Richard Sziroczák Email & Phone Number

Budapest

4Sales Systems (part of Dusser Group) is an IT consultancy firm specializing in high priority software delivery projects and IT strategy consulting for industry and government. I was one of the semi-independent consultants who went to various clients to help them realize their goals. My responsibilities were exceedingly varied, specialized to each client’s needs. I have taken on hands on roles as a solutions architect, specifications writer or process audits and process improvement proposition. I have taken on monitoring and control roles also to assure the quality and continuous progress of projects. I have dived deeper into the theories of project management with PMI.org and introduced the learned methodology into my company. I regularly help and mentor the junior members and step in, if projects deviate from the proper way.Lately I have specialized in two areas. First is the rescue of projects in serious disaster. Although not an easy task and most of the time it involves arguments and difficult decisions, there are rewarding moments of success at the end.Second, I have found my role in advising the CEO or CTO level leadership to better harness the resources at their disposal and to plan the long term direction where the hardware and software portfolio is heading. I am advising a realistic roadmap on how to achieve the long term goals and then prepare the decisions and project outline for the immediate next steps. With this I can apply my knowledge in team building, sustainable process design and compliance to cybersecurity standards and regulations.Major projects, where I had a major role: IT security and regulation compliance audit lead for (Hungarian) Ministry of Justice,New institution control software design and project lead for the Hungarian Accreditation Authority,Quality assurance lead on multiple geo-informatics projects for Lechner Think-tank,Smart factory R&D and software delivery lead for Knorr-Bremse.

Telio Group and its development subsidiary in Hungary is one of the market leading providers in closed circuit, high security telephony for correctional institutions, government and military. (https://tel.io/)I was contracted to oversee the company's planning, software upgrade and set-up project in the Czech Republic. Together with the Czech account manager, the German leader of the maintenance branch and the corporate leadership in the Netherlands the project was broken down to sub projects for the tasks at hand. I was responsible for the IT requirements gathering, software solutions design, instrument procurement and the monitoring of the IT development process. I travelled many times to the Czech Department of Justice in Prague and to various government IT sites, where I collaborated on site with a diverse cast of colleagues, sometimes in multiple languages. Most of the day-to-day work was done remotly, in digital collaboration.I also had the opportunity to lead some smaller side projects in research in collaboration with the Technical University of Brno and experts from Hungary and the Czech Republic. The most exciting was automated language and dialect detection based on recorded or real time telephone speech with artificial intelligence. Although the problem is solved academically, in controlled environment for major Germanic languages, interestingly it is a much deeper and fundamentally different problem for example for the many dialects of the Arab language family. Needless to say, this is a highly anticipated feature by several European governments, and it might become a flagship feature for the correctional institution telephone product. During my brief tenure we made progress in the areas of noise cancellation and cancelling the effects of speaker voice pattern change (for example because of agitation or excitement). These were important stepping stones in conquering the larger task in the future.

As lead solutions architect I was ultimately responsible for all the information technology solution designs the department made and for the technical monitoring and technical quality assurance of each software delivery project. Day to day, I was responsible for the work assignments of my team of software designers (8 colleagues). I participated in the management of the wider department (50 colleagues) under the direction of the IT delivery VP.My primary task was to plan a grand transformation project with all the countries in the central European region. Over a five year period, through multiple phases the provisioning, billing, maintenance and on-site technical equipment was going to be standardised. I planned and organized a series of lectures, where I set out a new method of work organization, documentation and planning methodology for the IT delivery department. Although a good portion of the lecture was evident for engineers and software designers, the real added value was for the other colleagues with varied backgrounds (project managers, business analysts, account holders, procurement managers). Topics included thinking in processes and automation, standardising the estimations and business cases and learning the UML modelling language (with exercises, homework and one on one consultations with me). In the end this allowed the departments to cut down on the day to day redundant tasks and freed up the necessary and educated staff to begin the planned region wide transformation project on common knowledge and processes.Sadly this grand transformation project did not enter the execution phase. Corporate leadership made the decision to sell the individual country assets instead of upgrading and consolidating the assets to more manageable and efficient region wide providers. UPC Hungary was acquired by Vodafone Hungary who already had plans and staff for the coming years.

