Development Work

I enjoy doing development as part of what I am doing.
 
At Korn Ferry, I was hired to create the specs for a small app and then QA it after it was built.  The development manager asked me to create the SQL Server stored procedures for it and I did.  Also, during the lull between the specifications and the QA, I was asked to help QA the new data warehouse.  This involved complex queries of the data in the old warehouse and the data in the new warehouse.
 
At Portico Benefit Services, I was flown out to Minneapolis to create the specifications for Microsoft CRM Workflows.  Their original idea was to hire a separate developer.  While I was doing the specs, the manager decided he wanted me to do it.  I learned how to develop CRM Workflows and created them.
 
At the Southern California Association Of Governments, I lead the effort to move from a custom, out of date CRM application to Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  I had an external vendor make the changes to the CRM package but determined that I was the best person to migrate the data.  I knew the old CRM application's data model as well as the Microsoft CRM data model.
 
When I do a data migration, such as this one for CRM, I like to do it in separate steps with just one or two data transformations in each step.  This allows the changes to be precisely checked.  The CRM migration had 29 steps to it and I ran it in a safe space about 40 times before the move to the new platform.  This ensured the migration was perfect.
 
During my first engagement with Virtual Consulting, I created two ASP.Net/VB.Net web applications to replace two aging VB6 applications.  This was difficult as the users wanted the new screens to work exactly the same way as the Windows screens.  I had to do much Javascript coding to make the UI the same.

Mentoring

I am very strong at mentoring technical staff, including developers.

 

John is a phenomenal problem solver and a great mentor. We worked together on some 'impossible' projects that I'm proud to be a part of years later. In addition to technical brilliance, John's highly developed sense of ethics remains an example to follow in my own business decisions.  - Rukesh Maharaj, Lead Developer, the j j wild group (my company between 1992 and 2003)

Web Master

I have been the webmaster for the Los Angeles chapter of the International Institute of Business Analysis for 7 years.