Contract and Project Manager

Skills overview

• Contract and Project management;
• Team lead;
• Broad IT expertise (technical consulting, experience in the whole software lifecycle: functional and technical specifications, requirements analysis, architecture, design, implementation, integration, unit and integration testing, documentation, packaging and delivery, deployment, maintenance, evolution, release management, user support).

Experience

Managing a large multi-year framework contract, involving:

• A blend of fixed-price tasks and T&M activities undertaken by two teams in Poland and coordinated from Luxembourg by a technical coordinator and his assistant (9 people)
• Several T&M projects implemented by colleagues and sub-contractors in the customer's premises in Luxembourg (5 people)

For fixed-price activities, I'm in charge of:

• Getting estimates approval
• Managing offers
• Planning implementation
• Monitoring status (quality, delays, cost)
• Getting approval for estimates addendum, parts invoiced as T&M and delivery dates updates; Preparing according offers
• Reviewing deliverables before handover to the customer's test team
• Getting acceptance documents
• Managing customer invoicing
• Computing KPIs and statistics
• Devising and implementing improvement plans to address quality, delay and cost issues

For Time and Means activities, I'm in charge of:

• Managing sourcing: coordinating with internal and external HR suppliers, selecting CVs, conducting recruitment interviews, choosing who to hire (hired and placed 2 people)
• Making and renewing offers
• Approving timesheets and managing time reports corrections

And in both cases:

• Profit & Loss responsibility
• Tracking and mitigating risks
• Reporting (status, risks, financial actuals and forecasts, etc.) to the Head of Delivery and to the Managing Director of Atos Luxembourg, as well as to the Atos BeLux management in Brussels
• Organizing and leading project board meetings
• Negotiating terms with suppliers and managing their payment (5 suppliers)
• Decisive hands-on work on our bid for the renewal of our 04/2009-03/2013 framework contract

Main achievements:

• Praise informally received from customer for the significant improvement in the quality of the deliverables for one maintained system (Number of bugs down to only 5 minors in the 16 workpackages delivered since June 2012)
• Framework contract successfully renewed. The 2 resources I had hired have also be retained.
• Management retained the proposal I submitted for our "Innovation Contest", to automate contract management processes so as to reduce costs and increase gross margin by 5 points (Similar challenges in this contract and the one I worked on at Intrasoft inspired a solution that would both create value in the short term and provide competitive advantage in the long term).

Promoted manager of the new "Transversal Unit" (14 people with 4 nationalities on 4 countries: India, Luxembourg, France, Germany) of the Acquiring Back Office development program, a unit in charge of:

• Releases Integration,
• Maintenance,
• Support to the customers,
• Program-wide transversal activities, such as: End-to-end sanity tests of deliveries, Rights management, Extensibility, Exceptions/errors handling, ...

Managing several projects in parallel, I was:

• Planning and preparing the activities of the unit staff (consisting in a maintenance manager, several information analysts and several developers)
• Coordinating and supervising, including:
  • priorities setting,
  • tasks allocation,
  • monitoring of (and suggestions for faster) progress,
  • controlling implementations
  • Leading daily meetings, writing minutes
• Tracking and mitigating risks
• Communicating and coordinating with internal and external stakeholders, located in different countries (project managers, business analysts, development and program managers, operational program management, test teams; customers, software architects, technical direction, etc.)
• Coordinating most of the activities related to the integration of the first release of the program, on a daily basis (program wide: implementation team, test team, business analyst, infrastructure team, etc.)
• Reporting to the Program Development Manager and to the Global Program Manager (e.g. for SteerCo meetings)
• Preparing annual appraisals with the unit members' respective line managers

Main achievements:

• Successfully delivered the first release of the program, within agreed time, resources and quality level, and with a scope larger than agreed with the customers - Our motto: "Under promise, over deliver"
• Praise officially received from our customers for the excellent quality of support provided
• Significant improvements in the quality of the system, through the introduction of automated "end-to-end sanity checks" before handover from the development teams to the test teams, using a test tool customized by the unit. This step, an initiative of the unit, officially became a go/no-go for entering coupling tests.

In charge of the "Dispute Management" service of the new Acquiring Back Office system under development (banking system - SOA, MDA, J2EE, EJB3, JPA, Hibernate, Oracle, Tomcat...). In close collaboration with the Business Analyst (in Germany), the implementation team (6 colleagues in India) and the test teams (in India and Belgium), I was in charge of:

• Defining the content of each development phase
• Writing Use Cases
• Designing the system (Service Contract, Domain Objects, etc.)
• Estimating workloads
• Leading kickoff meetings
• Guiding and supporting the implementation team
• Reviewing deliveries
• Supporting the test teams (reviewing test cases, providing clarifications, helping to classify issues as bugs or improvements, etc.)
• Reporting progress to the Program Development Manager (e.g. monthly report for the Steering Committee)

Main achievements:

• Successfully delivered the first two releases, within agreed time, with the best quality, and with only half the amount of resources compared to the other project teams
• Team recognized as the most successful one in the program
• Was asked by a young Deputy Project Manager, newly promoted, to coach her in her new role

Delivery Management (reporting to the Delivery Director):

