project life cycles. Providing extensive communication to all Ultimate Medical Academy project team members and stakeholders through the use of Microsoft Project and custom developed SharePoint project sites used to track timelines, decisions, deliverables, and risks.• Providing leadership for the design, development, testing, implementation, training, documentation, and support for all enterprise applications used by over 14,000 students and 3,000 staff. Core enterprise applications include an Enterprise Resource Planning System (CampusNexus), Learning Management System (Blackboard), Customer Relationship Management (Zoho), Document Management System (Perceptive Content), eSignature (DocuSign), Employee Portal (SharePoint), and custom developed integrations.• Responsible for managing all day-to-day operational support, production fixes, enhancements, configuration changes and incident resolution. During the 2016 calendar year this included over 4,000 service requests and 250 incidents while maintaining an average customer satisfaction rating of 4.2 out of 5.• Currently supporting key project initiatives of the Information Technology department that include the implementation of Identity Access Management for students and staff with the roll-out of Office 365, SQL upgrades to SQL Server 2016, and automation of student course scheduling for improved operational efficiency.

Tampa/St. Petersburg, Florida Area

• Developed a highly effective, productive, and award-winning support team achieving high levels of customer satisfaction and innovation that currently receives over 4,000 support requests a year with a completion rate of 98% in less than 5 days.• Managed a team of SQL developers who are responsible for developing custom database objects, automating data integration, monitoring database performance, and troubleshooting production issues.• Effectively, ensuring customer satisfaction by increasing positive customer experience, managing customer expectations, gaining their trust, and constantly seeking customer feedback on quality of service provided. • Received “Breaker of Silos” Leadership Team award for continuous communication and partnership across all Ultimate Medical Academy business units while overcoming long-standing business and technology silos.• Guided the development, maintenance, and support for a platform of products that serviced multiple departments and positively influenced key business objectives and metrics• Partnered with non-IT teams to define and encourage improved Product Owners and establish technology roadmaps and metrics for key departmental projects

Austin, Texas Area

• Implemented a campus web portal for 1000 students and 75 faculty members that provides students with the ability to register for courses, view grades, print course schedules, view semester financial statements, etc.• Served as project manager for the implementation of the campus Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. The reimplementation project consisted of 1088 hours of basic consulting, training, and software programming for Recruiting/Admission, Student Management, Fiscal Management, Institutional Advancement, and Human Resource modules.• Procured $500,000 of restricted funding to complete the installation of category 6 Ethernet cabling in all classroom buildings on campus. This project also includes the installation of new network equipment and wireless access points to support all classroom activities.• Teamed with an Austin based document management company to implement a campus wide copying/printing solution for the campus that decreased annual printing and copying costs by 50%.

Gainesville, Florida Area

• Supervised, trained, mentored, hired, and managed the Operations and Support staff for the University of Florida which oversees the batch processing for all myUFL systems (roughly 75,000 unique users)• Led all activities (report modifications, salary projection processes, PDF and Excel report creation, MyReports navigation, and batch processing) related to the bursting and extraction of over 115,000 unique Enterprise Reporting / Business Intelligence monthly financial reports• Worked directly with the University of Florida campus community to provide the users a central point to receive Level 2 and Level 3 technical and functional support • Partnered with the UF Help Desk staff, UF Staff (Finance, Human Resources, Security, Business Intelligence, and UF Directory), and the UF Core Offices to provide the campus community with a timely and accurate response to all of their Help Desk tickets• Served as project manager on the implementation of numerous projects with varying levels of severity, scope, and schedules

Fairfax, Virginia

• Managed a staff of employees in the Quality Assurance operations of the U.S. Customs Service, Seized Asset and Case Tracking System (SEACATS)• Worked on the development and implementation of a new Test Plan and Test Case Methodology for the Information Systems Division (ISD) Testing Branch• Directed a team of quality assurance testers responsible for test execution of multiple complex projects for weekly and quarterly software migrations• Assigned tasks to members of test teams, coordinated all activities of teams, and provided hands-on technical leadership during all phases of testing • Wrote and executed system/regression test scripts, plans, and problem reports to test software functionality• Coordinated and collaborated with client staff as well as team members during development, testing, and implementation of software

Fairfax, Virginia

• Seized Assets Control and Tracking System (SEACATS)• Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS) • Internal Affairs System (IA)

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

• Business Analyst -- Pyramid Project, School District of Philadelphia