Shakir Akbari Email & Phone Number

Chicago, Illinois, United States

As the Director of Applications at the American Library Association, I oversee strategic planning, development, implementation, and maintenance of our organization's applications, ensuring regulatory compliance and alignment with industry best practices. I lead teams to create solutions by leverage technologies such as: Drupal, SSIS, MS Power BI, iMIS (association management), Salesforce CRM, Boomi integrations, New Relic, Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains, Prophix, Thrive/Informz (email marketing/ campaigns), Higher Logic's Online community platform, MS Tenant management, Foundant (grant management), Weave (accreditation management), PayPal's PayFlow Pro (payment processing), ContractSafe (contract management), Zoho helpdesk and support chat, RingCentral IP phone and Call Center, WordPress, Zoom, Adobe Sign, Adobe Creative Cloud, Figma, Lucid, Jira / Confluence, AWS, MS Azure, Shibboleth, Okta, Forj LMS, and Ultripro (HRMS).Key Responsibilities:• Strategically plan, develop, implement, and maintain enterprise-wide applications• Foster innovation, continuous improvement, and collaboration • Communicate benefits, process impact, and ROI of technical solutions • Evaluate, select, and manage vendor relationships • Build relationships with key stakeholders to forecast their needs and align to organizational goals• Establish IT governance frameworks and standards • Create and ensure adherence to a bespoke project management process which includes scoping, budgeting, resource allocation, and timeline management

Greater Chicago Area

The charge of the American Library Association's IT Project Manager position is to 1) coordinate internal resources and third parties/vendors for the flawless execution of projects 2) ensure that projects are delivered on time, within the scope, and within budgetKey Responsibilities: • Provide regular status reports for all IT initiatives to the association's executive directors • Implement Major IT Projects and Initiatives • Deliver projects on time and with in budget while ensuring quality • Manage relationships with vendors and consultants • Create common understanding and agreement on scope with business stakeholders

Greater Chicago Area

Responsible for the stewardship of mission-critical software-based business solutions across a portfolio of business accounts. These solutions optimize the key workflows and processes of their users and the Product Owner is charged with gauging whether this expectation is being met and proactively engaging in remediation efforts when technology solutions are falling short.In addition to managing the evaluation, planning, and implementation of software-based business solutions on behalf of business constituents, the Product Owner is also responsible for maintaining an ongoing dialogue with key stakeholders to deliver a line of sight into the evolving business needs of his assigned accounts so that IT can effectively anticipate how to best support the medium-to-long-term technology needs of the business

Greater Chicago Area

Lead enhancements and supported CRM solution including website, reporting, data integration using both agile and waterfall SDLC processes for digital healthcare marketing company. Provided guidance to new project managers and business analysts. • Worked closely as technical/business liaison with account managers and development team to identify business needs. • Played key role onboarding new clients on data solutions. Created presentations and diagrams for teams to understand scope, project work, and help gather additional requirements • Streamlined manual processes for creating multi-channel marketing reporting which resulted in long-term savings and revenue generating products. • Created business and functional requirements to integrate 3rd party data into CRM solution including sending CRM emails, and identifying sales targets.

Greater Chicago Area

Responsible for project management, business analysis, requirements documentation, designing & developing data models, user interfaces, and systems integration for the suite of education information systems supporting the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Develops project plans to offset risk factors, allocate resources, and align with the CPS’s strategic vision as well as tactical business needs. -Worked with stakeholders to capture business requirements, use cases, and define scopes for information system projects.-Managed advisory and information strategy creation for various lines of business at CPS.-Resolved conflicting priorities to effectively leverage very limited resources.-Broke down project timelines into milestones and deliverables to communicate status and complete information systems deployments.-Created and maintained library hundreds of reports utilized by 40,000+ teachers and administrators.-Developed analytical reports for CPS senior management and Chicago’s Mayor’s office.Managed vendor and in-house deliverables by creating object-oriented milestones and conducting coordination calls.-Authored work breakdown structures to support development and ensure on-time and on-budget projects.-Analyzed business processes to ensure deliverables meet stakeholders’ spoken and unspoken requirements.-Implemented knowledge repository by creating a library of code and mapping it to service offerings; decreasing project lead time and promoting cross-functional team growth.-Managed day-to-day client / vendor relationships to set expectations and escalate critical support issues.-Led user acceptance labs for various levels of end users.

Greater Chicago Area

-Designed, developed and implemented many different MIS projects including-District health modules to ease data entry, improve data quality, increase state compliancy, and reduce clinicians’ workload. -Duplicate student resolution tools: reducing 50+ resource-hours of data resolution per student to less than 1 hour of data validation. Enabled the city to recoup significant funding from the state. -Automation tools to reduce resource-hours across 700 schools used to complete student scheduling by +70%. -Managed the extremely aggressive deployment of ‘GradeSpeed’: the primary application used by the +30,000 public school teachers to enter grades, attendance, and assignments. -Managed the deployment of Parent / Student Portal: the web portal available for +1.5 million parents and students to monitor grades, attendance, and receive real-time student performance based alerts.-Performed application system research and analysis.-Supported enterprise wide applications in 24 x 7 x 365 environment.-Refined internal processes in pursuit of operational excellence.-Mentored 20+ junior colleagues to grow their skill sets and improve the escalation process. -Conducted knowledge exchange sessions to create cohesion across 5 levels of support groups.-Redefined management processes by implementing tools to facilitate communication and coordination.-Conducted pilot roll-outs at several elementary schools.-Identified major milestones and developed plans to systematically address them.

Doctor Of Philosophy - Phd, Business Administration And Management, General

Master Of Science - Msc, Major In Business Information Technology

Bachelor Of Science - Bs, Information Systems

Bachelor Of Science - Bs, Graphic Art & Animation