• Direct contact for our Customers and our consortium Business Partners, responsible for their satisfaction
• In charge of making and submitting official offers to our Customers (many different products improvements and new projects), including:
  • Assisting our Customers in clarifying their needs
  • Writing requirements/specifications documents
  • Proposing state-of-the-art solutions, ensuring that they meet all needs and constraints
  • Estimating price, costs, time and resources requirements with risk analysis
• Staffing: selecting CVs, conducting recruitment interviews, choosing who to hire (hired 3 people for my team)
• Leading projects kick-off and progress meetings
• Allocating resources
• Planning and coordinating the tasks of the implementation team (4 to 7 Engineers spread on 2 to 3 countries: Luxembourg, Romania, England), in fast pace and quickly changing contexts
• Projects follow-up (quality, cost, deadlines): continuously handling several parallel projects with conflicting constraints (fixed-price projects with tight contractual delivery dates; unpredictable number of bugs to be fixed for already delivered software, under a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with strict contractual response time and according financial penalties)
• Responsible for the quality of deliverables: performing functional tests before deliveries
• Proactively analyzing performance gaps and improving operational work processes
• Weekly, monthly and bi-annual reports regarding:
  • Projects progress
  • Financial figures (Profit & Loss responsibility)
• Conducting team members annual appraisals

Software Engineering:

Functional and technical specifications, analyses (e.g. feasibility studies), architecture, implementation, tests, documentation, packaging and delivery, release management, support.

As technical expert, I was proactively involved in a large re-engineering project, in a challenging production environment with strong operational constraints (time, financial) regarding end users (airline passengers):

• Requirements (with the Customer's technical and quality teams)
• Technical specifications (proposal of a full Perl, object-oriented solution, etc.)
• Proposal of software architecture solutions
• Design
• Proposal and implementation of development "Best Practices" in my team, to ensure fail-safe products that can easily and quickly be debugged and fixed in case of troubles in production
• Development
• Coaching of young developers
• Integration
• Set up of unit and integration tests
• Implementation of standard delivery processes
• Packaging and delivery
• Deployment on Customer site
• Proposal and implementation of code documentation standards
• Formalization and documentation of all implemented standards and processes

Sole in charge of the design, development and/or maintenance of key components of Alcatel-Lucent's "Extended Communication Server" (formerly known as the "Eye-box" of the startup "Right Vision"): Backup/Restore, Firewall, PPTP and VPN, QoS, Ports redirection, Proxy Cache, Web access control, Web content filtering. Third-level support for these components.

Education and Qualifications

Certifications

Languages

French (mother tongue), fluent English, basic Italian.
Daily work in multi-national / multi-cultural / multi-location English speaking teams.

IT Skills

Office:

Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, Project, Office Communicator, Outlook

Web Development:

Good experience developing in PHP, Ajax / Web 2.0 / Java with GWT (GWTcs, gwt-log, gwt-dnd, gilead4gwt), JSP, Spring MVC, excellent skills in hand coding HTML and XHTML, good CSS, XML and XML Schema (XSD), little CGI-Perl, RSS and microformats, very good experience of working to W3C standards, good knowledge of deploying products under Apache web server, Apache Tomcat and Weblogic application servers (general knowledge of how to install and configure these servers), implementation of SOAP and REST Web Services

Programming:

Excellent knowledge of Perl

Solid working experience in Java (J2SE, JSP, EJB3, Spring, Spring MVC, Hibernate 3, JAXB, JBPM, Log4J, Apache Commons, JUnit, Quartz, Birt, SOAP Web Services with Apache Axis 2 and CXF, REST Web Services with Alfresco, GWT)

Solid working experience in PHP

Little JavaScript.

Operating systems:

First class experience in working on UNIX platforms (Linux Slackware, Mandrake, Red Hat and Fedora, OpenBSD, AIX, Sun/Solaris, ULTRIX. Software compilation and installation. Basic administration. Cygwin). Daily work on Windows XP.

Database/Directory:

LDAP (openLDAP), JavaDB (Apache Derby), MySQL, Oracle. SQL Developer.

Application servers:

Apache Tomcat, Weblogic (9.2, 10.3.3).

Development tools:

Eclipse IDE. Maven. Ant. CVS and Subversion (SVN) source control tools. W3C's HTML and CSS validators. Perltidy. RPM and CPAN packaging. Oxygen XML Editor, SoapUI

Design tools:

UML modeling with Eclipse/Topcased, Microsoft Visio

Content Management Systems (CMS):

Alfresco (configuration, Web Forms, Web Projects, JBPM Workflows, Java development to customize Alfresco platforms).

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB):

SOA with Mule (architecture of a SOA Middleware, development of custom Mule Services, Mule Filters, Mule Transformers, Web Services for the embedded CXF engine).

Bug tracking systems:

Mantis, Jira.

Collaborative work tools:

Xwiki, PhpWiki, MediaWiki and Zope/Plone.

Gwenaëlle Culot-Leclair
Creation: Mon Jan 12 2004 18:00:00 CET
Last update: Sun Mar 31 18:12:15 CEST 2013
gwenaelle "at" culot.org