IT Manager, Actuarial Modeling and Systems Calculon Development Team

Allianz LIfe, Golden Valley, MN     2022 - Present

Manage a team of 4 Software Developers and 1 Sr. Actuarial Analyst to develop a home grown application to validate Allianz’s annuity offerings.  We work within an Agile environment to meet quarterly deliverables of Annuity or Payout options.  In doing this, we are confirming accurate payments to our customers and company.  We do this through C# code base batches and SSIS Packages in SQL server and MongoDB.  We confirm payment accuracy to 99% efficiency to our internal stakeholders.  Currently, we are a non-production application and my role in managing the team to mature the application to a Production ready state in both versioning of code/SSIS as well as infrastructure perspectives. 

• Work closely with IT to meet standards and best practices while being under the Actuarial Department

• Work with Junior Developers on Agile and IT development practices to meet deliverables in timely manner

• Work closely with Actuaries, and Analysts on Annuity products and payout options to meet deliverables

• Function as departments Records Custodian to ensure data is up to date or in a secure location

• Increased team’s overall Agile velocity by 20% by implementing new process and procedures within first 3 months of hire date

• To date the the Calculon application has found $13 Million dollars in defects, saving the company and customers

Manager Cloud Engineering, Oracle Cloud Services Team

TCF Financial Corp, Plymouth, MN     2017 - 2021

Managed team of 2 Business Analysts, a Cloud Engineer and a Scrum Master to manage all infrastructure of Oracle application products. (minus specific databases procured by specific application teams)  This includes, but not limited to Oracle ERP Cloud SaaS offerings for HCM (including time cards), ESS Jobs, benefits, Taleo and overall functionality.   Oracle ERP Cloud SaaS for Operations, including Procurement, Sourcing and managed specific ESS Jobs.  Oracle ERP Cloud SaaS for Finance.  These include testing of full functionality post-grades and patching.  Implemented and managed Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) in 2 separate environments. Architected, built, configured and supported 3 full Hyperion 11.1.2.4.x  environments, including Hyperion Essbase, FDMEE, HFM, EPMA, CalcMgr, ODI, EAS, Essbase Studio.  Patched Hyperion environments as recommended by Oracle and scheduled as needed.  Migrated previous Stonebranch jobs to new Stonebranch Cloud offering.  Worked with Finance customer teams on process improvement to mitigate issues and down times and batch impact. 

• Managed a team of 2 Business Analysts, 1 Cloud Engineer and Scrum Master    

• Owned from an Infrastructure perspective $4-5 million in Oracle products   

• Delivered full Hyperion 11.1.2.4 environment in first week to reduce consulting costs of 10 consultants by 1 week, reducing overall costs and shortening timeline. 

• Standardized Change Management policies within team, consulted on larger Infrastructure-wide policy changes.

• Established new tools for Oracle SaaS offering analysis, monitoring and troubleshooting.

• Created new standards and policy for Hyperion Financial Batch process to reduce overall time by 1.5-2 hours nightly.  Ensuring users would have less daily impact.

• Oversaw Peak Season activities, resulting in 100% system availability for critical systems.

• Automated all OAC activities to maximize use of the metered system during off/peak times to save the company time and money. 

• Implemented new Essbase processes to meet SD1 expectations during merger with Chemical Bank. 

• Worked closely with Azure/AWS team to have a standardized Cloud philosophy. 

• Decreased post-update/upgrade time of our Oracle Cloud SaaS environments by 1 day (2.5 to 1.5)

Tech Lead/Business Systems Analyst

Lifetime Fitness Corp, Chanhassen, MN     2016 - 2017

Technical lead that managed daily duties of a team of 3 Senior Analysts and 2 Junior Analysts.   Oversaw daily development activities within  Workday Finance objectives to meet payroll needs determined by corporate or tax/regulatory changes.  Worked with direct manager to set goals and objectives based on state/county/city laws to impact the clubs.  Worked with business users, clubs and payroll team to migrate all payroll to a bi-weekly system.  Worked with internal stakeholders to set up a release schedule for all Workday and Kronos updated activities instead of treating every change as an incident.  Kronos administrator within Lifetime Fitness.  Provided input of daily team activities to management.  Assisted with employee training and reviews. 

• Implemented a structured change management schedule for all Workday and Kronos activities that was used as a pilot program within Lifetime Fitness.

• Kronos Administrator at the time GPS enablement was implemented for our clubs to utilize 'mobile' to gain more accurate time tracking and increasing financial benefit to the company.

• Assisted in the implementation and scheduling of payroll migration from a weekly to bi-weekly program to all employees saving the company in both financial and employee utilization expenses. 

• Implemented an internship for our team to give club employees an opportunity to work towards a career on the corporate side.

Systems Architect Consultant-Oracle Practice

eCapital Advisors, Bloomington, MN     2014 - 2016

Consulted as an Oracle Practice Architect to implement, consult, supported and lead projects from an infrastructure perspective on all Hyperion products.  Was the technical contact and liaison between eCapital Advisors and external customers including but, not limited to, Archway, Holiday Corp, HB Fuller, Merrill Corp, Thomson Reuters, Lifetime, UHG/Optum, Unisys, SunOpta, Ameriprise, AgriBank, Children’s Hospital, MoneyGram, Ecolab, AY McDonald, Follett Corp.  Consulted to implement Hyperion 11.1.2.2-11.1.2.4 environments to the requirements the customer needed, whether this was to be on a Windows, Linux, operating systems and SQL or Oracle DB’s utilizing on-prem or AWS back end, to be configured with the application.  Customized environments to customers user needs, licensing and needs. 

• Completed all projects within 5% +/- original quotes to give customers and employer accurate budgeting and timeline expectations. This allowed us to preserve a good working relationship and return customers.