I became a (SCRUM) product owner in a fast paced company where living day to day with our partner's needs was a reality. My clients included telecommunications companies, online marketing companies and an oil trading company.My responsibilities included meeting with the client and figuring out how his needs can be realized exactly. I was the one who penned the user stories (requirements) and I made a deal with the client on the deadlines and time-and-material constraints. Then I refined the plans to information technology solution designs, ones that could be implemented and upgraded from existing systems. Further, together with the team, we refined those plans to executable development tasks. These development tasks were executed in the two-week cycles called sprints, where I oversaw the process and handled issues that deterred the development team.In the meantime I did new opportunities estimation, contracting and project management tasks too. It was not an easy task to handle multiple cross-functioning teams, each working on several projects for multiple clients. Measuring progress and billing all clients fairly and transparently was a challenge in its own.Rarely did I have coding done in this role, to help out the development team in a really hard impediment or a really tricky bug fix. Although this was not necessary and was not encouraged by the company, I found that these opportunities were essential to build trust and build a team from the developers. My teams performed better because I was an inside man, not a distant boss. They told me every important information and issue, because they knew, I will understand and I will help.I championed the cause of making a knowledge or competence registry, where each developer's skill could be overviewed and plans could be made on where to improve next. On personal level and in company strategy level. I was pleased that the system I proposed and implemented was widely accepted in all levels of the company.

I participated in a series of projects as a java developer and later team lead to a group of developers in the Hungarian power distribution network's transformation. At the time a large scale infrastructure upgrade was on the way in the power distribution network, meanwhile the commercialization of the power market was also set as a goal. Through our company's (and many other's) efforts the Hungarian power exchange was born. (https://hupx.hu/en/)My daily tasks were to develop features precisely, to the ultra-high standard required for the technical control and commerce business of the power grid. The tasks were sometimes highly technical in respect to electrical engineering, like taking into account the nuances of hot and cold-boot of thirty year old soviet transformators. After a year, my tasks expanded to organizing task breakdown sessions and reviewing the work of the junior developers. I was responsible for all my team to understand the tasks at hand and to perform them to the expected high quality.I had some chance to participate in the design and fine tuning of some more complex functions on top of the actual development. Namely the time-series predictions of small consumer behaviours and the predictive optimization of the 15 minute option-contract offers for large consumers and providers. This was an excellent opportunity to put the learned sciences into practice and to go through all the tasks and challenges that are needed to implement artificial intelligence solutions to real live problems. I am particularly proud of my upgrade to a feature, where I made the predictive model work well with additional restrictions to some providers, like solar power plants. Before, the model commanded the plant to increase production, but you know, it could not, because it was dependant of the amount of sunshine :) Developing the new feature, testing, fine tuning was quite a challenge, but I am happy to see it runs smoothly in the live power system still.

While attending the university, I made a side job building simple websites for small-medium companies and foundations. Tech stack was mostly PHP, Wordpress, sometimes .NET solutions. This was a small scale operation alone or with a trusty designer friend. I was able to introduce small companies to an internet business and presence with a friendly attitude, price and a truly all composing service. Although the technical challenge was not that complex, I learned a lot dealing with customers, requirements and contracts. Some of my clients, although they were an established business with decades of excellence and local renown, did not own a computer at the office when we started. I helped them understand this new world of electronic commerce, that they knew nothing about, but saw the world going in that direction. I set up servers, networks, electronic office where it was needed. I guided the client through all the processes of buying a domain, making a new company logo, styles, deciding the core message, user experiences etc. I made simple informative websites with the specialised features they needed for their business. In the end I was pleased when they got their first customers form the internet and thanked me for it.

Master’S Degree, Computer Software Engineering

Activities and Societies: Belonged in the freshman helping, camp and festival creating, party making societies (SSSL and many others)..

Bachelor’S Degree, Computer Software Engineering

Activities and Societies: Belonged in the freshman helping, camp and festival creating, party making societies (SSSL and many others)..

High School, Mathematics

Activities and Societies: Student and sports life organisation.Special mathematics faculty (talent grooming program).