September 2011 – Current

As a member of Designkitchen’s client services team, I am able to take a more on- the-ground role in shaping and executing projects to success. I am currently managing projects for Designkitchen’s three highest value clients: HP, Best Buy, and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. On each project I have been responsible for day to day client communications and nurturing of the business relationship, project schedules and budgets, timeliness and quality of the project delivery, and managing Designkitchen’s internal team to project completion. My technical background has been a key point of optimization for these projects and has helped to streamline the delivery of them.

February 2008 – January 2011

Designkitchen is a fast-paced 100+ person interactive digital agency with big brand clients such as Motorola Solutions, HP, Burger King, and the University of Chicago. I was responsible for all areas of technology, including functionally managing the development team, providing technical and problem solving guidance, managing project delivery, performing new business pitches, evaluating technologies and partner agencies, and infrastructure work. My deep backend experience was heavily relied upon to lead diverse technical discussions with clients, including requirements gathering sessions and documentation.

My team executed a large majority of development, including HTML-based front end work, Rails and .net back end work, mobile app and mobile web development, and QA. Our primary account focus was Motorola Solutions, and we successfully launched a number of initiatives for them, including the brand new motorolasolutions.com, the global release of their highly-anticipated ES400 product, and numerous other campaigns. We also delivered a number of other large brand site experiences ranging from consumer products to virtual games to healthcare. Some work that my team delivered included crushyourstyle.com, craftsman.com, caremark.com, clubbk.com, huggiesmominspired.com, and lifefitness.com.

In addition to client deliverables, I was also responsible for the functional and operational management of a team of 8-12 developers. Those tasks included managing the teams performance, career management, recruiting and budgets, and generally taking care of the people on my team. About 10% of my time was also spent on general infrastructure duties, including hardware and software purchases, phone and networking, and server maintenance.

company when it was a small 500 person company called Solucient, and shortly thereafter Thomson Healthcare acquired us.

My role at Thomson was a 70-30 split between management and hands on development of the CareDiscovery product, respectively. That product was very data heavy and ran on WebSphere Portal (webapp), Cognos (reporting engine), and Oracle (database). My development time was spent coding core libraries in Java for the webapp that executed Cognos reports, while my functional time was spent in requirements gathering/documentation and technical analysis and design.

Functionally I managed a team of 6 developers on both the WebSphere and Cognos teams and was responsible for their performance as well some high level career management.

January 2003 – June 2004

My work at Abbott was a blended role of developer and business analyst. I performed a variety of technical functions on Documentum including running in- depth queries and reports, performing upgrades and patches, developing new modules, and working with Documentum directly on support. Additionally, I was responsible for the execution and development of standardized processes in support of any Documentum work.

On the more traditional BA side, I would gather and document any business requirements necessary for new features or projects in the Documentum space, and eventually move those into functional requirements to more directly work with developers. That documentation would also be used in support of QA activities for traceability. I was also primarily responsible for leading any direct communication with Documentum’s team and led weekly status calls and detailed technical discussions.

to align the workforce to the appropriate stations. The webapp and reporting engine were 100% custom Java apps, and my role was to help develop the data to webapp interface/bridge. Unfortunately, that division of the company eventually folded and the project never made it into stores.

Allant was a direct marketing company that was building a variety of internal Java CRM webapps to support their marketing initiatives. The applications relied primarily on parsing and writing XML as the data interface, and this was the portion of the app that I worked on.

ChicagoMixer was an idea that my brother and I had to try and build a small but nimble online dating alternative to match.com and eHarmony. The idea was to make the site faster and easier to use than the larger sites, with a focus on more accurate matches. While we could never get the site to really take off, it was an excellent entrepreneurial learning experience. I built the entire site from the ground up with a standard Java webapp setup (Tomcat, Struts, MySQL, JSP, HTML, custom servlets).

January 2000 – August 2002

Braun was a full service technology consulting firm specializing in web development and business intelligence projects. I joined Braun as my first job out of college. I met some of the best people I’ve worked with in my career, and it gave me a solid foundation of technical skills to build on.

The majority of our work was for large pharma clients such as Biogen and Pfizer. We executed a number of development projects for those clients, primarily using Documentum and BEAs WebLogic app server. The projects were typically customer-facing portals or internal document management tools. One of our major achievements were the simultaneous launches of avonex.com and msactivesource.com, built on a unified platform and codebase on WebLogic Portal.