• Conducted training to external customers to best support common issues to build strong customer experience.

• Presented at local conferences on issues and resolutions of Hyperion issues to support the consulting practice.

• Resolved an issue with a valued customer that had a high severity outage of their environment and I was able to triage down to resolution in a matter of hours as opposed to the recommended full rebuild which would have cost the customer a week including Wall Street implications.

Manager, Medical/Clinical Software Programs

United Healthcare, Minnetonka, MN     2013 - 2014

Managed a team of 2 DBA’s, A Business System Analyst and 2 Business Analysts to implement projects on a Medical/Clinical need.  Collaborated with Doctors and Nurses to gather requirements to develop applications to assist in medical needs.  Managed project deadlines based off the needs of Clinics within the UHG network.  Collaborated with Optum resources to utilize and prioritize Hadoop's big data use with the team’s Alteryx implementation.  Implemented internal team’s usage of requests to utilize work requests to use the corporate standard ticketing system.  Prioritized work requests for internal resources.  Managed the implementation of Alteryx. 

• Began first steps of developing a program to clinicians to diagnose severity and improvement of traumatic brain injuries.

• Translated technology to clinicians and doctors and vice versa to speed time to delivery.

• Implemented Alteryx to create a library of DB activities that could be utilized by non-technical resources to speed delivery of needs exponentially.  

• Led effort to create Application Support, Change and Incident Guideline documents for customers, decreasing change execution lead time and e-mail overhead.  This cut our requests in half and allowed e/u's to track their requests.  

• All major projects were driving towards 100% within timelines dictated by clinical needs.

Senior IT Management Consultant

United Healthcare, Minnetonka MN     2007 - 2013

Provided application architecture, implementation, support and management for tier 1 applications running on Windows and Linux Redhat systems. Participated in on-call rotation including weekend/overnight shifts, responding to incident calls and performing scheduled work. Led and drove major incident calls with executive level audience as well as vendors and other support.  Built out new servers, created application installation procedures and documentation. Worked closely with IT and business teams across business unit to streamline project and incident reporting.  Performed root-cause analysis.  Utilized full SDLC process throughout builds and go-live process. 

• Collaborated with development to maintain a 99.5% up-time on all applications including  Hyperion, Peoplesoft Finance/HR, Concur Expense, Taleo (pre-Oracle).

• Decommissioning of Cognos Decision Stream and BI to now utilize the Hyperion suite saving the company seats and licenses.

• Worked with management to interview potential team members and contractors to fill in gaps to provide better overall support.

• Migrated previous Hyperion v9.3 from Windows to 11.1.2.1 (followed by 11.1.2.4) on a Linux Redhat environment for more consistent up-time and less scheduled down times. 

Senior Systems Engineer-AMS Hosting, Application Support

Thomson Reuters, Eagan, MN      2006 - 2007

Provided application support and management for approximately 90 different applications running on Windows and UNIX systems. Participated in on-call rotation including weekend/overnight shifts, responding to incident calls and performing scheduled work. Built out new servers, created application installation procedures and documentation. Worked closely with teams across data-center to deliver solutions and execute major maintenance events including power, switch, and storage. Performed root-cause analysis.

• AMS Hosting liaison for Dialog Summit, Online Charges, BIS-App development teams. 

• Supported various websites using such technologies such as, IIS 6.0, Websphere, Orion, Iplanet, and Apache Tomcat.

• Monitored 50 applications that provide the company with 650 million dollars in revenue annually via SiteScope, Tivoli and iMon and triaged the issues as they arose.

Systems Support Analyst 3/Windows Administrator

Unisys Corporation, Eagan, MN     2004 - 2006

Responsible for 24x7 application and OS support of production, QA, test and Dev servers. Worked specifically on the “Change team” for all scheduled work within the ITIL framework. Was responsible for monthly Windows patching utilizing WSUS and Shavlik Netchkpro. Supported team Windows servers, including troubleshooting, security patches, and system rebuilds. Worked closely with vendors, contractors and outside customers. Received state and federal background checks in order to support secure customers. 

• Led monthly Windows OS patching efforts to ensure minimal down times while coordinating with many external customers.

• Worked as Unisys liaison between Piper Jaffrey, United Healthcare, SBA and more.

• Worked with helpdesk management to empower specific duties that were done by Windows Administrators to give them more responsibility and open time for Administrators to focus on more pressing customer needs.

• Provided support to users via e-mail and phone.

Academy Education – System Network Administration

Mini-MBA program from St. Thomas University 1/2021

AWS Architect Accreditation, 2016

Six Sigma Yellow Belt Certified

Professional Development

High Performance team leading, Hyperion EPM Suite, Oracle Cloud (SaaS), Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC IaaS), Agile Methodology (w/KANBAN), ITIL, Ansible, Jenkins, Splunk, Solarwinds, Stonebranch (cloud), Windows 2000-2016, SQL Server 2008-2016, SSMS, AIX, Linux (redhat), VMWare, AWS, Azure, 

Working knowledge within the Financial industry standards (TCF Bank 4 years)

Working knowledge of Health Insurance (UHG 7.5 years)

Passed local (City of Minneapolis) background check and Federal background check

I was the Q3 recipient in The Customer First - Quarterly Award.  TCF grants this as a recognition to an employee each quarter that showed outstanding customer service.

I have volunteered to help with the St. Paul winter carnival at Hazeltine for the PGA Championship.  I have also volunteered with Helping to Feed our Starving Children.  I've participated in the Walk for Diabetes.  Also, donated time and fund raising to help make advances with Dermatomyositis and Alzeimers, both of which are near and dear to me.  As well, I have helped coach local youth baseball teams and contributed to youth sports programs.